Least. Convincing. Argument. Ever.
Shorter Beverly Willett: New York should have kept its anachronistic divorce laws so that more women could go through the immensely painful, expensive, and futile attempt to maintain a marriage with a jerk who treats them horribly.
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What a nutcase.
That was a really creepy read. This woman has more than one screw loose, and if I was her ex-husband I would be moving much further away than New Jersey.
She actually says, ” Divorce reduces life-span.”
That’s the perfect example of correlation being mistaken for causation.
I wonder what the life span is for people who are forced to be in marriages against their will. I’m betting it’s lower, on average, than people who got divorced…
But I found the most jaw dropping line in the article to be, “If no-fault is good, why do we have the highest divorce rate of any Western nation?” How does the second clause follow the first in this sentence? Someone, please, explain the connection.
I’ll take a shot at this. I think it comes down to defining terms.
Ms. Willett is here defining ‘good’ as ‘people remain married’ and, thusly, when we make supposed ‘good’ changes to marriage law, they ought to result in both more marriages and less divorces. If they fail in this, the putative ‘good’ thing is actually NOT good. If you define the terms that way the sentence makes perfect sense.
Note; this does not change the fact that this column was batshit insane, to the point where I think Ms. Willett needs counseling. Her husband seems like a real piece of work (adultery and then lying in your divorce paperwork? Not cool, dude) but this experience seems to have been so traumatic for her it has led to some… interesting logic chains. My heart goes out to her and her children.
Yeah, that’s the way I tried to make sense of it, but that interpretation fails on the fact that I don’t think anyone who has said no-fault is “good” said it was good because it would reduce the number of divorces. Which means she severely misunderstood the point of no-fault divorce.
The evidence, though, does suggest that such a misunderstanding is highly possible.
“lying on your divorce paperwork? Not cool, dude.”
No, not terribly cool. But before no-fault, quite routine.
In some circles, your lawyer would refer you to a hotel which would neatly document your overnight stay with a member of the opposite sex (actual sex was up to the parties involved), in order to politely give your spouse “legal grounds”.
You know, I’m a lot more ambivalent about that.
In the absence of no-fault, if both parties want a marriage to end but there’s no legal avenue that lets you stand in front of a judge and say ‘we just… we’re DONE,’ I’m not above some machinations, agreed to by BOTH parties (important), in order to secure a divorce. One should generally not lie and deceive, especially in court, but that’s a situation where I’d be inclined to say ‘no harm, no foul.’
It seems pretty risky, tho. You had better be damn sure the spouse in question isn’t going to immediately use the ‘evidence’ of your infidelity to try and nail your ass to the wall when it comes to dividing up assets or securing child custody.
That was exactly the problem for women, back when divorce laws were not only adversarial but biased in favor of male spouses.
At least the comments thread is sane.
Sane and brutal, but she had it coming.
Reading that convinced me that the Thirteenth Amendment should fairly obviously be interpreted as mandating no-fault divorce. Spouses can not legally be enslaved to each other.
I can only imagine what that marriage must have been like if she thinks of it in terms of bargaining chips and leverage.
nolo’s right, though–some surprisingly good and sympathetic comments on the original article.
I think there was an episode of The Sopranos about this…?
She eventually admits that it didn’t stop the divorce. But she doesn’t admit that the usual situation is different from her version of this story: the horrible, abusive spouse is the one refusing to cut the other loose. That’s why feminists advocated for divorce reform in the first place: women had no way to get free of abusive husbands.
No, Tony and Carmela lived in Jersey, which has had no-fault divorce for some time. Tony used other methods to keep Carmela from divorcing him.
I was kidding–the whole point of the episode was that Carmela was trapped by an abusive husband who refused to let her leave their marriage. Their situation was unusual, but not that dissimilar to other abusive marriages.
Some days I think most other people who share my politics have lost their minds, and this is one of them. The woman wanted to preserve a 20 marriage, which entails a whole hell of a lot more than feelings and sex. She wanted to prevent a home-wrecking whore* from stealing her husband. In a sane world, the home-wrecker’s life would be ruined. Instead, her husband can follow his penis and ditch his family just because he wants to. Seriously, his pwecious widdle fweelinks don’t matter one tiny little bit here. His marriage wasn’t over because he decided to chase a piece of ass, and his wife should have been allowed to prove that.
