It's hard to know how to start a post that digs into your heart so painfully that even as it makes you laugh, sadly, you can feel the damage that will never be able to be reversed. I am in the midst of my second divorce, yet it is not so much painful, to me, as it is silly, even comical.
Why?
First, because it has been such a drawn-out affair, it's becoming ludicrous. More importantly, at the end of any domestic relationship, the legal system attempts to rationalize the irrational. There are formulas and culturally-determined assumptions, none of which capture the unique nature of our uniquely tangled relationships.
No mathematical formula can ever capture the elusive hopes between partners who lose what they had, and who once hoped for so much more. Nor can it predict the elusive futures they now cannot envision.
And the contract of marriage, once broken, can never be put together again, rather like Humpty Dumpty. Once it is broken, not even all the king's horses, etc., can help.
That this makes me smile may seem strange, but it does. Divorce decrees attempt to preserve all the worst parts of being married, while dismissing the best parts as meaningless.
Getting divorced, finally, is like being sentenced to jail. A cautionary tale, this, to anyone contemplating marriage. The informalities that are precious may get lost; the formalities may prove costly.
And no one can legislate trust.
It's the raw material for a joke. This one will be on me.
-30-
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