| She was slim and he liked her that way.
So he called a lawyer. The result was a contract. According to the document, the
fresh-faced bride agreed to pay a fine for each pound she gained in weight, the
money refundable upon its loss. The paper signed, and the wedding went
on. This is a prenuptial (婚前的)agreement—one more indication of the strange pass of marriage in this most transactional decade. You are welcome to marriage, contractual style, where increasingly detailed legal documents spell out everything from who's going to do the dishes to who's going to get the house when you split. This is family planning taken to extreme. Once employed solely by the rich, second-timers and the old industrialist carrying off the latest young cookie, the prenuptial agreement—a written pact between a couple outlining the financial obligations in the event of divorce—is becoming commonplace in a litigious (爱打官司的),disillusioned and materialistic age in which one in every two marriages is projected to end in divorce. The only question is: What about love? When asked whether anyone believes in Cupid (爱神)anymore, Dr. Michael Vincent Miller says, "Given a century that is full of sexual liberation, computer-dating services and so on, one feels tempted to reply,' only in a mood of desperate nostalgia (怀旧 )'. ""Pre-nups" (prenuptial agreements)do assume negativity. Founded on disillusionment, they cannot be separated from the high divorce rate in the United States. The result, argues Miller, is a kind of defending mentality. "We've gotten good at managing finiteness, failure and trouble with a sort of 'What' s yours is yours and what's mine is mine's realism'. We've seen it isn't all about love. We've seen there's power politics in there—a fight for control, and when you've got those things, you're halfway to lawyers and money." In other ways, however, the compacts embody positive, even idealistic thinking about marriage, love and relations, a law scholar Isabel Marcus believes. Marcus says , "Contracts could spell the end of romantic love as salvation. They say love exists, but that it's best accompanied by good, hard thinking about equitability (平等). By writing a contract, the couple gains control of its marriage. "What's good is it contributes to honesty; what's unfortunate is the idea that any contract can govern your emotions," says the author of the book "The Nature of Love." |