*A woman who has sex with a man she knows to be married to someone else deserves slut-shaming in the most vigorous language possible. This is no different from stealing someone’s property. The problem with the word “whore” is that there isn’t a masculine equivalent, not that the word doesn’t describe a useful concept. Having sex with someone else’s spouse is stealing and deserves sharp and thorough punishment.
A woman who has sex with a man she knows to be married to someone else deserves slut-shaming in the most vigorous language possible.
I couldn’t disagree with this any more strongly. She didn’t take vows to be faithful to Willet; the blame for the infidelity is the husband’s.
I also disagree with the general point; marriage should be a mutual, not unilateral, contract.
Why do the emotions of the cheating bastard husband deserve respect from the law but the willingness of the wife to keep her promise doesn’t? I don’t believe the law ought to reward oath-breaking, whatever the contract. He promised to stay with her for life and in the absence of proof of fault on her part, he should be required to keep his promise. Either that, or he walks away from the marriage with no assets. See how long the slut sticks around for “love” with a penniless hubby.
I am in complete agreement that this woman is a gold-digging whore. After all, why else would she hook up with a married man who would have to go through a messy and expensive divorce just to partner with her? I was totally convinced of her deceitful, selfish, cynical character when I learned that she stayed with this man when his lawful wife clearly wasn’t about to simply let him divorce her.
Would that our penal code still prescribed stoning for the entrapping limbs and lush cheeks of such a coldhearted Jezebel! Truly, she should be immured in a hail of adamantine condemnation, flung by the gallant arms of chaste and correct citizens!
And then we should go after everyone else who ever crossed a promise to get to a lover! We can recycle the stones, after all.
Why should this man be forced to stay in a marriage unless and until his wife hurts him? (You see the perverse moral hazard there, don’t you? Other commenters have pointed it out.)
Marriage isn’t like other contracts: it involves something essentially unpredictable and changeable, i.e. love. The writer seems to think that her husband has no right to ever stop being married to her. He doesn’t love her anymore. Why in God’s name would anyone want a husband who failed in that most essential duty of marriage, and who showed no signs of ever changing his heart back again?
Everyone here assumes that the essential element of marriage is a transient feeling. It is not. Marriage is the willingness to stay with one person and one person only until you or that person dies, and to perform all the acts of support necessary for that person. No sex or emotional involvement with anyone else.
You all accept that love can end and that forcing someone to stay married is forcing that person to be miserable. First, a cheating bastard deserves to be miserable, for awhile anyway. But more than that, why presume that the misery lasts forever while love doesn’t? Why shouldn’t the law force him to work through his misery instead of allowing him to leave when there has been no abuse, adultery, or abandonment? Is the ability to have sex with anyone, anywhere so important that it allows someone to ruin the life of his wife and children?
Marriage is the willingness to stay with one person and one person only until you or that person dies, and to perform all the acts of support necessary for that person.
Yes, and in this case, that willingness no longer existed on the part of one individual. Thus there really is no marriage any longer.
You all accept that love can end and that forcing someone to stay married is forcing that person to be miserable. First, a cheating bastard deserves to be miserable, for awhile anyway. But more than that, why presume that the misery lasts forever while love doesn’t?
First, this particular plate of misery is being served to everyone involved and they are all forced to partake. I have never tried it myself but I feel fairly confident that forcing my way into the life of someone who didn’t want me in their life would be quite miserable for me, for them and for any children we shared. Its difficult for me to imagine how it would be anything but humiliating for all of us.
Second, if you mean to suggest some sort of waiting period, then I don’t really agree with that either but I could see some sort of reasonable argument there.
Third, someone will either love you or they won’t. Trying to force them to love you, especially through the use of state coercion is not likely to be engender warm feelings over any period of time. “Misery” may not continue. Who knows? But polite resolution to a scenario that no one really wants is no way for anyone to live either and that is really what you will have sentenced everyone involved to. I am presuming that what Willet really wants is for her husband to love her again, not to merely be formally tied to him absent that love.
