I don't much care for government involvement. But I believe we need to think of this as an attempt at cutting costs. How
Much goes to hearing divorce cases?

Having gotten married in Texas, I can say with some authority that no one is "forced" or "coerced" to do anything. Those who go through certified marriage counseling (not just the "official" Twogether in Texas -- we went through Catholic Pre-Cana and that counted, for example) get a significant discount on the cost of their marriage license (~$10 instead of ~$60). Not sure why this would be so controversial given that, again, there's no force involved. As Robert mentions, given the cost of divorce, I have no objection to a marriage license costing $60 in the first place.

What Texas *doesn't* require for a marriage license is a blood test, which I'd argue is considerably more invasive of my privacy. At any rate, the counseling option hasn't proven to be popular, so evidently, engaged Texans aren't feeling pressure to go to counseling. And there's certainly no requirement that they do so.

One can make an argument that the government should get out of marriage entirely -- but that's unlikely as long as governmental benefits (everything from receiving financial benefits to being the other's medical decision-maker when appropriate) continue to be associated with marriage. I object to the state forcing people to, say, receive marriage counseling, but I don't object to the state offering people indirect, optional incentives to talk to a counselor for an hour or two and maybe figure out that hey! one of them wants kids and one doesn't or hey! one of them thinks they'll both work full-time until they retire and the other one is just waiting until the first baby comes to quit the corporate world together. Divorce is expensive for state in direct -- court time, social workers, etc. -- and indirect -- kids growing up to be less stable because of divorce situations -- ways. I would roundly object to anyone being *forced* to undergo marriage counseling prior to getting hitched, but I'm not going to object to a policy that has a marriage license cost the same as less than two months of cell phone bills *unless* you go through a few hours of counseling.

No doubt these "counselors" will need to be licensed by state government. Don't want to miss that source of revenue.

Why aren't divorce lawyers hitting the streets in protest over this? Talking about sources of revenue....

Solution: Marry each other, not the state.

I, like Robert and Marion, have some trepidations about government involvement in our lives (including marriage). On the other hand, I do see the state benefiting from couples having strong, long-term partnerships (for example, when one person falls upon hard times due to illness or unemployment, that person will, hopefully, turn to his partner first before turning to the state for assistance).

But the fact is the state is currently deeply involved in marriage. The federal government offers over 1300 benefits to married persons. I googled to find out how many state benefits that Texas offers and only found a generic outline: http://articles.directorym.com/Marriage_Rights_and_Benefits_Texas-r935211-Texas.html.

So there is a part of me that thinks: Hey, if you are able to take advantage of so many benefits, it doesn't seem unreasonable that you "pay" something in order to receive them. The $60 marriage license fee that Marion mentioned seems pretty paltry in comparison to the enormity of the benefits. A few hours with some kind of counselor (for which, I'm assuming, the couple is responsible for paying), while certainly annoying, doesn't seem to be such an enormous burden when you factor in (i) the state's interests in encouraging long-term stable partnerships and (ii) the number of benefits such couples will receive.

However, I would also like to see some studies about the effectiveness of such counseling in creating/encouraging long-term stable marriages; without such data, the whole thing very well could be considered a bunch of hokum and another method of raising revenue for the state.

ah, using the 15# sledge to kill a flea again, I see. It's interesting to me how bass ackwards this thinking is.

you could eliminate divorce entirely, by the govt. getting out of the marriage business. If you only have a contract in the first place, then you only ever have a contract to dissolve if ever needed.

But... another case of BassAckwards thinking is how we even approach the marriage he have, and I am as guilty as any... when I got hitched, I thought naively that when you get together with someone you can work out problems that arise. In some ways we are always taught this in school and by our families.

But that ignores war, and the special case of war that is divorce. Sometimes people WON'T compromise, ever. No matter how congenial 2 people may be, there is the potential that they can't meet eye to eye.

Normally you try to avoid the situation where this is the case in the first place. You try and get to know people well enough, but how hard do you try? From this perspective, counseling provides a framework where many questions can be asked, that wouldn't normally come up in conversation, and you might learn a lot from that.

Choose well, because the stakes are higher than you believe. Dunno how much counselling would have helped me, but perhaps I would have gotten clear on her deceptive and capricious nature... and how it wasn't going to be cute forever.

On the third hand, though, this is not something the government will be any good at, and YES they will make this a thing you need to be certified at, guaranteeing that a lot of worthless people will enter the profession.

IF, this whole coupling thing was purely contractural from the govt's perspective, than people might be a bit more businesslike, and less squamish about asking the hard questions, and then holding accountable later.

Instead of beating around the bush about the hard questions, like children and money, figuring that you can eventually change someone's mind.

The Catholic Church requires a pre-cana course before being married in the Church. My wife and I married after knowing each other all of 6 months, and then took the pre-cana course so we could tie the knot in a religious cermony. Wasn't eye-opening to us; 90% plus of what was talked about in pre-cana we had discussed by our second month together. What we did note that there were two couples in out course that should have taken the hint, AND NOT HITCH!

For example, when discussing how many kids- He says 2, she says 3, he says 2, she says 3, he says he'll get cut after the second one, and she says I hope you love the third one as much as if it were yours, the marraige is in trouble before it starts. And that was an actual out loud (very loud at the end) discussion that went on in our course.

