5 reasons every grown-up couple should marry – with an ironclad marriage contract to make their new family last forever.

The inconquerable Janet Bloomfield (better known as JudgyBitch) has offered up five reasons no man should marry and five reasons every woman should.

I think anyone weighing these questions should take them by turns to never-married, divorced and still-married octogenarians. Life-long resolutions are easy to contemplate until you have to contemplate them for twenty-thousand days in a row, but the only ones among those elders who will be surrounded by people they love, by now, are the ones who committed fully to their marriages.

My own take is simple: Marriage is worth it – if not right away then eventually, once you both work out how to get it right. I wrote a book called Father’s Day about how men can be more completely married – better husbands and better fathers – but the question that book begs is the one Bloomfield is asking: Why would anyone – especially a man – get married?

My five reasons:

1. To dance as one can never dance with anyone less known.

2. To soar together as only two together can soar, each the other’s other wing.

3. To know so well, to trust so completely that you can be your whole self for her, and she for you.

4. To love so fully that your love-making seems to be its own private bubble in the plenum, and yet to love so enduringly that the two of you are always making love to each other, together or apart, awake or asleep – and someday with one of you dead and gone, still the love will live on.

5. To build those things – a home, a family, a life of meaning – that can only be built by people committed to their love for each other.

To be together is an accident of location. To be committed to each other and to the things you make together is a marriage. I don’t care who you hire to sanctify it, anyone or no one. But if you don’t hold it sacred, you won’t hold it for long.

So what of those awful risks Bloomfield cites – destructive of dad’s interests, and of mom’s, too, but especially of their children’s – the risks of divorce, of impoverishment, of the rending of relationships that should have lasted forever?

Even with its cornucopian benefits, unobtainable by any other means, how can anyone risk getting married?

By getting married with this marriage contract:

This little instrument, printable as a business card, commits both parties – completely – to their marriage, to their family, to their children, with no judge’s gavel poised over dad’s head.

Would this language hold up in court? It doesn’t have to. Simply negotiating this contract will tell you everything you need to know about your spouse – or, ideally, your spouse-to-be. If you end up in court, you picked the wrong one despite yourself. But to surrender all recourse upon default is the best assurance you can give that you intend never to default – and it is one hell of an incentive not to!

If your claim is that you’d gnaw off your own leg to escape this awful trap of a marriage – that there is no price too high to pay for your freedom – then do your gnawing in advance, in explicit, undeniable words. And don’t plan on wrecking everyone else’s lives just because you’re hell-bent on razing and reconstructing your own.

If you marry – or remarry – with this contract, your marriage stands the best possible chance of lasting forever. If that’s what you want, this is how you can get it.