Why shouldn’t the law force him to work through his misery instead of allowing him to leave when there has been no abuse, adultery, or abandonment?
The law has no mechanism to force any such thing. Again, the only thing it could do, before no-fault, was restrict everyone’s ability to move on with their lives. It could not force anyone to be physically or emotionally present to their spouse and I can’t see how such a thing could be forced.
If marriage really must be until death do us part, then why should women not be forced to “work through” issues like abuse? It’s curable, after all, given enough time and therapy. Sometimes, anyway. Abuse is generally episodic, after all–abusive marriages frequently proceed through recurring “honeymoon” periods in which the wife is not subject to brutality. What are broken bones to the state’s interest in promoting permanence at all costs?
“…And if Cheryl cannot have you, George, then do you solemnly promise and aver that no one else will, until death ends your grim charade?”
What a bunch of crap. Marriage is about love and honor, not withholding same from the person you once cherished. If you are not in love with someone, and every reason to believe that situation will never change, I would say that you have a moral obligation not to maintain a heartbroken marriage. And if someone is no longer in love with you, and you have every reason to believe that situation will never change, I would say you have every reason to let them go. Why would you keep them? This Daily Beast woman refers to love, but she clearly conflates it with a sense of duty. Why should she feel it? Why desire it?
You can argue that marriage should mean, “Til death do you part, no matter how much you end up hating or just plain lacking any love for your spouse,” but you can’t just insist that it does. How is this a superior ideal? Why is it in anyone’s interests to make marriage lifelong when love sometimes isn’t? Why should people not be permitted to go out of their finished marriages and form new, more durable, loving partnerships with other loved people?
Well, I’d like to be clear here; I don’t really give a damn about her husbands feelings in this. As I said earlier, he seems like a piece of work, and I’m using a genteel euphemism.
That said… you can’t really ‘steal’ people. People aren’t THINGS. Ms. Wittell didn’t own her husband, and he didn’t own her. And I do not think we want to go down the road of criminalizing consensual non-commercial sexual conduct between adults; I’m not sure you’re advocating that, as I get mixed messages (you refer to slut-shaming, which is purely societal opprobrium, but also equate cheating with stealing, and we usually criminally sanction people who steal.)
I’m also curious… what, exactly, is your end-game here? With no-fault divorce, we have one; the marriage ends, everybody gets on with their lines. If one person can bind the other in a continuing marriage against their will, how does that do anything other than prolong a deeply fucked up situation?
You say the guys marriage wasn’t over because he decided to chase a piece of ass. Fair enough. Let’s game that out. He says he wants out. His wife says ‘nuh-uh, not in New York; I haven’t wronged you, you aren’t going anywhere, and -I- am not divorcing -you- even though you’ve given me grounds.’ A court agrees. So now you’re left with two miserable people and their miserable kids, living in separate houses and generally feeling shitty. The wife still has a claim on half the husbands stuff, I guess, but that clearly doesn’t matter much to her since she could get that in a divorce and elected not to.
This isn’t rhetorical here; I’m genuinely asking what your end-game is in this situation that produces a better result than no-fault.
My end-game is that cheaters get punished. Hubby doesn’t get to be happy with his cheap doxie, and just might learn to get over himself and do his duty to his family. His wife gets his stuff and his daily presence with the children which quite significant. No-fault divorce favors temporary passion over long-term duty, which is in my view far more deeply fucked up than making marriage depend on transient feelings. And as for the homewrecker not being the one who took the vows, I don’t bloody well care. She knew the husband was married to someone else and had sex with him anyway. The only consolation for that is that she has no moral claims whatsoever when he cheats on her, as he inevitably will.
No, I don’t argue in favor of punishing adultery criminally, but I do believe cheaters of both sexes deserve to be punished.
Has it occurred to anyone that our only source of information on the ex-husband is the ex-wife who just went through a five-year legal battle with him? Maybe he’s a jerk and maybe he isn’t, but I think we need a little more evidence.
