Because I enjoy a little healthy debate (and also because I've been thinking about it a while), I posted yesterday on BlogHer about marital term limits. I actually don't care for that terminology, because it sounds like you're required to stop being married at some point, which was not what I was arguing for. If you want to be married, you wouldn't have to stop -- you just re-up. I actually like Mexico City's proposal (though two years seems a bit short):

The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple stays happy. The contracts would include provisions on how children and property would be handled if the couple splits.

"The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends," said Leonel Luna, the Mexico City assemblyman who co-authored the bill.

"You wouldn't have to go through the tortuous process of divorce," said Luna, from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, which has the most seats in the 66-member chamber.

It might seem odd that someone happily married after ten years is a fan of this idea. On Twitter last night I took a lot of heat for banging on "the sanctity of marriage." I don't see it that way at all -- the promise and commitment you make to your spouse can be spiritual, it can be religious, it can be personal -- but it needn't be legal. We all know plenty of people who are deeply in love and committed to each other for life but for whatever reason not legally married. The sanctity part has to do with the relationship, not the legal marriage. I believe in the sanctity of the relationship, not the sanctity of the legal marriage. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's.

Legal marriage is a legal contract and has nothing to do with love. Usually, they go hand-in-hand, but legal marriage as an institution is rooted in property ownership. In Missouri, where I live, it means this:

There are numerous legal benefits to marriage. There are both federal and state laws available only to married people. Other benefits include Social Security benefits, inheritance rights, property rights, the ability to sue third parties for the wrongful death of a spouse or loss of consortium, and the right to make medical decisions on a spouse's behalf.

There is nothing about love or sanctity or eternal commitment in the legal definition of marriage.

In my BlogHer series How to Get a Happier Marriage, I kept coming back to the concept of daily choice. Whether you're legally married or not, if you're in a healthy relationship, you're aware every day that you don't have to be there -- you're there because your life is better with that person than without him or her. You're there because you want to be. You're not enmeshed with the other person or controlled by him or her. I'm not saying it wouldn't be incredibly painful to leave, but if something happened to that person, you could go on putting one foot in front of another. You have to believe that if you don't want the other person to worry themselves to death over you. 

I think it's actually detrimental to love to think to yourself, well, we're married, so this other person has to put up with me no matter how I behave. I wrote in April 2010:

The fact is that I can't see the future. I learned a long time ago that you don't just say "I do" and it's done. I'm a different person than I was when I got married eight years ago, and so is my husband. We have to wake up every single morning and -- without so much as coffee -- choose each other again. And when I choose him, I'm not choosing the man I married when we were 28. I'm choosing the man he is now.

If you keep choosing that other person with your eyes wide open over years of good times and bad, that love deepens. While bagging on Twilight, I wrote:

Diana's romance illustrates what I know to be true about many happy couples -- they met when they were young. Maybe they even fell in love when they were young. But, as she writes, true love -- the kind that lasts fifty years -- is something that brews over time spent bailing each other out from crises, from facing real life and sometimes mundane challenges and achievements.

I realize my opinion in favor of marital term limits won't be a popular one, even with members of my family. I do hope it's clear that I'm not talking about spiritual or religious marriage -- I'm talking about the legal documents that make separating in the case of two people falling out of love something that requires lawyering up and involving the family court system. Falling out of love with someone is bad enough -- to have to be financially devastated and prolong the experience just adds legal insult to emotional injury.

I do think people should be very sure before they get married. I do think people should commit to working things out if at all possible. 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. has the highest divorce rate out of us, Denmark, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.

I have some other arguments for term limits in my BlogHer post. I hate to divide the conversation, so I'm going to close comments here and ask that if you'd like to respond that you do it there. 

I'm not anti-love. I'm not anti-commitment. I think it's incredibly romantic to choose the other person every day for the rest of your life, as I do every day with Beloved. I don't see how separating the legal from the spiritual hurts my bond with him in any way. I'm actually surprised people are unwilling to see the difference between the legal bond and the spiritual or romantic one. Am I insane?

Today is Beloved's birthday. And today a crew of twenty or so men showed up at our house at seven in the morning to begin replacing our roof.

The roof is wood shake, which is the worst kind of roof ever. It's expensive, it's flammable and it rots. Ours is crumbling to bits and got slammed by the hail earlier this summer to the point that we were getting water stains on the ceilings. The first insurance inspector who came said it wasn't bad enough to replace. Beloved was livid, so was the roofer, a readjustment was arranged, and lo and behold, the second adjustor agreed: New roof! Paid for by the insurance company!

