not a step

Compared to real estate, marriage is easy

Buying an apartment requires considerably more paperwork than getting married. In fact, nearly anything that requires any sort of license - from fishing to refrigerator repair - necessitates more paperwork than making a lifelong commitment to another human being.

It's actually much harder to get cable television or add a second phone line than it is to get hitched. In fact, in parts of New York it's actually more complicated to have a pizza delivered than it is to get married in Las Vegas.

Though marriage represents a fairly significant engagement - one certainly more important than the bond between a man and his apartment - anyone who owns a pen can enter into it with little effort. If you want to get married, most states do little more than make sure you're not too closely related to your intended spouse by taking some blood, and a few don't even do that.

As long as you're not foaming at the mouth or wielding an ax, the bureaucrat in charge of issuing permission to marry just about everywhere will rubber stamp your application without a second thought. If you wanted a parking permit or a sailing license he'd at least have some tough questions and maybe there'd be an eye exam, but for marriage, your ability to sign, and possibly bleed, is more than enough.

Actually getting married - at least in legal terms - does require a justice of the peace, which will set you back around $40, but no lawyers need be present, and the whole affair can be done for under $300. Buying a piece of real estate - in our case, a simple two-bedroom apartment - called for the presence of three separate lawyers, multiple bank representatives and one or two other people with no specific purpose other than billing you for their time.

This cadre of expensive professionals comes together at the "closing" only after each one of them has had the opportunity to charge you individually. In additional to the money, our 1000-square-foot apartment required nearly 100 pages of paperwork, most of which was devoted to meaningless phrases involving the words "heretofore" and "hereunder."

Even with this impressive gaggle of legal and banking minds at our disposal, the most common answer to any question I had was "just write the check."

While my lawyer seemed reasonably sure that everything going on was legal and that I wasn't signing anything that gave away my rights to any future children, even he seemed baffled by some of the fees assessed to us.

My favorite, a $200 item labeled as "miscellaneous bank fee," seemed to be a charge designed to see how far I could be pushed. "You won't walk away for 200 bucks," the bank seemed to be saying, and in the end, it was right.

Luckily, we have the apartment purchase behind us and now get to move on to the much less daunting task of entering into and building a successful marriage. Assuming things go well, we shouldn't need any lawyers, and since I'm pretty sure we'll ace that blood test, the rest should be easy.

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