No Wedded Bliss for the Ignorant
With June almost here, let’s go over the wedding plans once again:
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something--Yikes! What are you getting into? Have you looked up the law on this? For once in your life, think!
OK, it doesn’t rhyme--but it does make sense.
The government requires warnings on a tube of toothpaste--”If you accidentally swallow more than used for brushing, seek professional help”--but it has issued not a peep of admonition on life’s riskiest venture: marriage.
Just wait.
If a bill from Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson becomes law, couples applying for marriage licenses in California will be handed a fact sheet that explains such post-honeymoon concepts as “community property” and “child support.”
The timing does seem strange. Couples in line for marriage licenses usually aren’t seeking legal advice. What they want is a caterer whose last name isn’t Salmonella and a honeymoon suite in a place where they don’t leave the light on for you.
Yet this dizzying moment is the very time lovebirds most need to understand a few legal fundamentals, said Jackson, a freshman legislator who for years practiced family law in Ventura.
“I’ve done a lot of marital dissolution work,” she said, “and I’ve been consistently astonished at the total lack of understanding and appreciation that people have for their legal rights and obligations.”
I’m sure that’s true.
Most people have no idea, for instance, that after 15 1/2 years of marriage, the state vests absolute TV clicker control with the male partner in the marriage contract, who is not obliged to switch to figure skating even during commercials. Look it up!
When I asked Jackson, a Santa Barbara Democrat, which facts on her fact sheet would most surprise spouses-to-be, she pointed to the laws regarding pensions built up during a marriage.
“If you’re accruing a pension from your company, that’s a community asset,” she said. “If the marriage should dissolve, that pension has to be thrown into the pot of assets that belong equally to both parties. I can’t tell you how many people hear that and say: ‘Are you kidding? I’m the one who worked for that!’ ”
Later, I told my wife of 15 1/2 years that if our marriage ever hits the rocks, she’d get half my pension.
“Oh wow,” she said sourly, peering into her sunset years and seeing an old Buick and a monthly henna rinse.
Jackson’s bill sailed through the Assembly and is to be debated in the Senate. Opponents fret that the fact sheet will scare couples out of marrying; supporters, to their credit, say the state should not sanction ignorance, no matter how blissful it may be.
But the real question is whether couples in prenuptial fervor will stop to read something that looks like a handout from a ninth-grade social studies class.
For maximum impact, the fact sheet should not, of course, say FACT SHEET. Perhaps something warmer, yet dignified . . . maybe “SEX SECRETS OF THE SOUTH SEAS!” And it should be friendly; nobody wants to be harangued on the eve of matrimony, especially when so much time is available for that afterward.
Here’s how the state’s effort might begin:
“Dear Happy Couple, we (your state government) wish the two of you (there are just two of you, right?) a marriage that is happy and prosperous (notwithstanding the split of community property as envisioned in Family Code sec. 760). May you have all the joy in the world (absent those activities expressly prohibited by state or federal laws, or applicable local statutes) . . . “
Of course, no fact sheet can fully educate prospective litigants about the legal risks of marriage. Many vexing marital problems have yet to be adjudicated; what judge would dare rule on complaints of bad jokes, of knuckle-cracking and soup-blowing, of telling the same stories over and over, of gazing into the distance mid-conversation, of abusive snoring, of blankets wrenched away at night?
Still, Jackson’s bill is a good idea. It might not lower the divorce rate, but it would help couples understand the staggering reverberations of that deceptively simple “I do.”
Now if the state could only equip every newborn with a warning label:
“Prolonged contact will cause headache, heartache, drowsiness, sour stomach, bloodshot eyes, loss of disposable income, joy. Treat kindly.”
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Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
