It is the age of temporary everything.

It is the time when nothing lasts forever and that includes many of the things we thought would last forever, like home and family and work, like all-white presidents and the U.S. as righteous global superstar, like a healthy planet and pretty good schools and that thing you thought you always wanted but then when you finally got it you were all like, "Wait wait wait, this isn't what I meant at all."

Take marriage. Take it and turn it over in your hand like an exotic, prickly gemstone made of blood and family and time, wrapped in everything we think we know.

Weather beaten, beleaguered, whipped to the bone and yet somehow just as magically alluring and amorously besparkled as ever -- marriage, to paraphrase Herb Caen, ain't what it used to be, and it never was.

Is it not a fascinating thing, this bizarre illusion that long-term marriage for romantic love has always been here, that it's woven like patriotic godspit into the streets and the textbooks and the very Constitution itself, that it's some sort of mandatory, sacred cornerstone of a healthy Christian society?

Of course, it's none of those things. Despite its awesome prevalence in the relationship discussion, we know marriage to be an entirely fabricated social construct, built from economic scrap and agrarian remnants, greased by religious dogma and fueled by our mad desire to build an even marginally effective container for the most slippery wonderdemon of all: love.

In other words, we made it all up. But while marriage is a cultural and romantic wonder, it's also a total mess, an abject failure by any measure of such grand social experiments.

Its stats are a straight-up nightmare. Billions in divorce attorney's fees? Anywhere from 30 to 50 percent failure rate? Broken homes and messed-up kids and antidepressants like candy? Such stats would spell utter doom to just about any other experiment in the known world -- science, seatbelts, diet soda. Nearly half of it fails nearly every time? Huge percentage of its adherents are vaguely miserable? No one has the slightest clue how to do it "right?" Time to rethink.

Which brings us, naturally, to Mexico City.

Mexico City makes San Francisco look like Utah. Mexico City is surrounded like a pagan porn star in Kentucky by a billion hard-charging conservative Catholics. But the city itself, 21 million strong and the 2nd largest in the world, is a madhouse bastion of progressive politics led by a ultra-leftist mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, who's so popular he's about to step down and run for president.

Mexico City. First Latin American city to legalize gay marriage? Check. First to allow gay adoption? Check. Easy access to abortion services? Yep. Greenest city in Latin America? Yes. Women-only pink taxi service? Pending. Thousands of new CCTV cameras to cut down on crime? OK, not exactly free-thinking liberalism. But what can you do.

But now MC is about to upend it all again, with the advent of -- have you heard? -- the temporary marriage.

True. MC's leftist legislators are proposing to allow any citizen to legally marry temporarily, for as little as two years. What happens after two years? The marriage just... ends. Dissolves. Biodegrades. No messy divorce, no expensive attorneys, no stalking or stabbing or excessive wailing over who gets the damn dog.

Don't want your brief marriage to end? Just renew it. Want a contract for more than two years? You can do that, too. Want to commit to a more traditional, long-term marriage? You got it. Have kids or joint property and therefore things are a bit messier? They've thought of that, too.

Not bad, right? There is brilliance to be found here. But to acknowledge it, you must stop your knee from jerking like that. You must pause and go a bit deeper and think what it all might mean. Most of all, you must not emit the same shrill, reactionary screech you can hear coming from the conservative sects right now.

"This absurd legislation contradicts the very foundation of traditional marriage!" Mexico's conservative Catholics are already howling, not realizing that's exactly the point. "It fosters a disposable culture!" they added, without the slightest thought to how they might be dead wrong.

Here's the thing: half of Mexico City's marriages already end in divorce, and most do so within... you guessed it... two years. Why not offer the option of pain-free dissolution? Why not acknowledge reality instead of pretending it doesn't actually exist -- or arguing the ridiculous flipside, that the problem with marriage is that it's too easy to get divorced, and we should instead make it much more difficult? Yes. Right. Let's go ask the 19th century how well that worked out.

Maybe the church has it exactly backwards. Maybe what undermines marriage -- at least for some -- is the very idea that it can somehow last a lifetime. Maybe the problem is that traditional marriage works against the nature of fluxive, messy, fickle love. Maybe what scares many off from sticking to marriage at all is the idea of, well, "forever."

Let's be clear. The idea of deep commitment, of exploring a single person and core relationship at that range and depth, remains enormously appealing to millions. I'm a big fan of such intensely personal delving myself. After all, there's surely a connection, a knowing, a deep understanding of love you simply can't get otherwise.

But obviously, it's not for everyone. And why should it be? In the realm of the heart, one size never fits all. One definition of love and connection can't possibly sustain a culture as modern, chaotic and technologically intoxicated as the one currently bouncing off the walls of the asylum.

It's the age of transitory everything. And you know what? It's only accelerating. A dozen careers, countless apartments, multiple cities, relationships like bumper cars, "friending" and "unfriending" on a whim and a burp and an impolite status update? It's what Generation Facebook does. Which is why temporary marriage makes a sort of perfect sense.

But you gotta go one or two steps further. Because maybe it wouldn't be so temporary after all. Maybe by removing the "forever" component, marriage will suddenly appeal to all those who would be otherwise terrified, who are addicted to the temporality of everything, who can't otherwise see the point. And once they try it, once they realize marriage's power and potential, well, who knows what might happen?

After all, you gotta re-learn how to breathe before you go scuba diving. You gotta understand weightlessness before you go to deep space.

And maybe, for a generation defined by nothing except instant gratification and relentless change, you have to learn to love in a new and committed way -- first two years, then five, then ten -- before you can truly appreciate the impossible gift of forever.