In a real bit of news today (No April Fool’s Day joke here), Nebraska lawmakers are considering a bill that if approved will encourage couples to take eight hours of marriage related classes before receiving their marriage license. While the state cannot force a couple to take these types of classes nor can they mandate the exact content of them, they can encourage couples to seek out these types of relationship classes from different sources including their clergy, marriage counselors or other types of officials.
How would the bill work?
Couples who took at least eight hours of relationship and marriage therapy classes designed to help educate them on balancing their lives, merging their lives together as well as positive coping skills from communication to how to resolve a disagreement would be able to apply and receive a marriage license for just $15.
Couples who elected to forgo these types of relationship classes would still be able to get a marriage license, but their fee would jump from $15 to $100. The couple will also have to wait 30 days from the time of their application to the receipt of their marriage license. This would help eliminate spur of the moment marriages and still give the couple an opportunity to consider their options as they prepare for marriage.
A Positive Move
On the one hand, there are going to be people who find this type of law to be insensitive and interfering in their personal choices, but on the other it does not require that a couple take these classes. It simply gives them a good, fiscal reason to invest some time in learning about relationships before they take the big plunge. I think marriage education is a constant and evolving process and it requires a lot of attention from both a man and a wife to make a marriage work.
Getting involved in relationship counseling and marriage education before a couple gets married can help both of them to be more realistic in their expectations as well as provide them with the personal tools to make their marriages stronger. Overall, this is a great plan and I would like to see Nebraska pass this bill so we can get a good look at the implementation and the numbers.
Over the years, I’ve always wished we’d done something similar before we got married – if for no other reason than no matter how much we love each other and despite the fact that we lived together for years before we married – living together and being married are vastly different and until you’ve experienced being married, you don’t really understand that.
What do you think of the proposal being made by Nebraska lawmakers?
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