Car Warranties, Why Not Spouses?

Universal Marriage Warranty Act

When Congress is done frittering away time on Health Care Reform, it should address serious national problems like marriage warranties.

As a nation, we’re obsessed with warranties. They come with new cars, new cell phones, even new puppies, but are conspicuously absent when the deal is for a new spouse.

If a car company is warranting your new car for just about everything for five years or 60,000 miles, why shouldn’t your spouse’s parents do the same? A spouse, after all, costs lots more than the car, requires lots more maintenance and usually has a resale expense instead of a resale value.

For example, you got your spouse because he or she had a sexual transmission you thought was permanently locked in overdrive, but a few weeks after driving off the lot of I Do Motors, you discover that the only working gears are now Neutral or Snore. With a car, federal and state laws allow you to march back into the dealership and get the problem fixed or either a new car or your money back.

With a spouse, the most you can hope from parents is a smile and a shrug.

Even puppy mills will usually take back a puppy that wagged its tail until the sale, then concentrated on biting off anything it could chew, including you. True, the puppy mills will generally peddle the perp pooch to some other unsuspecting customer, but is that any different than parents of the previously married smiling benignly at the next prospective victim? The puppy mills will still warrant the puppy on second sale. Try getting that from a divorced spouse’s parents.

Pre-nuptial agreements address what happens when the star-crossed lovers just become cross, but they almost always wind up in court. A marriage warranty would avoid clogging the court system if it specified specific remedies for specific problems.

Auto warranties would probably provide the best model for spouse warranties. The rust-through provisions of most auto warranties could easily become lard-through provisions in spousal warranties. And if the drive train dropping out in a car is a clear case for no-cost replacement, what about a spouse who loses all drive?

When communication devices in cars break down, the warranty usually covers the problem. When they break down in spouse, nothing covers the problem except divorce lawyers drawn like flies to an open wound.

A properly designed marriage warranty might even reduce the murders listed under “crimes of passion” when one frustrated partner takes the “until death do us part” of the vows as a good suggestion.

Because this is such an important issue, I’ll even suggest a title: The 2009 Universal Marriage Warranty Act. While it might make lots less sense than Health Care Reform, that will at least guarantee it consideration.

###