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RIVERSIDE -- They vowed commitment "until death do us part," but 23 years after he filed for divorce, he hopes it won't actually come to that.

John van Tienen learned in August that his 1984 divorce filing is still pending, due to incomplete paperwork. He was at home in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday when a Riverside County Superior Court clerk called to tell him the matter will have to go before a judge, because of a statutory limitation.

John and Lois van Tienen lived in Whittier before marrying, in August 1975, in Las Vegas. They lived together as husband and wife for about two years and had two children together, John van Tienen said.

John van Tienen is now 58. In the 30 years since he and his wife separated, he has lived in three states. He lost touch with one of his two daughters and fathered a third, whom he raised alone after her mother died. He remarried and divorced again in the mid-1990s, all while still legally married to the woman he met soon after graduating from high school. Court records show that van Tienen filed the divorce case, after seven years of separation, in June 1984, a time when he said he was staying with his parents in Lake Elsinore.

It was last summer, after van Tienen was injured in an auto accident, when he decided he should make sure his affairs were in order in the event of another accident or illness. He went through his files and realized that he didn't have anything to document his divorce from his first wife. He called the court in Riverside and found that it was never finalized.

In late 1984, van Tienen said, he received a document that he mistook for a confirmation that the divorce was final. Based on recent consultations with the Colton law firm that advised him in 1984, van Tienen now believes that document was a notice of interlocutory -- interim -- judgment. The process was designed to give the two spouses a waiting period before making the divorce final, a paralegal at the firm told him.

"The waiting period turned out to be decades," van Tienen said.

Van Tienen contacted The Californian in February because, he said, he wanted to make would-be divorcees aware of the complexity of the proceedings. Van Tienen also said he wonders whether the legal waiting period was really a good thing for couples in troubled marriages.

In fact, the waiting period was eliminated in 1985 or 1986, attorneys told The Californian. The Colton firm appears to have provided advice and help with the paperwork in 1984, but the paralegal said Van Tienen acted as his own attorney and was ultimately responsible for filing everything.

The van Tienens' separation and divorce proceedings were fairly amicable, John van Tienen said, perhaps a reason why neither spouse took pains to confirm the status of their case in the following months. There were few assets to be divided, and both agreed that he, as a long-haul truck driver, would not be able to take care of the two children, he said.

In the years following the change in law, it was still somewhat common for divorcing couples to go for years without filing the final paperwork because they misunderstood the interim judgment, said Gary Gorczyca, an adjunct professor of family law at Chapman University in Orange. Gorczyca said he wasn't aware of any particular case that remained in the courts for two decades, however.

"There are probably still cases out there where the parties don't realize that they're not divorced," he added.

In those cases, a judge can rule that the divorce became effective at a particular point in the past, Gorczyca said.

Van Tienen's case is scheduled for a hearing March 23. He plans to request a teleconference, an option that the court told him is open to out-of-state petitioners.

If that doesn't straighten things out, he'll have to file for divorce all over again, probably in the Florida courts.

"I blame myself for not checking up on it earlier," he said. "I should've been on the ball."

-- Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.