Marriage Pact

They were twenty-three and drunk and it was funny at the time. If neither of us is married by forty. Somebody wrote it on a beer mat and somebody else kept the beer mat, and it is now eleven weeks until his birthday. Marriage pact is a plot-shape built on an agreement made in the past that becomes operative in the present, and its whole architecture rests on a promise nobody expected to have to honour. What the shape promises is a deadline attached to an existing relationship. These two already know each other, usually well, frequently as friends who have spent seventeen years declining to examine something. The pact converts an open question into a dated one, and the reader gets the specific pleasure of a countdown running underneath every ordinary scene. The make-or-break element is whether the pact is treated as binding. That is the test. A pact that is invoked in chapter three and then set aside while the characters simply fall in love has functioned as an inciting incident and nothing more. The strong version keeps it live: one of them takes it seriously and the other does not, and the asymmetry is the conflict. Or both take it seriously for different reasons, and neither will say which reason. Or it is invoked coldly, as an obligation, by somebody who does not want to admit that invoking it is the least cold thing he has ever done. The failure mode is the forgotten agreement. The beer mat appears, the countdown is mentioned twice, and the couple arrives at love by routes that have nothing to do with it. The reader was promised a mechanism and given a prompt. There is a second failure, which is the escape hatch. Somebody says out loud, early, that of course it was a joke and neither of them is held to it. That is realistic and it removes the shape's only pressure. The books that work refuse the exit, usually by making one party genuinely willing to go through with it. The strongest versions understand that a marriage pact is a document about fear. Two people at twenty-three, insuring themselves against a future in which nobody wants them. What the shape is actually examining is what happens when that fear turns out to have been well founded for one of them and not the other, and the humiliation available in that gap is the shape's richest material. There is also the third-party problem, which the best books use. One of them is seeing somebody. The pact's deadline arrives with a real relationship in the way, and the person in the way did not agree to any of this and does not deserve what is about to happen. The shape has a close relative in the marriage of convenience and is worth separating from it. A convenience marriage is negotiated in the present by two people with a current problem. A pact was agreed by younger versions of the same people for reasons that no longer obtain, which means the shape is not about a bargain but about whether a person is bound by the decisions of who they used to be. Eleven weeks. He mentions it first, badly, at the wrong moment, and she pretends she has to think about which pact he means. That is the shape. Not the promise, but two people discovering that a joke made at twenty-three was load-bearing.