Roulette Marriage

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 April

If you've been married and not all that happily, you know how it is, so maybe this isn't as immoral as it seems*:


1. Short of rape, which still wouldn't count, it's up to those who have gone
through a marriage ceremony whether they consummate the union

2. The law of England and Wales does not allow divorce** within the first year of marriage (a period that might be inferred to run from the date of consummation)

3. Unless, as it turns out, consummation, or the failure to achieve it, is separate and only relates to annulment, i.e. not to starting 'a divorce clock' running at a later point than the day of the ceremony

4. And applying for annulment of what appears to be a marriage, as with so much of our wretched legal system, is both adversarial and a matter of persuading a judge

5. So one party to the marriage ceremony would need to allege that the other party, wilfully or through incapability, failed to consummate the marriage***, and he or she would have not to contest, probably event assent to the truth of, that assertion****

6. So maybe, three months after the ceremony, a judge might not swallow that the aggrieved party had taken so long to seek annulment (and rumble that the parties were conniving at - what will unfold below as - a contingent marriage)

7. Which leads us to the roulette element: thirty-six men and thirty-six women agree to go into a pool of marriage candidates, from which a pairing (and a number allotted to the pair, between 1 and 36) will be made on some basis or other, but essentially not of the candidates' choice (or not based on knowledge of the other opposite-sex candidates)

8. Cleared payment to the organizer by each candidate of the full costs of a civil ceremony is a prequisite to knowing where and when to attend (advised at short notice, say, by e-mail)

9. If one party fails to attend the ceremony, the one who does attend is reimbursed from the other's payment, and might elect to start again

10. If both fail to attend, maybe they get a refund of one-half each...

11. If they go through with the full legal ceremony, they get what they have paid for - they get what some cult leaders impose, on some basis or other, on the members of their cult

12. With a better knowledge of the facts and law than stated above, they choose how to proceed, whether to consummation, delayed consummation, or none

13. Each couple will have its own outcome that links to its number, whether they never met, met and could not contemplate marriage at first sight, went through the ceremony, etc, etc.


The tracked outcome of each numbered couple (for each of many such pools, in order to achieve a chi-squared level of statistical significance) feeds into a complex betting-system for roulette, reminiscent of the plot of the film Pi (1998)



End-notes

* Though the Surrealists might have approved, as, without formulating it in marriage as such, maybe they did this by default... I gather that, despite the former Soviet regime having marriage, it was neither difficult to begin or end.

** Yet it does allow for the lesser step of judicial separation (as used when Charles and Diana first split up, I believe), which - as far I recall - relieves the parties of what is claimed to be 'the duty to co-habit' (if you can credit such a thing!).

*** Has this topic been in a news-story of late?

**** That said, if John Smith says that Boddingtons slept with someone (who may or may not be named as London Pride), and Boddingtons agrees on the right form and in the correct way that it happened, who is to say otherwise? (Except that it mustn't, of course, have been more than six months ago that John Smith first knew.)

Any better or worse than these company records that say that everyone listed as present had a meeting in Delft, whereas some, say, do not even have a passport - or were doing something quite different on Jamaica?


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