Chinese province forces couples to sit exam to decide their divorce fate

DIVORCE is never easy for either party.

In one part of China, though, you have to prove you’re a failure before you can become single again.

At the Yibin People’s Court in Sichuan Province, a magistrate has created a divorce exam that both the wife and husband have to fail before their divorce application can be approved.

Wang Shiyu, the judge, had noticed that divorces were taking up an awful lot of the court’s time, and felt he should make couples think properly about it before actually going ahead.

He came up with the idea of giving them a chance to reminisce about the good times they’d enjoyed together — not just the bad moments.

This led to a series of questions, which have to be answered separately.

If you score under 60, he approves the divorce.

If you get more than 60, however, he asks you to keep working on your marriage and trying to fix things, whether you want to or not.

The judge says the main intention is to get to the real status of the marriage, and help couples think more about their feelings.

After recalling bits and pieces from their marriage, he reckons, couples will become more rational about the whole thing, rather than jumping in and splitting up without giving the process and all the implications due thought and careful consideration.

As his county has a population of over a million, his court gets hundreds of divorce cases each year, and he would like to stem the tide if he can, especially as he himself is married with children.

The exam includes a part where you fill in the blanks, a short question section and a statements part.

Questions cover such things as family members’ birthdays, favourite food, anniversary dates and the like, as well as bigger questions about how man and wife feel they have done in the marriage and why they went into it in the first place.

Once both husband and wife have completed it, the judge studies their responses and gives them a score.

Thing is, though, nobody knows exactly what his criteria is, which makes the outcome difficult to predict.

One of the earliest couples to take the test scored 80 and 86 — which are very high scores — and the judge promptly turned down their divorce application!

The husband, apparently, had a problem with gambling and didn’t show his wife enough respect, but as their scores went the way they did, it was the judge’s opinion that this marriage was still salvageable.

But what does the rest of this massive country think of the judge’s ideas?

The story has, needless to say, gone viral on social media sites in China, and the public response has been a bit mixed, to say the least.

Some people seemed to like the judge’s thinking and wouldn’t mind seeing this rolled out across the country.

For others, though, they reckon divorce is a very personal matter for both parties involved, and magistrates should look at things like alimony, custody of children and so on, and leave the man and wife to divorce.

Time will tell, but it would be interesting to see how many couples denied divorce patch things up and make a go of it in the end.