Gay Marriage: Won't Somebody Think of the Children

[Jub]

...then dropped her like a ton of bricks when he did find what he was looking for. It's a shitty thing to do when a man does it to a woman over another woman, it's a shitty thing to do when a woman does it to a man over another man, and it's still a shitty thing to do when a man does it to a woman over another man.

So what, we expect people to stick out a shitty marriage even after they find somebody that they feel is a better fit? That isn't realistic and our culture needs to get away from this stupid idea that love is forever. Love isn't and has never been something that is guaranteed to last and as much as you can admire the people that work through falling out of love while staying together it is stupid to think that it is the only reasonable way to do things.

Does it hurt the person that isn't ready to let go when the one who is finally makes a move? Of course it does, but how much should the person that wants to leave have to suffer before Grumman the arbiter of who can leave a marriage deigns to let them divorce.

The fact is we're moving towards a society that doesn't value marriage all the strongly, and for good reason. We're living longer, we aren't stuck within the same small farming community with a pool of people that wouldn't respect a person who left a perfectly fine husband or wife, and our culture doesn't have the same guilt associated with sex out of wedlock as we had even thirty years ago. Add to that greater access to mates via living in denser communities and having access to the internet and anybody can see that people are going to be either leaving relationships more often or cheating more. That's just the way we as a society are moving.

I don't know how old you are, or what your social group looks like, but from where I'm at it looks like more and more people in their twenties are going with some form of open relationships. Less people are getting married at all, and divorce rates don't seem to be going down. So your views on when you can leave a relationship make you look like a dinosaur to me given the way I see love and relationships.

[Broomstick]

Look, even people like my parents who grew up in another era and remained married for 60 years, until one partner died, knew that not all relationships ended happily ever after. There are good reasons for ending a long-term relationship.

That said, there are different ways to end a relationship and some are better than others. So, yeah, if you've found a "better fit" sure, it makes all the sense in the world to go with better but how you end the prior relationship says a lot about you.

In this thread we only hear one side of the story - the wife's. She is quite bitter. Is that because she's a shrill harpy, or because her ex was a jackass when he broke off the marriage? We don't know. We can't know. I'd really like to hear his side of things, and how it looked to the kids as well because that's the only way to get anywhere near the truth.

Maybe the marriage hummed along for years and the "I'm actually gay, here's my boyfriend, I'm divorcing you and marrying him" thing really did hit like a bombshell. Or maybe it was an empty shell of a marriage and the woman had tried to maintain appearances for years because in her mind that was the right thing to do but in fact they were both miserable, sex was non-existent after some point, and there was a lot of arguing and bitterness behind closed doors.

We can't know. It is interesting to watch peoples' assumptions when they post, though.

[bilateralrope]

In this thread we only hear one side of the story - the wife's. She is quite bitter. Is that because she's a shrill harpy, or because her ex was a jackass when he broke off the marriage? We don't know. We can't know. I'd really like to hear his side of things, and how it looked to the kids as well because that's the only way to get anywhere near the truth.

This line from the article hints at quite a lot:

the judge gave him practically everything he wanted. At one point, he even told my husband, “If you had asked for more, I would have given it to you.”

Three possibilities
- She is lying about the judge saying that.
- The ex-husband asked for less than the judge considered reasonable. The only thing we know the husband got out of the divorce was custody of the children.
- The judge was biased towards the gay ex-husband. Which seems unlikely as if the judge was biased, that line would have got him in trouble.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Fourth possibility
- The wife behaved so badly in court and pissed the judge off so much that he decided to give the husband whatever he asked for and more

[Flagg]

Most likely this is all bullshit made up by the American Family Association.

[Raw Shark]

Fourth possibility
- The wife behaved so badly in court and pissed the judge off so much that he decided to give the husband whatever he asked for and more

I'm picturing a three-way split between went nuts in court and pissed off the judge, the fact that they, "make more [ed: possibly a lot more if they collect artwork and entertain large groups of guests frequently] money," (she might not even have a job for all we know), and weighing the value of two primary parents vs one. IMHO if she is physically attractive enough to have two children in the first place and has been single for seven years while not wanting to be, that is a big red flag for crazy right there.