He cheated and was public about it. That’s enough proof that he’s a jerk. Also, why does everyone assume that if he stays married to his actual wife he’ll be miserable forever? You accept the premise that he stopped feeling love, why can’t he stop feeling misery?
He served her with divorce papers; he left their household. He moved to New Jersey and established residency there to get away from his marriage to this woman. He also fucked someone else–which is unkind enough to any spouse, but especially brutal for a wife as simply Manichean as this lady. If he had any interest in reconciliation, he would have made some attempt to reconcile with her. He did not.
There’s no difference here between will and can. He did not want to love her anymore. That’s the same as not loving her anymore.
He made a promise and the law should enforce that promise. Your system rewards the flighty and unreliable among us. If he can’t love her he can still fulfill his duty to her by staying in the marriage and providing her with his income and his presence, however resentful. If you really believe he, or any other self-indulgent slob whose feelings matter more than their duty and promises, shouldn’t stay, then the law should reward the injured wife with 90% of his income for the rest of her life. If his pweshuss feewings are so important, then he’ll be happy to part with the cash.
All right, but what would that solve?
To be clear, I’m attributing the description to her; I take no position on it, not knowing them or anything.
So the cheater’s punishment is to be forced to remain legally tied to the spouse he no longer wants? How is that a positive? No one with any self-respect would want to make herself a punishment, even if her spouse was a cheating piece of work.
As for the kids, I think it’s highly unlikely that they would benefit from having a father who is slogging through his duty because he can’t escape and a mother who sets herself up as his jailer.
It’s a lose-lose proposition, and the only motivation for it, that I can see, is revenge.
Yeah, but… okay, I don’t much like cheaters myself, but practically speaking, how do you implement said punishments assuming a lack of cooperation from one party, especially since you’ve said you aren’t in favor of criminal sanction? (Again, that’s not rhetorical; I’m actually asking.)
We already know you’re in favor of trapping him in the marriage regardless of his wishes as long as the wife gives him no grounds for divorce, and I will assume you’re in favor of vice-versa if the gender roles are flipped.
You mention the wife getting his stuff and his daily presence with the kids. While we can (and should) legally compel him to provide financially for his offspring (and I should note; that’s the VERY LEAST YOU CAN DO if you have kids; a real man cowboys up) I’m curious as to how you can force him to do anything other than put a roof over their heads and food on their table, which is something we already require divorced fathers to do.
And supposing that you’re legally forcing him to live with his wife against his wishes, how the heck is that a good outcome? For that matter, how do you stop him from simply spending every night with his cheap floozy (or reasonable facsimile) if he wants to? Will cops be detailed to escort him home every evening? And when they do, what the hell sort of environment is THAT for everyone else in the family?
I think once you have reached the point ‘We will punish this guy by making him stay married,’ that is, using the institution of marriage as a punitive measure, you’ve gone way off course.
Actually, as far as the law is concerned they entered into a contract. Contracts can always be broken, if you are willing to pay the price of breaking them, like losing have of your wealth, say.
Now I think what you are talking about is some sort of religious punishment for violating religious vows. The Catholic church comes to mind but there are others.
In the mean time you seem to desire to see the sinners punished. That is what the hearafter is for, isn’t it?
Well, there have been laws against adultery and fornication. If that’s the real problem, why muddy the issue with divorce at all? Why not just punish people for cheating on their spouses? Or parents, if they have not yet got spouses. Or elder male relatives, if they have no longer got parents. We should punish unchaste sex, not the desire to break up a marriage. Then the homewrecking sluts can suffer as well.
Then we wouldn’t have to bother assigning “fault” in the frequent case of dual culpability. We can just seize both their assets, liberties, lives, or noses, and settle the issue in the traditional spirit that so encourages the others.
This solution would also relieve the wife of the duty of jailer to a social criminal. She would be free to remarry, provided she did not also have to be stoned.
Without defending the husband, it should be pointed out that while he seems like a “piece of work,” we only have her side of the story. And, she seems quite bitter indeed. Something that she might characterize as a lie, might not be one at all.
Based on the article, both parties seem quite terrible, and should be happy to be apart.
Instead, her husband can follow his penis and ditch his family just because he wants to.
