The other day, I introduced a co-worker to the term "starter marriage." It’s a term I’ve been hearing more and more often, partly because a book on the topic came out last year (Pamela Paul’s The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, published by Villard), and partly because I seem to keep running into people who’ve been in one.

"Starter marriage" plays on the term "starter house" — you know, the nice little place you move into because you’re ready to buy a house, you can afford it, and it seems right for you, at least at the time. And whether or not you admit it to yourself, it’s a place in which you don’t intend to stay very long.

Not everyone has a starter marriage, of course, just like some people buy their first house and live in it for the rest of their lives. But more people seem to have an experience like that of a couple I know who moved into their first house last March and spent the next year discovering just how much is wrong with it. The basement keeps flooding. The pipes are so corroded that only the grime built up inside prevents them from leaking. And the kitchen roof was set at the wrong pitch, so a warm snow day means an indoor waterfall. This is the stuff you don’t catch on the walk-through, no matter how thorough you are, no matter how many inspectors you hire. You only discover these things by living in the house day in and day out.

Which sounds like my own starter marriage. It began when I was 24 and lasted two years — at least on paper. I thought I knew what I was doing. We’d been together almost two years, living together about half that time. I thought nothing about him could surprise me. I was wrong. After four months, I started seeing a therapist. After six, I went to the Bahamas for a week to think things over. One year in, I moved out for good. Let’s just say I finally realized it was going to cost more to fix the structural flaws than I’d paid for the "house" in the first place. When such a thing happens to a car, they call it totaled. My marriage? Same thing.

Of course, there are other versions of the starter marriage. There are people who move in and love it deeply for a while, but eventually outgrow it. Their lives expand to the point that the marriage can’t hold them anymore. And of course there are the serial movers, the people who never really settle down, who might feel good about where they are now, but are always looking for the next great thing.

I’ve been talking to people lately about the idea of starter marriages. I keep asking: why did you "buy"?

"I bought because it was time to buy, and I thought if I didn’t, I would miss my chance," one co-worker said.

"I bought because there were other potential buyers, and I thought I was going to be priced out of the market," another responded.

One thing we all seem to have in common is the idea of marriage as a mile marker, as something that symbolizes something about you. According to Pamela Paul’s publisher, "In today’s matrimania culture, weddings, marriage, and family are clearly goals to which most young Americans aspire."

I don’t know about "matrimania," but I do know it was important to me to get married — or, more important, to be the kind of person who got married. I wanted something out of it that maybe I wasn’t ready to bring to it. But then again, who is? Who can really be sure what they’re looking for in a house or a marriage until they’ve picked one and lived in it for a while? Until then, almost everything is hypothetical.

My friend Lisa bought a house — a real house — when she was 29. After two miserable years, she realized she never wanted to be a homeowner again. She sold at the right time and moved back into an apartment, this time with renewed appreciation for that lifestyle.

Me, I want a house eventually. A marriage, too. But I have a new idea this time around. My friend’s Turkish father once spent an afternoon telling me about rugs. Historically, Turks were nomads; all their houses were temporary. What was important was their rugs. When they left a place, they rolled up their rug and took it along. When they arrived, they unrolled their rug and built their home around it. They carried their rugs with them for the rest of their lives.

These days, I’m not house — or marriage — hunting. I’m rug shopping. Partly it’s because the pressure’s off. After all, what’s the rush? I already got married once. But more important, I figure that once I find the right rug, the rest will take care of itself. Forget mile markers; I’m just looking for the right traveling companion. Once I find that, we’ll see what gets built.

Kirsten Marcum can be reached at kirstenmarcum@yahoo.com