The Marriage Follies

by Susan Matthewson

People get married for all sorts of reasons. Young men once got married to dodge the draft. Some people get married because they’re lonely or bored. Others marry because they believe that two really can live cheaper than one. And, I guess, some people actually marry for love.

And then there’s Bonnie who got married at 18 to save $200 on a season snowboard pass. Bonnie and Brad were high school buddies attending college near a ski resort. When ski season started, the resort offered a family season pass for $100 less than the individual pass.  When you’re 18 and broke, $100 is a lot of money, so while standing in the ticket line, Bonnie and Brad decided to pass themselves off as married and save $100 each. Unfortunately, the resort executives had also once been teenagers and required proof of marriage.

 Okay, said Bonnie and Brad. “We’ll get married.”

 And they did. They didn’t live together, didn’t even sleep together, but they had a great time snowboarding together. In fact, they had such a great time that they both flunked out of school. Brad went to Alaska to work on a fishing boat.  Bonnie took off for Hawaii to live on an organic farm. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on! And it did.

Bonnie returned home, finished school, got a job, and forgot all about being married. And then one day, she got an email from Brad, who she’d also forgotten about. She almost deleted it as spam, but then noticed the subject line: “Divorce Needed Immediately.” It seems Brad had fallen in love with a girl in California and wanted to get married. That’s when he realized he had a problem.

And that’s when Bonnie showed up in my paralegal office. I’d known Bonnie and her mother for years. We’d both been single mothers raising children alone, hoping to remarry someday. When our kids were younger, we’d had monthly lunches where we exchanged hilarious stories about our dating disasters via online meet-ups or family/friend fix-ups, lamenting our failure to find someone compatible. We didn’t see each other as much anymore, but I knew we were both still single.

I asked Bonnie if she’d told her mother what she’d done. Of course, she hadn’t. So I agreed to prepare the divorce papers only if she promised to tell her mother. I knew how hurt her mom would be if she found out the news accidentally. Just tell her, I said, that you made a mistake when you were 18, but you’ve fixed it now. Then you can move on and not worry about it—not that she’d worried about it up to this point.

Months later, I saw Bonnie’s mother at the mall. I didn’t know if Bonnie had kept her promise, but as we greeted each other, her mom whispered, “Maybe we should try snowboarding. I hear there’s action in the season ticket line.” I laughed and we parted with a hug.

But it’s funny. Ever since then, I can’t help myself. I keep wondering:  Just how much does a season snowboard pass cost these days? Who says you have to ever actually snowboard. Can't you just stand in the ticket line?

After all, people get married for all sorts of reasons.