The Marriage Game

A good buddy of mine was in the middle of a divorce. He approached me and asked if I was interested in buying his handgun collection. Now at the time he had at least a half dozen quality pieces. Some were quite rare and collectible. There was no way I could give him anything near market value. Out of curiosity I asked him how much he wanted.

“Twenty-five dollars,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“My wife said to sell my guns and we’d split the money,” he said.

There was no way I was going to get in the middle of that. As it turned out her lawyer had already gotten a judge to prohibit him from selling anything. In the end the guns are one of the few things he actually got to keep.

Then there was the time an acquaintance asked if I would like to buy his motorcycle, a fairly new Honda Goldwing. I declined, but later discovered he was quietly selling all kinds of stuff. About a year later he divorced his wife. Surprise, surprise, he had almost no money in the bank and few physical assets. He quietly turned everything to cash and hid it somewhere. The guy got away with it too. He always was a little sleazy.

We all know people who’ve been devastated by divorce. If you are lucky it’s just someone you know and hasn’t happened to you. It’s rare that a divorce goes well and no one feels that they were screwed over. There’s only one couple in my experience who’ve had an amiable divorce where they split in a calm and reasonable manner.

It really matters who you marry, yet so few of us are really prepared to wed wisely. Matters of love and lust make us all a little crazy. Throw in money, religion, culture, society and all the other factors around it and level headed decisions are nearly impossible. There should be a course taught in school or something.

As for myself, I was lucky. When you marry at twenty after knowing your spouse for only four months the odds aren’t good. However, in my defense, we always communicated well with each other. Even after just four months we had a good idea about our values and life goals. It wasn’t all luck, but there was that too.

-Sixbears