“Defending marriage” is an oft-discussed topic both in the LDS world, and elsewhere.  Few General Conferences go by without the topic being raised in some form--albeit often in vague and unspecific terms.

In the US today, divorces are mounting—an estimated 10% of the US adult population is now divorced, up from 8% in 1990, and 6% in 1980--and along with them come the wide variety of serious social problems they can cause.
 
[Important Note: most discussions of “defending marriage” seem to center around one thing and one thing only: opposing legalized gay marriage.  Rarer are discussions about how to, you know, actually strengthen existing marriages and avoid divorce.  (Some maintain those two are equivalent.)  Just for a change, let’s make today’s post a ‘gay-marriage-free zone’…] 

What can be done (if anything) from a social policy perspective—that is, through laws and social programs--to ‘defend’ marriages and reduce divorces?  Here’s some possible options, with their pro’s and con’s.

1. Make divorces harder to obtain

Concept:  Divorce will probably always be a ‘necessary evil’, but it certainly doesn’t have to be easy for husbands or wives to leave their families.  Making the divorce process harder or more costly might convince some who are pondering divorce to rethink whether it’s really worth it, versus 'riding out the storm' and working out problems instead. 

Problem:  The main problem is that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy to make divorces more difficult may provide incentive for some couples to try harder…but almost certainly will at the same time create ‘victims’ where everyone in the family would benefit from a separation, but which now becomes more difficult.   Even in situations that don’t involve abuse or drugs (and the like), there comes a point where if you have two people who really, really have problems living with each other, it becomes counter-productive to try to hold them together through legal obstacles.

Modifying the severity of the restrictions and/or the hoops to jump through will alternately create more of one problem or the other:  stricter restrictions will create a larger ‘victim’ pool, weaker restrictions will lack any kind of coercive power to keep couples together in the first place.  Without any way to judge whether a couple really ‘tried’ to make things work or not, this kind of solution will always be inelegant and imperfect.

Outlook:  Some potential, but still problematic.

2.  Make marriages harder to obtain

Concept:  What if we approach the subject from the opposite angle?  Right now any Tom, Dick, Harry, Britney, or Hilton sister can trot on down to a corner Las Vegas chapel and grab a quickie marriage with a $20 dollar bill and ten minutes of spare time.  (Some chapels even have drive-thru marriages!)

Bump that bill up to $2000 or $20,000, though, and (1) you'll get most of those 'spur of the moment' couples to think twice before getting that license and then looking silly when they get it annulled a day later, and (2) give the participants more of an tangible investment in the marriage, creating the incentive both to consider it more carefully beforehand, and also to ‘get their money’s worth’ afterwards without breaking up.   (Divorcing and remarrying means paying the money again, of course…)

(This would also put an end to those possibly-apocryphal-but-probably-true stories of BYU students who drive down to Las Vegas on Friday for a quickie marriage so they can have “legal” sex over the weekend before getting it annulled Sunday on their way back to campus.)

Problem:  This policy severely discriminates against poor people, of course, who are just as capable of creating a solid family as couples with more financial resources.  Since the number one cause of divorces is financial struggles to begin with, it seems a little counter-productive to force couples to struggle more with money at the beginning of their marriage by increasing the cost of getting married in the first place.

The other obvious problem is that such a policy just creates the incentive not to get married at all.  If we're serious about “defending marriage”, it should not be just about limiting divorces, but also creating more stable families by encouraging marriage in the first place, rather than just having more people settle by living together.  Since it is well-known and verifiable that couples that live together without getting married are far more likely to break up than those who get their names on a marriage license, it doesn’t work to form a policy that actively encourages people to avoid getting married at all.  (There's a sense of this happening already, not just with the ‘marriage penalty’ in filing tax returns, but the general attitude of 'we're probably just going to get divorced anyway--why bother?')

Outlook:  Probably unworkable

3.  Limit the number of times a person can get married

Here’s an article about a man in Malaysia who's been married 52 times.  (Nope, no polygamy—one woman at a time, with marriages ranging in length from 20 years to two days)
 
It's easy to consider divorce when there seems to be an unlimited number of other opportunities out there. When things start to go bad, you just go out and find someone else.  Raising the costs of marriage is one solution, but what if once you get married the law said, “You can get divorced if you want--but you won’t be able to get another marriage license EVER, so decide between staying married to spouse #1, or having no spouse at all” 

There would probably have to be exceptions, of course (how could there not?), but for the most part having only one shot at marriage would make people consider their marriage partners more seriously, and valuing it more after the vows have been made, as it's their only shot.  Would the divorce rate go down if people knew divorce was really a point of no return?  Probably...

Problem: Well, if you're afraid of commitment now...let me tell you, knowing that you have one shot and one shot only is only going to make the fear of commitment worse.  As with solution #2, this policy would have the side-effect of just discouraging more couples from getting married at all, even if they really did have the means and the skills to form a happy marriage had they gone through with it.  The end result would be fewer marriages—not really our goal—even if those who did get married divorce less frequently.

Outlook: Interesting...but, no

Conclusion: From these basic ideas, we can see that there is probably no panacea--no secret formula to magically making families stronger through legal means.

And that makes sense—since a marriage involves a personal relationship between two people, the only parties that can have a significant effect on the outcome of the marriage are…those two people.  Is there really anything you or I or the government can do to make any marriage other than our own stronger and more durable?

[Discussion: Any other interesting ideas for laws or social programs to “defend the family”?  Let’s skip the gay marriage issue, please…]