I won’t surprise any readers to learn that I perform weddings. I got my license to be a minister in the mid-1970s from a mail order church.
I’ve only performed a few weddings but after decades they are all still married.
I did something unusual in each case.
I used the pre-marital counselling session to give the engaged couple an eye opening perspective on marriage and divorce.
I asked the couple to tell me what they knew about divorce laws in California. Most knew very little. So I gave them a quiz: Johnny and Susan were a high tech couple, married for 3 years. Susan earned considerably more than Johnny, roughly $300k. Johnny earned about $175k. They shared household expenses and the mortgage on their home in proportion to their earnings.
In the second year of the marriage, Johnny got an inheritance of $2 million which he put in a separate bank account. He used the money to buy a condo a few months before he asked for a divorce. He moved out of the house he shared with Susan which now had about $350k in net value after the mortgage.
Johnny moved in with Mark in his new condo.
I now ask my pre-marital counselling couples: “who gets what in the divorce?”
This is not idle speculation. It has happened to two of my friends. Johnny gets half of the net sale price of the house $175k because California is a community property state and he gets to keep the new $2 million condo too. The reason is that he kept the inheritance in a separate bank account. It was never ‘commingled funds’ with Susan so it is all his.
Maybe that sort of reality check is why the couples I married are still married.