Just yesterday, I went down to the Dane County Clerk’s Office with my fianceé (now wife, hooray!) and we applied for our marriage license. It’s a remarkably easy process. We raised our right hands, handed over some basic paperwork, and signed out names on the dotted lines. In six days, we’ll be able to pick up the license, and in another nine, it will be official.

I had more trouble getting a residential parking permit.

I’m one of the last people to espouse a sort of vetting process for two people getting married, but it’s an interesting idea. Before we left, I joked to our roommate that the process of getting the license involves answering questions about each other, like something out of The Newlywed Game. But in a time when a majority of marriages end in divorce, would that be such a bad thing? With more people saying, “Don’t get married, you won’t beat the odds,” is there something that could be done to sway more relationships toward long-lasting success?

I don’t really think so. It would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

The reason I find this so interesting is that getting married is, simply put, one of the simplest bureaucratic efforts a normal American citizen will ever have to undergo. It’s been so remarkably streamlined to encourage its ready use, so sweep our nation’s youngsters into marriage, into legally binding contracts and massive tax deductions. It speaks, of course, to the sort of imperative that our country has had in the last century: marriage for the sake of religion. Get married, and early, and hold on. I do hope things are moving past that.

Individually, it’s one of the biggest choices a person will ever have to make. Marriage, obviously, is no small commitment. Perhaps one could say that becoming a citizen is also a large commitment, but there’s no real choice involved. And the process is absolutely exhausting. Why should be funneling so many into marriages that might fail, no questions asked, while we’re pathetically suspicious of an immigrant looking to become an American? Well, in my case, it’s because we’re perfectly average. Two young adults — white and decidedly middle-class — aren’t anything for a bureaucracy to get worried about. Same goes for the couple that walked in right behind us.

Of course, all of this is nonsense until we get some equal marriage rights around nationwide. They do have a vetting process, and it’s unconstitutionally damning. I won’t really be happy until that marriage license no longer differentiates between “groom” and “bride.”