If marriage licenses were offered in one-year increments, imagine how much better relationships would get.

Fall asleep at the switch and you could lose your mate.  Knowing you have to both renew your intention every year is the antidote for the laziness and complacency that often sets in to ruin a marriage.

We have to decide on which cell phone we want every two years.

Health, auto and home insurance have to be renewed and revisited yearly.

In most states car registration requires an act of renewal for varying periods of time depending on which state you live in.

But when we get married, that’s all that is required until trouble shows up.  That’s why marriage counselors tell me that by the time they get a husband and wife into therapy, it is usually too late for the relationship.  It is the individual who becomes the focus on the counselor’s attention.

Of course, one-year renewable marriage licenses are never going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that people who value their union can’t renew their own vows yearly.  It doesn’t take a fancy get away weekend or a marriage workshop although that works, too.

Startling research studies have been done over the years to show how many people would not do it all over again given what they know after being married to their mate.

There is an old joke that marriage is a fine institution if you want to be institutionalized, but the truth is if we had to opt in every year in real time the way we pursue our careers, there would be more happily married people in the world.