The Right to Unmarry: A Proposal

When I say I’m in love, you better believe I’m in love, L-U-V.¹[April 2, 2020] BLF: This is a marriage proposal in the form of a law review article. In this Article, I observe that Maybell Romero and I are in love. I want to marry her, and I believe she wants to marry me. At least I’ll find out pretty soon. But we cannot marry each other right now, because we are both currently married to other people. Maybell and I want to end our existing marriages, and our respective spouses have even agreed to divorce. But the government will not allow us to marry each other until it decides to terminate our current marriages. Maybell is unaware of this prologue to our Article, describing our personal circumstances, but I’m sure she’ll see it soon. Wish me luck. [August 4, 2020] MR: As many of you who follow both Brian and me on Twitter or know us through other channels may already know, I, very happily, accepted Brian’s proposal, above. While none of the circumstances he described have changed at all, we’re both still waiting and hoping that hearings will finally be set and decrees finalized and entered after we have both spent months having to negotiate settlement offers with soon to be ex-spouses that, this Article argues, would more appropriately be handled after a grant of divorce. Today I called the clerk of the court in Cook County in an effort to speed up the finalization of my divorce. I was told that I would need to ask for a remote hearing date, given the impact of the pandemic, even though my soon-to-be ex-husband and I have reached an agreement. Why? “Because that’s how we stay in business, I guess,” said the clerk. [October 24, 2020] MR: Within about 24 hours of Brian’s divorce finally getting finalized, we got married on October 10, 2020 at 4:00 PM at the Gene Snyder Federal Courthouse in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. My divorce was finalized on October 6, 2020. The process was so slow in Cook County that my now ex-husband filed a separate divorce action in a different state with a more streamlined process. Our remarriage saga has finally come to a much-delayed but very happy end.