Yes, he can. He has that right because the alternative is to trap people in unhappy and loveless marriages.
She wanted to prevent a home-wrecking whore* from stealing her husband… A woman who has sex with a man she knows to be married to someone else deserves slut-shaming in the most vigorous language possible.
It takes two people to commit adultery and that which is freely given is not stolen. Setting aside the unlikely clarity you seem to have about everyone’s motives in this drama, the sort of slut shaming you advocate is not in short supply. Yet spouses still cheat on each other. I don’t think its working.
This is no different from stealing someone’s property.
People aren’t property and that is precisely why marriage and divorce laws are constructed as they are. Married couples are still human beings and treating either of them as chattel owned by the other person was never very helpful to the project of marital bliss.
His “loveless” marriage may not be hers. She still loves him even if he’s a cheating bastard, and I think her feeings, and especially her willingness to do the right thing counts more than the feelings of her dishonest husband and his homewrecker.
You can’t force someone to marry you, no matter how much you love them. Why should you be able to force them to stay married?
I’m not talking about personal honor, or religious morality: I’m a monogamist myself. I’m talking about the state’s legitimate interest in regulating personal behavior. If the state does have a legitimate, rational interest in supporting one-sided loveless marriages, what sort of enforcement mechanism should exist? House arrest? GPS tracking? Monitored quality time and mandatory counselling?
There’s no way this ends well.
His “loveless” marriage may not be hers.
His marriage is of course the same as hers. They are married to each other. But the law cannot force a person to be physically or emotionally present to their spouse. If one person no longer loves the other, than the marriage really only exists as a formality. Its a farce and why anyone would want to maintain that farce is mystifying to me.
Whatever your judgment about this particular marriage, no fault divorce is about protecting the liberty of individuals in a wide variety of circumstances where their marriage is no longer working. Maybe a wife doesn’t really love her husband anymore. Maybe she feels that he lacks the kindness or caring that he did when they first married. Maybe they fight every day because they are so miserable together. Would you compel her to stay married in this unfortunate circumstance if her husband refuses.
No fault divorce recognizes that marriage involves a mutual willingness to stay together. When one party no longer possesses that willingness than there really is no marriage, just a legal roadblock preventing everyone involved – wife, husband and children – from getting on with their lives.
Whatever Willett felt about her now ex-husband, it seems clear that their marriage was over in all but the most formal sense. He was, for all intents and purposes, already gone. All she managed to do was prolong the suffering for everyone involved. The state really has no interest in promoting that sort of behavior.
The formal sense of a marriage is still something. I strongly favor gay marriage precisely because marriage in the formal sense is still something. Why would gays WANT the kind of marriage that one party can ditch at will? Marriage is a whole lot more than transient feelings. I still fail to see why rewarding the cheating bastard by allowing him to have life exactly as he wants it is something the state ought to do. Again, if love is temporary, why isn’t misery? He’ll learn to live with her and show his children that grownups keep their promises.
I still fail to see why rewarding the cheating bastard by allowing him to have life exactly as he wants it is something the state ought to do.
Of course, the issue is neither punishment or reward because the state does not see it as its business to do either. Its sees it interests as staying out of the personal relationships of individuals as much as possible. It has an interest in enforcing financial and child-raising responsibilities but none in forcing people to stay together let alone participate in a real marriage, even if it were somehow possible to do so.
Again, you keep referring back to this individual case in which you have made a moral judgment about people and a scenario that you know next to nothing about but again, the law is not about this or any individual case. Its about a wide variety of circumstances in which individuals find themselves in broken marriages. There are a lot of reasons that people find themselves no longer happy with their spouses. I bet there are even some that would meet your strict moral parameters. But by your approach to this issue you would restrict all of those people from ever obtaining any measure of control over their lives. You would do so because you dislike the fact that someone you don’t know might somehow “get away” with cheating on his wife. You would punish everyone involved with maintaining a farce of a marriage so that he does not escape the punishment of your cruel but just gavel. This is really just a very bad idea.
Indeed. Say neither has cheated but both want to leave. No fault, no cheating, no love.
