Labyrinthine Marriage Bureaucracy

"Marry in haste, repent at leisure", goes the saying of old. However, this saying is no longer appropriate. The relative ease with which a divorce can be obtained and the gradual erosion of the social stigma attached with divorce has, among other factors, driven the divorce rate up. Unfortunately, divorce has many negative consequences for those involved and those around those involved - financial hardship, the cementing of enmity, the loss of sufficient access to a parent, etc.

It was in ruminating on this that a man wiser than myself said, "The government shouldn't be trying to make it easier to get divorced, they should be making it harder to get married." Fewer, stronger marriages, he reasoned, would result in a lower rate of divorce. But how to achieve this? Compatibility tests are all too fallible. Financial tests are inherently unfair, as are physical and mental assessment.

What is needed is a test that any man and woman who are sure of their love for each other will be able to complete. The modern world needs dragons - no knight that slayed a dragon and rescued the princess ever lived anything less that happily ever after. But dragons died out in 1965, shot by the government in an attempt to eliminate rabies. Their carcasses were burnt, leaving no dragon DNA that could be conveniently used. So the dragon will have to be metaphorical. We require a hazard that is strong, scary, powerful, intractable and inscrutable. This hazard shall be bureaucracy.

Under the system of Labyrinthine Marriage Bureaucracy, each couple will need - as before - a marriage license. To obtain a marriage license, the couple must travel 300 miles on public transport (a stern test for anybody) to their least-local Marriage License Bureau. The MLBs will be styled by H.R. Geiger and located on windswept moors. It will be a tall, black building - 20 storeys, perhaps - with lifts that are always out of order. Pipes can be heard dripping and clanking. Muffled screams of frustration will echo down the long, dank, mildewy reception hall.

It is at the reception desk that the test begins. The pallid, sunken-eyed receptionist will stare balefully at the approaching couple before letting out a long, low, miserable sigh. Request for assistance will be met with a look almost blank enough to mask the simmering contempt in which the couple are held. After roughly twenty-five minute of roundly ignoring the betrothed, the desk clerk will reveal to the by now irate couple that they need to go to room 13.22. Upon arrival at this room, they must ask for form 762/PF.

So begins the couple’s arduous and dispiriting journey. In the MLB, there is no logical room numbering. Each room is staffed by misanthropic troglodytes. Each troglodyte will send the couple to another room to fill in another form. After the couple have visited each of the 667 rooms in the building, they will be told that they need fill in each of the forms they present for authentication a second time. And when they arrive with the forms in duplicate, after going through every room, facing every troglodyte, re-filling every form – in a completely different order, the couple will be told that each form needs to be filled in in triplicate (“For our records, you see.”).

Only once the forms have been filled in in triplicate will the license be granted. Thus, only those people who have together gone to the very edge of insanity at the sheer confusing intractability of the MLB – only those people capable of living with another person for the rest of their lives – will be allowed to marry.