I've been in a half stage of shock since Beloved told me we were getting a new roof. We've been through a lot of money and broken house issues in our ten years of home ownership, and really, I've stopped expecting insurance companies to replace anything. I'm all GET OFF MY LAWN about it in a way I never thought I'd grow -- so jaded, just like my father when he talks about parking in Omaha. I'd accepted when the sweating man huffed his way up my stairs and examined the water stains located right above my winter sweaters (is there anything so vulnerability producing as having a stranger perspiring all over your wardrobe?) that we were screwed, there would be no insurance money and we'd probably have to take out some sort of horrific loan we don't qualify for or have buckets in every bedroom to catch the water when it rained. This is my best talent: catastrophizing. I don't even stop for the mid-level crises; I go straight to the bone splitters.

The longer we've been together, the more I've ostriched about money and house-related problems. After a while, I -- feminist still -- relinqueshed the checkbook and all the balancing and math that goes with it -- to Beloved. Every time I see him sit down with a stack of bills I half-heartedly offer to help and pray he says no, which he always does, whether he wants to or not (I'll never know). When I see those numbers fluctuate, I am suddenly incapable of seeing the big picture and become positive we will be living in a van down by the river in forty days. I don't know why. I just do.

Beloved taking over the checkbook and bill balancing put a roof over my head, a layer between me and the harsh outside world. I'm fine with shouldering all things parenting, with scheduling haircuts and dentist appointments for my daughter, with knowing her shoe size at all times and exactly how many minutes it takes to pick her up from wherever, where all her friends live and with whom she's allowed to go past the end of the cul-de-sac. I can be a big girl about my career and my health and my extended family. But that one thing for which I really do need a roof is money.

I'm sitting here listening to those twenty men ripping the house apart -- literally -- and trying not to think of them punching a hole in something or falling off and landing on the cement or dying of heatstroke or smashing my tomato plants. Beloved told me to go work at Panera or the library today because it would be so loud. I'm sure he understood that I wouldn't leave because I have a sick need to think it'll all be all right as long as I'm here while it's happening. But the truth is I wouldn't know what to do if something went wrong.

There are things in life that I know how to handle and things he knows how to handle, and I hope that I am his roof sometimes. My family always told me to marry someone I secretly think is better than I am, and I did.

Happy birthday, Beloved. Thank you for being my roof.

---

From my BlogHer Book Club review of The Kid: Read, then, so we will make better choices than the characters in The Kid. That we will pause and consider what a person might have been through before we judge. That we, at least, will not see the world in black and white, because it is never, ever black and white -- which is the message I took away from The Kid, a story in which the main character never really even knew his name, never knew if he was crazy or sane, never knew who his father was, never knew who was related to him, never knew anything for sure except that pancakes tasted good and dancing was a release and that he could teach himself to do the splits with practice and discipline. Read the rest.

Dear Beloved,

I had this great plan. Well, my first plan was that we would go back to the beach where we got married and, you know, renew vows and eat cake and drink champagne. Only that sort of didn't happen.

Then I told all my girlfriends I was going to have someone take a picture of me in my wedding dress, you know, sort of arty snapshot thing, that I could give you, only I would look okay in it, not totally thrown together. I had it lined up and planned for the day you were going to be working, but then you didn't work. Oops.

So then I started trying to think of back-up ideas, and the pressure of the ten-year anniversary gift started to freak me out every time I thought about it. You know how much I like ritual. I wanted something kind of formal and fantastic.

Then, just now, as I was getting out of the shower at 3, which I know is an extremely endearing quality about me, much like my inability to get out of bed and the fact that my feet stink, I decided to just take it. I didn't even wait for my hair to dry.

Only I forgot I got sunscreen on the lens of the phone camera at Worlds of Fun and didn't realize how heinously blurry these were until I emailed them to myself and opened them up, and dammit, I have a conference call in a half hour and then I have to go get the little angel, and you know this is how it is, this life thing that keeps happening while I'm planning the fabulous things I'm going to do for you.

But the carpet almost looks like the sand we stood on.

And the little beads still remind me of stars.

I couldn't get the whole dress no matter how I stretched and thus gave myself double chins. Another endearing quality: I have really freakishly short arms.

Maybe if I leaned over? Nope. Not going to happen.

Baby, I love you. I really wanted to get you something amazing, something heartfelt, but I realized I do have this blog, and maybe telling the Internet how lucky I am, how amazing you are, how astonished I am that our lives turned out so perfectly after these ten years, how much more comfortable I am in that dress than I was that day when I was so worried about the details and the sand and our relatives and friends, that today when I put on that dress all I thought about was us, and you, and how there's no one I'd rather see at the end of every day and when I first wake up and when something bad happens and when something good happens and when nothing happens at all.

I love you. Happy anniversary.