I’d be perfectly happy with women divorcing their husbands because they are bored only if those women who wanted out of that marriage got NOTHING, except what she came into it with. No child support, no children, no alimony and no house.
That sounds like a good deal to me. Go ahead and find yourself! Cool with me. Leave your boring husband at an age where it will become increasingly harder to find a mate. Go right ahead ladies….and good luck with that.
The problem is this….the above scenario rarely happens. Women can cheat, leave for ANY reason and still get the house, children, alimony and child support.
Until our domestic relations laws change and it is truly equal, marriage for men is a big gamble. Read this article and tell me if you still think modern marriage its built to last. Reform no-fault laws and then we can talk:
Lucy Valantine was approaching her fortieth birthday when she made the seemingly bizarre decision to leave her husband of five years. “On the surface, life was perfect,” she says. “We had a gorgeous Victorian house in the Home Counties, I had a great job with a blue-chip company, and my husband was a lovely chap. He was kind and gentle and my friends all loved him. There was nothing wrong with him, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to change my life.
“We’d married impulsively and really we were more like brother and sister than man and wife.” So, after “a lot of soul-searching and pain”, Valantine told her “devastated” husband she was leaving him.
In quick succession, she had a tattoo and bought a Harley-Davidson motorbike, which she rode across Australia and New Zealand. She taught English in Costa Rica and China, worked in a Zambian orphanage and travelled through Siberia and Mongolia. Now, six years later, she divides her life between the UK and Spain, where she runs a travel agency, Go Granada!
“It seemed unthinkable I could leave a good man and life, but I’d held a mirror up to it all and I’d started to see things I really didn’t want to see. I knew I had no choice but to face them.”
Fifty years ago, a woman such as Valantine would have been rare indeed. Divorce was taboo and few women had the guts, let alone the financial means, to brave the social stigma of walking out on a decent husband simply because she felt there must be “something more”. Until recently, with nearly half of all marriages ending in divorce, the most commonly cited reason was infidelity.
But times have changed. Last week, a survey of 101 family lawyers conducted by the consultancy firm Grant Thornton revealed that adultery was no longer the principal reason for break-ups. Instead, the most popular explanation was couples saying they were simply “no longer in love” and had “grown apart”.
Relationship counsellor Andrew G Marshall, author of I Love You, I’m Just Not In Love With You, says he has noted a trend towards such splits. “In the past 10 years, I’ve seen a huge increase in couples who don’t actually hate each other, they just don’t love each other enough to stick at it. Ninety per cent of these marriages would be perfectly serviceable if the people involved would just put in more effort.”
What does this say about our society? Is it a shocking indictment of our narcissism that we are ignoring “Until death us do part”, because it’s easier to slump in front of Facebook rather than book a candlelit table for two? Or is it a triumph of feminism that women whose mothers would have put up and shut up in return for a roof over their heads have decided that they refuse to live out their years with a man whose idea of an enjoyable night is dinner on his lap in front of Top Gear?
I say “women”, because they initiate seven out of 10 divorces. Divorce is also soaring among the over-45s, with break-ups in that age bracket increasing by 30 per cent in a decade. The writer Fay Weldon recently said: “Women in their fifties instigate divorce because they are bored and want to be free and single again, not because they want the emotional and sexual excitement of another man.” They’re encouraged by a recent vogue of “finding-yourself” literature, headed by the international best-seller Eat, Pray, Love, which recounted author Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision to divorce her husband and embark on a round-the-world odyssey of – depending on your view – inspirational self-discovery or nauseating navel-gazing.
Andrew G Marshall thinks that such soapy portrayals have had a devastating effect on the way we approach our own relationships. “The phrase I hate more than anything is ‘soulmate’,” he says. “There’s always that scene in the movies where a couple who thought they were mismatched realise they were meant to be because they’re singing karaoke and they both know the words to an obscure song – and lo! It sells us a fantasy that we’ll find this perfect match.
“The truth is relationships, however good, will go through bad patches. There will be times when you drift apart and you need to crawl your way back again. The problem is most of us don’t have the relationship skills to do it. We don’t like the idea of blazing rows, so we simply switch off and all the feelings – both positive and negative – die. We treat each other like brother and sister, and that’s the least sexy relationship imaginable.”
Most couples have cans in their cupboards that have lasted longer than their romantic phase. A study by the dating site ForgetDinner found that people who had been married one year spent 40 minutes of an hour-long dinner in conversation. After 20 years of marriage, it was 21 minutes; by 30 years just 16 minutes. Those married 50 years were talking for only three minutes.
Therapist Francine Kaye, author of The Divorce Doctor, says self-discovery is impossible outside of a relationship: “The best place to find yourself is with an imperfect partner. You can’t try to find yourself through travelling, because you take yourself with you wherever you go.”
But what of those marriages that can’t be rescued? Elissa Da Costa-Waldman, a 56-year-old lawyer, left her husband of eight years because he “would rather watch DVDs of trains than talk to me”.
“It was very tough,” she says. “It was not easy being single when you’re older. It’s daunting walking in to a room on your own. But I’m so glad I found the courage to do it.”
Lucy Valantine’s ex-husband is now happily remarried with a baby. And while she relishes her new existence, she hopes one day for a family life, too. “I still believe in marriage,” she says. “I didn’t leave mine lightly and many times I have wondered if I did the right thing. There have been nights when I’ve ended up sobbing, thinking ‘What am I doing in a strange country with no job, no husband, no friends, no home?’ But through quitting the conventional path I discovered who I really am.”
Origina here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/8739533/Women-and-divorce-Goodbye-darling-youre-just-too-dull….html