Should husband and wife then be forced to stay together in their loveless marriage until, I suppose, one of them either dies or takes a swing at the other? What are they being punished for? A mistaken marriage? Whose interests is this punishment serving? Theirs?
Feelings aren’t the point. I think we can agree that love isn’t the issue here, and that revenge and pride shouldn’t be; this is one arena where the phrase “think of the children” shouldn’t be a punchline.
The husband cheated. That’s a bad thing, to be sure, but ultimately irrelevant; the real issue is how the children (and, to a lesser extent, the soon-to-be ex-spouse) is to be provided for. Child support is a commonplace; not being a lawyer, i don’t know if alimony is ever awarded in a no-fault situation, but some similar arrangement can be arrived at. Bottom line: if the husband doesn’t want to stay in the marriage, he will make life hell for all involved, including the kids. Better to separate the clearly-incompatible parents and dial down the tension in the home.
Yes it is, all the time, in particular when the marriage is long standing or one spouse has become a stay at home while the other is out working.
I guess she may love him if stalking can count.
Oh, but we don’t even share the same politics, because I recognize that slut-shaming is NEVER appropriate and hurts ALL women. I’m a crazy feminist like that.
People are not property. Marriage is not ownership. Thinking like this is why it took so long to legally recognize that rape can happen within a marriage.
I should also point out that no-fault divorce laws allow women in abusive marriages to get out. Not that I suppose this worries you. Since they are “property.”
I knew I wrote a post on this.
I don’t understand how condemning cheaters fails women? Doesn’t the wife deserve something? Do you side with robbers, thieves, or murderers against their victims? The slut knew her sugar daddy was married to someone else; she knowingly participated in cheating on another woman. She’s no different from fences or money launderers; she profits from evil. Women deserve the right to demonstrate that we’re capable of being moral adults. Sluts like this only hurt the cause for good women.
You really just compared sleeping with a consensual partner to murder. WELL DONE.
There are no “good” women versus “evil” women. Or: the Catholic Church wants their virgin/whore dichotomy back. No-fault divorce laws HELP your “good” women, too, as I pointed out.
And now I am letting this go, because I don’t even want to legitimize your argument by acting like it’s valid. Women being policed by their sexuality hurts all women. The end.
Wow, Karen. Way to bring the crazy. The ethics of interpersonal relationships are not predicated on it being a zero-sum game of good vs. evil. What if the spouse “cheats” because the marriage has irretrievably broken down and they don’t have the financial wherewithall to divorce? What if one partner is emotionally abusive? What if, what if, what if… Your black and white viewpoint is not only archaic and simplistic, but also, frankly, a little horrifying.
Karen, I feel like I’m uniquely qualified to address this. My parents got divorced 25 years ago (wow… there’s an anniversary this year) after an affair. They are now both happily remarried, one of them to the person with whom s/he cheated.
Was it traumatic? Yes, for me and them. Because of the particular path they chose to get divorced, there have been long-lasting enmities that made it difficult for me to have both my parents in the same room, when I graduated from college and law school, when I left for 2 years in Peace Corps Ethiopia, when I got married. If there was a way they could have gotten divorced, 25 years ago, that would have led to fewer raw emotions, I would invent a goddamn time machine and go back in time to urge them to take that route.
I now practice law, including – at times – family law including divorces. I have represented husbands and wives, cheaters and cheatees. It is much much much easier – and cheaper in attorney’s fees – if people can find a way to agree to divorce, rather than fighting it out in court.
You very clearly have some emotion invested in what you are writing here. But the idea that somehow it would be productive to “compel” or “slutshame” the parties involved is just misguided. Particularly when there are children involved. I don’t think it would make Christmases any merrier for me if my stepparent had been “slutshamed” in court.
I feel obliged to add – this is my experience, this is the example I can give you. Everyone’s divorce is unique. That’s why no-fault is a useful tool in some cases. If someone wants to fight it out, they always have that option. Witness the Daily Beast story – she didn’t do anything to convince her husband to stay married, but she certainly prevented the divorce long enough to fight it out in court. That option is always available.
If (as Ms. Willet describes) your spouse moves out of your home and into that of their new partner – are you still “married”?
