Let’s just dive right in. My partner and I are getting married sometime in 2023 and we are doing a 2 year marriage contract. A what?! Yes, that’s right, a 2 year marriage. Let’s start by telling you a little about who we are and then what the heck a 2 year marriage is.
THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE
Who are we? My partner and fiance, Breanna, was married for 18 years and has two kids; I was married for 22 years and have four kids (she cringes when I tell people we have six kids, LOL). Our divorces were coincidentally finalized within two weeks of each other in August of 2018 and we literally met on a hookup site later that same month (humans have needs). Although our divorces were as amicable (conscious uncoupling is the cool term now) as could be, when we met four and half years ago just days after the ink was still drying on our divorce decrees, we were both very committed to never doing that again…marriage that is, and we both stuck to that commitment the first two years of our relationship until…drumroll…I’ll get to that in a minute.
She is a health care professional and I’m an entrepreneur, turned investment banker, turned Web3 hedge fund manager. She is 41 and I identify as 42 :). She’s completed an Ironman in under 12 hours and I’m a hardcore biohacker working on aging backwards.
To our credit, we did a few crucial things right in starting out this relationship. First, even though we fell hard for each other on our first date and by our third date we were telling each other “I love you” (how crazy is that?!), we would not call each other “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” for an entire year even though we were glued to each other every free moment we had. We rejected the typical labels and found that quite freeing. You will see in future articles about our 2 year marriage contract journey that “freedom” is a recurring theme for us.
Second, I remember on our big third “I love you” date, I said to Breanna “let’s do this differently, let’s not project into the future, let’s focus on the present and what we have and what we are creating in real time. If we start thinking and talking about ‘what does this mean?’ and ‘where is it going?’ it’s going to potentially ruin the epic magic we are experiencing.” And amazingly, we actually did that. And wow did that pay off big time. All the usual pressure and stress about “where is this going, etc.” never emerged and allowed us to keep the beautiful, elevated, loving, magical state we were in to just keep rolling.
After we were together for 12 months our friends and family were getting annoyed that we wouldn’t call each other boyfriend/girlfriend (in the first 9 months we had been on three trips, two of them out of the country having the time of our lives) so at our 1 year anniversary of meeting we decided, more for convenience, to graduate to “boyfriend”/”girlfriend”. If you think that is unconventional, just wait, it gets way better/weirder.
Fast forward to our second year anniversary of bliss (we literally couldn’t believe we could be this happy in life and relationship) and Breanna walked in the door one day and said “hey, I just read an interesting article on a 2 year marriage contract and if I were to ever get married again, which I’m not planning on, that is how I would do it.” I was instantly intrigued.
Unfortunately, the article was pretty light on details on what this was and how to do it but the basic idea was that you would sit down with your partner every 2 years and talk about the health of the relationship and whether you wanted to continue the marriage for another 2 years. That was surprisingly appealing on so many different levels and we got excited to dive in and read about all the people who have done this, how they did it and how it’s worked only to find out…there is almost nothing that we could find on the topic and the only material out there are just a couple articles that superficially talk about the concept and to our knowledge, nobody has actually done this in a formal contractual way, at least not the way we are going to do it.
We are going to change all that. We have been having fun creating our own 2 year marriage contract/system (not sure what to call it yet) for the last 30 months. The system we came up with includes a prenuptial agreement that will be reviewed and updated every 12 months, and a 2 year marriage contract which includes a relationship evaluation system to be completed every six months and a clause that says at the end of 2 years if both parties don’t agree to renew for another 2 years, then the marriage is “complete” with an uncontested petition for divorce (we really don’t like the “D” word and how its used, more on that later) filed with the courts with little to no lawyers, no mediators, and no fighting (theoretically).
We are creating this “system” out of love. Love for both our Selves and each other. Our goal is to start our marriage with the strongest foundation possible, improving the chances of having a high quality marriage that lasts 50 years, not just 2. Yes, you heard that right, we are doing this out of love.
Most marriages start out with a really shaky foundation leading to big challenges in the future. Why? Because most people marry when they are in the NRE (New Relationship Energy) stage. Which is the falling in love, the chemical romance, or the honeymoon stage. It’s literally a period of time where your brain is brilliantly hacked by chemicals that evolution has instilled in our DNA that literally makes us think, feel and act differently than “normal” and one of the consequences is that we don’t see the “real” person we are marrying. It’s only after the NRE wears off, usually 1-3 years after we enter this stage, that we start to see who we actually married. In the meantime, you have just entered into a life long contract called marriage with no performance guarantees whatsoever, while your brain has quite literally been drugged by NRE. Crazy when you zoom out and really look at what’s going on, right?!
So why does a 2 year marriage contract bring love into that situation? Because it forces you and your partner to face the reality of what you are about to enter and deal with uncomfortable issues that marriage brings before you get married. That doesn’t sound like love to you? Actually, that’s where real love starts. The opposite of love is ignoring important issues because they are difficult or uncomfortable. If you and your partner can’t sit down and lovingly create a prenuptial agreement, then you may want to consider if you really have the tools you need to establish a healthy long-term relationship. Sure the chemicals you are feeling are amazing, and it must mean you are “meant to be together forever”. But we all know (maybe some of the twentysomethings don’t know yet) those chemicals fade in a couple years and that’s when the healthy long-term relationship love starts, hopefully. We believe implementing a 2 year marriage contract before you get married brings real love and a strong starting foundation from day one to your marriage.
This article is the first of a series that we’ll talk about in detail what is a 2 year marriage contract, how we are doing this and most of all why we are doing this. The next article is all about why we are doing this but I’ll tell you one reason now why we are doing this. Our current marriage system has many failings, how it starts as I’ve just illustrated, and especially how it ends. If two adults want to end their marriage, it shouldn’t be World War III to do that. Millions of people, and tragically children included, suffer great pain and trauma from how our current divorce system works. It’s somewhat startling that anyone would get married knowing how much pain it can be to end a marriage. With more than 50% of marriages ending in divorce and more than 70% of second marriages ending in divorce, the vast majority of us know how challenging both marriage and divorce are. The reality of these statistics, as well as our own experiences, lead us to believe that maybe not all marriages should be expected to last forever but that some relationships become “complete” or that we graduate from the learning that takes place in that relationship and that for our own growth, it is best to move on to a new dynamic for both parties. We’ll be saying a lot more about relationship “completion” in the future.
However, we are optimistic creatures. We can thank the NRE, those falling in love chemicals, for taking over our brains and getting us to do irrational things like getting married under the current system. Once again, would anyone in their right mind enter any kind of contract with NO performance guarantees, knowing there was a 50% chance the business would fail and when it does it may be the biggest nightmare of their life?! Of course not, but millions of people do exactly that every year when entering a marriage. Crazy.
This 2 year marriage contract/system is our attempt at making marriage AND divorce (or better yet “relationship completion”) better using the system we currently have to work with. Sure, it’s an experiment, but at least we are trying to do something different that has a chance of making marriage better (more on how it makes marriage better in the next article) and hopefully a much more humane way of ending (or “graduating”) a marriage if it needs to end.
Intrigued? Good, my next article will talk in detail about why we are doing this and why we believe ANYONE who is thinking about getting married should seriously consider doing this too. Additionally, all of you unmarried couples who are cohabitating because you are horrified at the prospect of going through our divorce system, and rightly so, you will particularly want to read my next article as it will give you some reasons why even you may want to consider this 2 year marriage thing.