Please pass the guacamole once I’m off the phone.

Well, we can. Somewhere – maybe on your sister’s blog – I read something about women talking about a marriage that would ‘get them to Central Park West,’ and what women were looking for in their ‘first husband.’

But the point I was trying to make is that the article seems to put a lot of emphasis on marriage as a vehicle for obtaining material possessions. Maybe the guys being interviewed were taken out of context, but that’s the impression I got. And if a whole relationship is built around getting stuff – basically a business partnership – it’s not surprising to me that it ends badly.

Sex three times a week would indeed change the world! Where do we sign the petition for the Defense of Marriage Act?

Sex three (3!) times a week???

Dayum

MCARP, your response gives me the same cognitive dissonance; if we’re gonna slam the guys for whining about losing their “cool stuff”, why don’t we slam the gals for their gold bricking, money grubbing land grabs?

My experience with the system just tells me that divorce is a bad deal all the way around. In general, my own “hunch”, if it even deserves that much credit, is that we tend to give women the childen even when he’s been father of the year, but we impoverish the women so that they cannot successfully raise the kids. Meanwhile, the men are involuntary servants, working for material gains they can never realize under penalty of jail should they fail.

If my hunch is correct, it’s not so much the fault of the divorce system per se as it it the fault of the American culture of consumerism. Most of the families of divorce lived a paycheck to paycheck existence, barely staying ahead of their joint debts with their joint incomes. When there’s a divorce, there are instantly two light bills, two telephone bills, the mortgage and the rent, and when there’s not enough money to go around with one household, there’s even less when there are two households.

This combines with a black and white absolutist idea of child rearing within the system to create some very unfair situations. A child may well need its mother at one time in the child’s development, but need its father at another and child development is far more fluid and individual than laws can cope with. A three year old male child at the time of the divorce can be placed with the mother rather reliably because a child that age needs to be nurtured, but that child grows into the 10, 11 or 12 year old pre adolescent who needs a strong male role model that is absent under the custody arrangement. However, if we give the boy back to dad, it’s too late to move dad into the boy’s customary environment of the former family home and the change in child support can be devastating to a Mom who has built that money into her budget.

Whatever. I stand by my post. It’s a damn good bet that when a man gets divorced, he will whine and cry and bitch to high heaven. Generally speaking, I think if people REALLY understood the problems they will face after the divorce, the problems divorce solves would not look so monumental.

I’ve witnessed that exact tantrum and crying spell over and over and over again, regardless of time passed.

How come ya’ll can’t just git over it already?

For now, I’m crawling in my safe hole or going on search for my own Cold Mountain.

But did you notice how much of it focused on their material possessions? ‘So and so had a career making $xxx,xxx, a house in a fashionable suburb, and he was married. But suddenly, she divorced him and his cool stuff got taken away from him.’