Marriage in all its forms
Jun 19th, 2008 by Holly Fox
Surely in response to the first same-sex weddings in California this week, Redbook has an interesting article profiling nine different married couples. The author uses the couples as examples of nice marriage types:
- Covenant marriage
- Second marriage
- Polyamorous marriage
- Average marriage
- Long-distance marriage
- Child-free by choice
- Same-sex marriage
- Late-in-life marriage
- Married young
The one marriage type I was unfamiliar with was the covenant marriage. Legal provisions for covenant marriages exist in Louisiana, Arkansas and Arizona. In response to the rise in no-fault divorces, covenant marriages make it more difficult to get divorced, require counseling, and emphasize that marriage is for life. Divorce is only allowed in cases of abuse, adultery, commitment of a felony or abandonment.
This kind of seems like a step in the wrong direction in that divorce reform is meant to provide individuals with an out from unhappy marriages, without having to accuse their spouse of abuse or adultery. Yet it isn’t hard to get the impression that some people do take marriage and divorce too lightly.
Would you ever consider a covenant marriage?
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Another form of marriage not covered by that article is the morganatic marriage. A thing of the past mostly, it was a marriage between two people of different social rank (i.e. a noble and a commoner) which prevented the titles and prerogatives of the high-ranking spouse to pass on the low-ranking spouse and their children. Vittorio Emauele II, King of Italy, contracted morganatic marriage with one of her mistress after his first wife died.