I worked with both of them at the place where they met. I’ll e-mail you off line, Scott with some additional details, sadly not for publication.
My personal feeling: a plague on both of their houses.
If the former Mr. Willett has any rabbits, he might want to make sure the hutch has its own security system.
Jesus Christ. This woman illustrates why pride is one of the seven deadly sins.
There is no Mr. Willett; except perhaps her father. As I mentioned before, I used to work with both of them and she kept her maiden name.
Egads! No wonder he dumped the ball-breaking feminazi! I kid. About that part anyway. (Although one could discuss why a person who is very traditional in some respects didn’t change her name. If one cared.)
Her former husband needs to garde bien les lapins.
I cannot believe this thread has gone this long with someone who actually believes we should take advise from this song.
I’m unclear what obligations the husband is being forced to live up to in a situation like this. If it’s financial support for his wife and child, he would be forced to do that in the event of a divorce. If it’s his presence in their lives and his continued involvement in the raising of their child, forcing him to remain in the marriage wouldn’t make him do that (clearly, since he doesn’t seem to have done so during the divorce proceedings).
What does keeping him in the marriage compel him to do that allowing a divorce doesn’t?
If he gets a divorce, he wins. The whole point of this game, if I understand Willett and Karen correctly, is to keep him from winning, because he doesn’t deserve to win. Everything else is immaterial.
That’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far. Makes everything in this increasingly odd thread start to make sense. Thanks.
Yes, I think you may be right.
1) Husband is bad.
2) Bad people should not get what they want.
Therefore, 3) Husband should not get what he wants.
4) Husband wants a divorce.
Therefore, 5) Husband should not get a divorce.
A divorce ruins the illusion that everything will always be exactly the way she wants it to be.
I wanna see “Karen” type something while Ms. Willett drinks a big glass of water. Or appears in court.
I vote for this to win the thread.
To be fair, Karen does appear to have a proposed remedy which hasn’t been addressed here AFAICT: no-fault divorce, but the partner seeking the divorce has to surrender 90% of his/her future salary.
I guess in this case people wouldn’t get divorced. They would just go live with their new girlfriend/boyfriends. Managing the finances of the non-dissolved marriage would get problematic though. Maybe Karen’s solution then would be to physically prevent the cheater from having sex with other persons.
I just can’t imagine how she expects this solution to be workable. The only thing that can really be mandated is the meaningless maintenance of a legal marriage. And for all the ‘punishment’ this will be for cheaters trying to leave a marriage, how will it serve those who would like to leave a marriage in which their partner has stopped fulfilling their wedding vows in any meaningful sense but haven’t crossed any of the bright line rules (provably at least) normally used in the past?
I have to agree with the original title of this post. Karen has not added anything to change this judgement.
To be fair, Karen does appear to have a proposed remedy which hasn’t been addressed here AFAICT: no-fault divorce, but the partner seeking the divorce has to surrender 90% of his/her future salary.
I believe (and I could be wrong) that she advocated at-fault divorce, with a 90% claim on salary.
Applying this idea to marriages where domestic abuse is occurring boggles the mind.
This is only for the sake of argument, but I believe domestic abuse would normally allow for an at-fault divorce (much like sexual infidelity). Requiring that it be proven in a court of law is a huge problem though and part of the reason why there is simply no case to be made for opposing no-fault divorce laws.
I wonder if the kids/props understood that “fighting for daddy” would mean no $$ for college educations? Or maybe even daddy hating them in addition to just mommy?
I wonder how you tell your kids they can’t get a tattoo/piercing after you write a big article where their advice on adult issues features so prominently.
I don’t condone the language used by Karen nor do I agree with Willett, but marriage does involve concepts like duty, loyalty, and honoring your spouse and your children and the commitment you made. Just saying.
Nobody’s arguing that Willett’s husband didn’t betray their marriage, just that, well, we shouldn’t get rid of no-fault divorce laws just to punish the occasional cheater.
I don’t think anyone’s really disputing that, but these are concepts which are only useful insofar as they improve people’s lives. If they stop being useful for that, why hold onto them as tools of revenge?