It may appear unusual that Moore, who never married, spent much of her life with her mother, and was very private about her personal life, would create a well renowned poem on marriage and gender dynamics, but Moore was really quite interested in and bothered by the issue. Her first marriage ended in divorce, and she wrote several poems about this experience. She also wrote about her second marriage in some detail, although it lasted only three years. Moore got divorced when she was thirty-one years old. Her husband had been sent to prison for six months for hitting her with his car. He later escaped from jail and moved to California, where he continued to send money home to his wife. When he died in an accident at the age of forty-seven, she published a brief note in a newspaper calling him her "husband" because they had been legally married until he went to prison. The last line of "A Marriage License" is: "So I, who have no religion/ Nor ever had, marry you, who have no church." The couple in the poem are having their wedding ceremony in front of a judge because they cannot find any other way to be married. They want everything legal since they are both non-believers. At the time she wrote this poem, Moore was living with her mother in New York City.