Pre-marital couses are a good idea. And I'm certain that if there a state approved curriculum, that it will be counter-productive to the goal of achieving a successful marriage. The Catholic pre-cana course seems to force couples to think about what they're actually getting in to. Oh, and I'm not Catholic. Mixed marriage.

BTW, it's been 33 years now for us.

Oh this is a load of CRAP. All you need is the Red Flag list, found over at HBI (http://tiny.cc/ew5z7), and you're good to go. Some highlights of this list include:

He/She doesn't take responsibility for his/her behavior- everything is someone else's fault. Or blames all adult mistakes on parents.

He/She gets annoyed if you want to spend time with anyone else but him/her. Won't let you have your own friends and starts gradually cutting you off from them. Or insists she/he doesn't need any friends except for you.

He/She wants to get married before you have known each other for more than 1-2 years and haven't even lived together yet. It takes at least 1.5 years for the "hormone rush" of infatuation to wear off, and the true colours to start to emerge, depending on how quickly you individuate away from the "joined at the hip" phase.

He takes pride in how he "screwed over" his ex-wife financially in the divorce. OR
She takes pride in how she "screwed over" her ex-husband financially in the divorce.

He/She continually wants to discuss "the relationship", and is always finding problems or faults with it, and/or starts insisting/implying that all the relationship problems are YOUR fault.

He/She puts on a very different demeanor, a different persona, when at work or with another group of people. He/she seems to be a chameleon depending on who they are with - instead of being one real person. If questioned, gets defensive and insists that they just have many "facets" to their personality, implying that you just don't fully "accept" them as they are.

He/she says things like "you're everything to me. I can't live without you."

He/She is under 23 and has already been married and divorced and has kids.

He/She can't hold a job for more than three months.

Much more at the link. If you have to have the government tell you these things, you're in deep doo doo!

If [marriage were only] a contract in the first place, then you only ever have a contract to dissolve if ever needed.

Sorry, folks. You can't reduce marriage to just a business arrangement. There are too many emotional issues involved.

Divorce is so more than just the abrogation of a contract; more than just "who gets the couch." In those rare instances when the break-up is mutual and not accompanied by hard feelings, a simple contract annulment and division of spoils is possible. But is it realistic to expect all (or most) divorces to be amicable?

Let's use pre-nups as a proxy for marriage-as-just-a-contract. In a recent survey by the AAML reported by Forbes, 44% of the matrimonial attorneys responding said they've seen an increase in challenges to pre-nups over the last five years, compared with 18% who said they've seen a decrease. The rest (38%) reported no change.

Pre-nups are challenged for a variety of reasons - including hidden financial assets, signing under duress, child custody and support issues, or when it's regarded as unfair by one or both parties.

And pre-nups become difficult to follow several years into a marriage. From the Forbes article: "Say Henry and Wendy are about to get married. Henry has a house, which he wants to keep for himself in the event of a divorce. The two spouses-to-be decide that he will continue making all mortgage payments from his own accounts and keep the house. But as the years of marital bliss roll on, the spouses commingle all their money and Henry ends up making mortgage payments from a joint account. The result? According to Katherine Stoner, author of Prenuptial Agreements: How to Write a Fair and Lasting Contract, 'If they get separated or he dies, there could very well be a marital property claim on the house. They had a perfectly good prenup, but they didn't follow it.'"

"'And assessing fairness at the time of divorce can be even more confusing,' says Stoner. 'Say, for example, that both spouses worked before they got married and had a prenup that gave each their share of earnings during the marriage. At some point, the wife was disabled and stopped working, so the husband became the main breadwinner. In that case, the court could overturn the prenup and grant the wife a larger alimony.'"

Yes, clauses can be written into the marriage contract to cover many eventualities. But it's impossible to write clauses for every eventuality in a comingled life (marriage). So, there will be challenges at the time of dissolution (effectively ending the argument that marriage-as-a-contract would save the state money over the current system of divorce trials).

ah, you are correct Conan, however, I said that GOVT. shouldn't be in the marriage business, not that those involved wouldn't look at it as more than that. All the governemnt actually cares about is the business aspect of the transaction, not the philosophical/moral/romantic aspects. So all they should be concerned with is those business aspects.

While it's true that you can't put all the eventualities in a contract, when you look at it from a business transaction aspect, rather than some kind of 'soulmate meeting of hearts and yotz' you force people to think about those ramifications more clearly.

the examples you gave are very clear, and don't have much to do with the matters of the heart. They are concrete rules, so imagine adding the whole emotional demension on top of that, shake well and have a court figure it out.

Sure, it's never going to be cheap/easy, but we should be make sure that the govt. only effects certain things that are very specific, rather than having broad powers...

If the State wasn't doing marriages, it wouldn't be in a position to worry about mandatory counseling.

Since the State, however, has been given/has taken a monopoly on marriages with any legal effect, why not?

The secret is not to keep the State from mandating conditions on its marriages, but to break the monopoly, ideally by getting it out of the marriage business in the first place.

(Imaging competing marriage providers, some that mandated counseling and some that didn't!

Then we could look at rates of divorce between the two, and people could see the effect, or lack thereof!)

What really would interest me is does state marriage conseling actually lessen the chance of divorce? Many seem to assume it does, I would not.

Does somebody want to tell me who the arbiter of inheritance is, if it's not going to be the State?

Geez. You think you're consistent? By any chance, are you arguing FOR gay marriage and AGAINST the state licensing same?

It's state law you deal with, married or not, and the State has a claim on you and your offspring AND your property!