Help Desk Screeds

her husband’s a lucky, lucky guy

Recently I came across an article on CNN.com that so utterly, perfectly expressed the concept of EPIC FAIL that I had no choice but to give it the complete MSFT3K treatment. The concept: the writer, a woman named Ellen, is contemplating leaving her husband, and she proceeds to describe why:

I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn’t quite pieced out that I’m not viable before 10 a.m.

Apparently, Ellen would rather be greeted with stony silence, perhaps even a curse word or two. And the day starts at 10 AM? Since when?

…when he buttons his shirt and jacket into the wrong buttonholes, collars and seams unaligned like a vertical game of dominoes, with possibly a scrap of shirttail zippered into his fly.

Like, OMG! That’s totally grounds for divorce.

It slammed into me like a 4,000-pound Volvo station wagon one spring evening four years ago, although I remember it as if it were last year. He had dropped me off in front of a restaurant, prior to finding a parking spot. As I crossed in front of the car, he pulled forward, happily smiling back over his left shoulder at some random fascinating bit (a sign with an interesting font, a new scaffolding, a diner that he may or may not have eaten at the week after he graduated from college), and plowed into me. The impact, while not wondrous enough to break bodies 12 ways, was sufficient to bounce me sidewise onto the hood, legs waving in the air like antennae, skirt flung somewhere up around my ears.

I would suggest that holding a grudge over an accident that happened four years ago and left no real harm probably necessitates a semester or two at the School of Correcting Perspective.

Don’t misunderstand: I would not, could not disparage my marriage (not on a train, not in the rain, not in a house, not with a mouse).

Too late!

Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I’ve made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man…

Because trashing your husband in public as a Moderately Bad Man is so much better than trashing him in public as a Very Bad Man. And so much for not disparaging the marriage!

…the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home’s traffic so that one day I’ll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he’ll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.

Yes, Will neither beats his wife, nor verbally abuses her, nor cheats on her, and is apparently such a good provider that she can rise at 10 AM. But he leaves his shoes on the floor, which is so much worse.

We are also tickets with jobs and disposable income. If we jump ship now, we’re still attractive prospects who may have another shot at happiness. There’s just that tricky wicket of determining whether eternal comfort resides in the tried-and-true or whether the untried will be truer.

Because leaving one’s spouse to hook up with the perky young secretary/conceptual artist always turns out well. And eternal comfort? Seriously? If you’re looking for eternal comfort, it’s not to be found in this world. And may I suggest that if you’re looking for eternal comfort in your spouse, you’re doing it wrong.

Another friend viewed divorce as being akin to an extended juice fast: You’re intrigued but skeptical, admiring yet apprehensive. Is it dangerous? Does it work? You’re not completely sold, but then again, you could envision yourself attempting it down the road.

What this says to me (other than: my friends sure do come up with awfully good metaphors!)…

Um, no. Divorce is not like a juice diet.

(as one friend’s husband put it, “I’m essentially a checkbook and a sperm bank — but I’m okay with that!”)…

Soooo…does that mean he can consider his wife a maid and a sex toy? And expect that she be okay with it?

This is not to say that dismantling one’s marriage will automatically bring happiness…

An 800 word article with exactly one sensible clause. Not a splendid success rate.

Maybe one day, marriage — like the human appendix, male nipples, or your pinky toes — will become a vestigial structure that will, in a millennium or two, be obsolete.

Marriage is both counterrevolutionary and doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime, and must be purged for the good of The People! And if our writer were at all familiar with history, she’d know that no human society has ever successfully done away with marriage because those that move in that direction tend to fall apart and get absorbed or conquered by their neighbors.

Our great-great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren will ask each other in passing, “Remember marriage? What was its function again? Was it that maladaptive organ that intermittently produced gastrointestinal antigens and sometimes got so inflamed that it painfully erupted?”

No.

Here’s the main point. I’m not married, but I’ve observed that those marriages that last do so on a basis of mutual charity and forgiveness. You’ll notice that our writer has none of that (she has yet to forgive her husband over an accident from four years ago). In all her contemplations about divorce, her focus is utterly upon herself. She briefly wonders about the effect on her children, but only briefly. She does not seem indifferent to the fact that her husband may have thoughts or feelings of his own, but utterly incapable of recognizing that fact. (If she were an opera singer, her signature aria would be “Me! Me! Me! Me-Me-Me-Me-Me! Me!”) But, then, I suppose that a walking checkbook/sperm bank does not have thoughts or feelings of its own.

Narcissus has at last found a bride who is his match. And what’s worse, she’s encouraging others to follow her example, despite the fact that it will lead to (to paraphrase Screwtape) “unhappiness of the most exquisite and lasting kind”. In a century or so, when some future Edward Gibbon is writing his monumental Decline And Fall Of The American Republic, no doubt he will cite this article as a source describing one of the contributing societal trends.

-JM

UPDATE: Nor am I the only one who disliked this article, incidentally.

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