Marriage Is a Credit Card

I’ve been getting some strong reminders lately about the importance of planning. Very strong.

The core lesson keeps repeating itself: skip the upfront planning on something important, and things can go badly wrong. Do a little work ahead of time instead, and life tends to go a lot more smoothly.

One place I don’t think enough planning happens is marriage. Plenty of wedding planning, sure, but not nearly enough marriage planning.

Here’s my evidence: ask anyone who’s been through a divorce, and they’ll likely agree that getting married is a walk in the park compared to getting divorced. Divorce is hard enough that some people just stay in unhappy marriages rather than face it. No escape plan, so they simply don’t leave.

A good comparison is credit cards and credit card debt.

Credit cards are easy to get, and a lot of fun if you haven’t thought much about what happens once the statement shows up. You get the card, you go shopping, and the first couple of months feel great. Then reality lands: wait, I have to pay this back? Plus interest? And if I don’t, I’ll be paying it off for decades?

At that point, getting out of the hole takes real, sustained effort. Getting into it was effortless.

Marriage works the same way. It was easy to get married when I was practicing, roughly a hundred dollars for the license, a few hundred more for someone to say the actual words that make it official. And then you’re married.

I hope you did some planning together about what the marriage would actually look like, and even more planning around what happens if it goes wrong. Because getting out is nowhere near as simple as getting in. You can’t just tear up the license.

You need a separation agreement, and those are hard to get precisely when you need them most. Once you and your spouse have reached the point of divorcing, you’re usually not getting along especially well, which makes agreeing on anything harder. So you hire help: a lawyer, a mediator, a counsellor, a financial planner, an accountant. Those professionals charge considerably more than the marriage commissioner did- several hundred dollars an hour, in my experience- and reaching an agreement could take a long time.

Or you skip all that and let the courts decide, representing yourself and leaving your future in the hands of a judge who’s never met you. Most people don’t take that gamble and hire a lawyer instead. A court divorce generally costs thousands more than a mediated or collaborative one.

The way around all of it is planning. Build a marriage agreement with a qualified professional before the wedding, not after things fall apart.

Yes, it costs money, and no, planning for a hypothetical future divorce isn’t remotely romantic.

But look at it this way: reaching a marriage agreement takes far fewer billable hours, because at that point you and your soon-to-be spouse are still on the same page. You’re about to get married, after all.

Not on the same page? Struggling to reach that agreement?

Then I have to ask: why are you getting married?