After our Sex in the News segment, during the one break the Afternoon Advice host Tiffany Granath gets (it’s two minutes — just long enough to pee!), we talked about the differences between live radio and writing for the web.

One is that writing is archived forever — and it isn’t instant. So when I start to write things like “you can annul a marriage in California up to the five-year mark,” I can then go verify that I’m right. Then I find out I’m wrong, by an inch or a mile, and I revise my writing. On air, I can’t do that, so I say these things and then I go “wait! I’m not sure!” and the producers go looking stuff up but meanwhile I’m hanging there live on air being wrong with stuff people might depend on me to be accurate with. (In the spirit of live radio I’m not going to revise that poorly constructed sentence into a more readable one.)

So, to clarify, in case you missed the correction on air: In California, you can get a summary dissolution within the first five years of marriage, not an annulment. Annulment (talking legal term here, not religious) is specific to certain conditions such as incest or bigamy and does not depend on the amount of time married. Here’s a summary of the law from the Superior Court of Sacramento.

I think that’s it for this week’s corrections, so now, on to Sex in the News.

The divorce/annulment/dissolution subject came up in the context of the story about Germany considering making marriage licenses renewable, in hopes of cutting back on the divorce rate. In this way couples would have to renew their legal marriage on a periodic basis — or not renew, which would be a different legal action than filing for divorce. Dina over at This Marriage Thing has a nice summary and an invitation to conversation on the issue.

On air, we compared it to the Scottish tradition of handfasting, where you pledge a year and a day of “as-if” marriage, and on that day decide whether to get married, split up with no legal/social repercussions, or renew the handfast.

I think this concept recasts relationships because it changes the default from “stay together” to “split up.” It forces couples to decide actively to stay together, otherwise legally their status as a married couple dissolves. (I know that in marriage people make active decisions to stay together every day, sometimes every hour - I’m talking on a larger scale than that, here, about legal status.) As it is now, marriage licenses default the relationship to staying together, making divorce the active decision.

I wonder how that would change things, if the renewal period fell within one of the inevitable bad spells of a marriage? Would couples, faced with losing their marital status whether they like it or not, just let things dissolve? Or would an inevitable renewal date help couples see beyond the temporary horribleness and misery and grasp for some reason to work it out? How would letting a marriage expire affect the emotional aspect of a breakup, even if legally it’s a different action/status than divorce?

(I want to get these show notes posted quickly so I’m going to leave it at that, but this is an idea I’d like to revisit in the future and would have totally written a column about, back in the day.)

We also talked briefly about this cosmetic surgeon who “did not attempt to stop” a patient from blowing him, and who also chose to perform her nose job anyway. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the 22-year-old woman thought she could get away with something by blowing the 50-year-old male doctor and later suing him, and the case was dismissed. But I couldn’t help but laugh at this quote: “Knowing her nose better than anyone else, I was in a unique position to take care of the problem.”

Really? And what position was that, Doctor?

Also, I’d like to know what a “celebrity plastic surgeon” is and how that differs from non-celebrity plastic surgeons.

We didn’t get to the story about the German phone sex addict who has a history of checking into hotels, running up the phone bill, then running away without paying. His latest transgression is a six-day stay and about $10,500 in phone sex bills.

And we spent the first 25 minutes of the segment discussing the Bondage lovers happier than normal sex counterparts study, because as it turns out, the column I wrote on the subject was inspired by a conversation with Tiffany and the fishbowl while I was a guest on the show last year.