"If we haven't found anyone else by 40, let's get hitched!"

Are "marriage pacts" a mature, open-eyed approach to love -- or the ultimate in cowardly bet-hedging?

Editor's note: This story is part of our continuing series on marriage.

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Nov. 18, 2003 | Christine and Max made the pact in their late 20s, while on vacation in Mexico: If neither of them was married by the age of 40, they'd marry each other. Though they'd never been an official couple, their friendship had, over the course of five years, resembled something awfully close. As Christine explains it, in addition to traveling to romantic destinations such as Mexico, "We saw sunsets and held hands and did karaoke and met people together and went to weddings together."

Christine and Max (all names except those of experts have been changed) were both living in New York when they met on the set of a short film. Initially, there had been a reason for them not to become involved -- they'd both just been through painful breakups. Then, after time passed, Christine actually valued Max too much to date him. "I never wanted Max to be an ex-boyfriend," she explains. "It was way more fun to just have a really close good friend that I could count on for anything -- to know what I loved, to remember my birthday."

And yet she was attracted to him, and she could imagine, in the long-term, sharing her life with him. Hence the pact. It was 1996 and Max had recently moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. Christine visited him in California, and they went on together to Mexico. "Things were coming to a head," Christine says. "[We were asking], are we going to be together as a couple or are we not going to be together as a couple? I just couldn't make that commitment at the time. But then we made the pact. I was like, 'Look, it's not that I don't love you.' It wasn't really about finding somebody better. I wanted him, but I also wanted something else -- I just didn't know what it was yet."

Christine and Max aren't the only ones making marriage pacts. They are by now so widespread that if you're under the age of 35, there's a good chance you've made one yourself, and if you haven't, you probably know someone who has. Pacts inspired the 1997 Julia Roberts movie "My Best Friend's Wedding," and have served as subplots for episodes of "Friends" and "Ed."

But what do these pacts really mean? Do they imply an absurdly naive and wistful idea of adulthood -- you say it offhandedly, and therefore it will be so? Or is their phoniness implicitly understood, the matrimonial equivalent of saying, "We should get coffee"? Are they the shy person's way of flirting, with the subtext being I'm madly in love with you? Or are they the coward's contingency plan? -- I'm only moderately into you, but if it looks like I'm going to end up alone, you'll do. And finally, what happens when the person you were supposed to marry marries someone else?

The meaning of the pacts, it turns out, depends on whom you ask -- and apparently marriage pacts, like actual marriages, can be pretty complicated. They're often made in jest, but according to Cathie Gray, a Washington couples therapist, it wouldn't be such a bad thing if more people made good on them. "What makes a marriage really work over a long period of time is companionship," Gray says. The two people "trust each other, they respect each other, they feel emotionally safe with each other. I know of people who've made these sort of pacts, and the upside is you're transitioning into a relationship called marriage with somebody [where] there's a secure friendship. That's a positive. The deficit is [the feeling that] the pact is made out of a default rather than an active choice."

The pacts also can be something of a cop-out or crutch, says Rhonda Britten, a Boulder, Colo., life coach and the author of "Fearless Living" and "Fearless Loving." "Most people, if they have a level head, do it more for fun than reality," Britten says. "But some people actually use it to stop themselves from having intimacy. They go, 'I don't know how to have intimate relationships,' or 'I always pick the wrong men' -- [but] I don't have to really try to get past this because George is over here, and George and I get along great."

Britten herself, now 42, has been in such a pact for 13 years. She and her friend Clark went out for a year when she was 29 and he was 25. When they broke up, they promised they'd marry when he turned 30 -- which then turned into 40, "and now we say when we're 50," Britten says. "We're never going to get married." For her, the pact is basically a good-spirited joke -- and, in fact, she was married to someone else for seven years in her 30s -- but for Clark, "I actually believe it has stopped him," she says. "He has said many times to me, 'When I date somebody, I date them for a while, and then I think about you and compare them.' It's like he uses me to avoid intimacy. I've actually told him, 'You gotta go for it. We're never getting married. You gotta get over it.'"

For Alex and Karen, who grew up together in Rhode Island and are now both 28, making the pact definitely wasn't a coded way of declaring their love. If they were to marry, says Alex, "It'd be a pragmatic decision. Here's someone you've known your whole life. All the tough parts are out of the way. Your families know each other, you like the same activities, you have the same values. It would be a marriage of convenience, and you would have to create the physical side. The rest of it would come easy [when] usually it's the opposite."

But "creating the physical side" can be challenging. When there's zero chemistry, says Gray, "that relationship is going to be mighty dull."

If Alex sounds pretty passionless, to be fair, he isn't the one who suggested the deal in the first place. "I think Karen proposed it as soon as she began to get jaded with the world," he says. "Usually it comes up whenever we hang out and have a few drinks. It's in the context of a bigger talk about how guys suck, she can't find anyone else, and all her friends are getting married."

Adam's and Michelle's pact involves slightly more passion -- but not much. Adam and Michelle went to their high school prom together as friends in 1992, and they made the pact at 3 a.m. in a field in upstate New York, while around them their drunken classmates were making out. Adam was a year ahead of Michelle and when they'd first met -- he was a sophomore, and she was a freshman -- he says, "I was desperately in love." But by the time of the pact, which occurred his senior year, "I had given up on that and she had become one of my best friends." In fact, they openly admitted that they were each other's prom dates only because neither of them had anyone better to go with.

Making the pact "wasn't flirtatious," says Adam, now a 29-year-old lawyer in Washington. "It was genuinely [saying], 'You'd be a good person to be married to' just because we got along and knew each other so well. We thought if we're completely alone when we're the geriatric age of 35, why not just get married and comfort each other?"

Next page: "I think we were made for each other -- it just never worked out"