What to Say to Someone Who's Getting a Divorce
I read an article this morning about divorce that actually made me laugh out loud. I know that seems wrong, but this was just plain ridiculous. The article was about divorce lawyers in the U.K. who have the unenviable task of building divorce cases in a court system that doesn't allow no-fault divorces.
In England, divorces are granted only under one of five categories (like adultery or spousal abuse), and half of the cases end up being filed under the category of "unreasonable behavior". In other words, one spouse has to prove that the other is acting so unreasonably that they can no longer live with each other. This leads to a very large amount of silly excuses - things like having to eat tuna casserole or fighting over the TV remote - that no doubt mask a much deeper set of issues.
Even though I was laughing through it, the article reminded me vividly of an incident between Peter and me. He had a real problem with clutter, and while I'm no fan of a messy house, when you have young kids, clutter inevitably happens sometimes. His biggest pet peeve was our kitchen counter - we have a large counter complete with a breakfasting area, and that's where our mail seemed to accumulate, until we took the time to weed through it. It was also the repository for loads of school papers, car keys, cell phones and whatever action figures my son was playing with at the time. In short, it was cluttered and often. Peter used to gripe about it a lot, but he rarely ever took a moment himself to go through the piles of stuff. I added an in-bin type tray to put things in, but it was usually filled to the brim.
The kicker was, I was using our digital camera one day and found a picture of the cluttered kitchen counter on the camera. I had no idea why it was there, and got an odd hunch. I checked the home email account and found that the picture had been mailed to Peter's work email. I didn't have to wonder why. He must've wanted to show Stacie. It was so ludicrous, I actually confronted him on it. He stammered and his eyes were darting in four different directions and he said he just wanted a picture of the countertop to show someone at work who was thinking of getting a new kitchen counter. I stared at him for a long minute, shook my head and just said "Whatever, Peter."
And I thought to myself, of all the things he could complain about being wrong between us, this is what he picks? A pile of papers? Was he having to grasp so hard at reasons to validate his choices, that this was what he was reduced to griping about? And I wondered what Stacie thought - am I a terrible wife for having a pile of clutter on a countertop? How ridiculous is that?
What sort of things did your ex latch onto when you started hashing through your relationship? Were any of them as silly as my countertop? Or fighting over a TV remote?
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What to Say to Someone Who's Getting a Divorce
Source: https://www.womansday.com/relationships/dating-marriage/a46152/ridiculous-divorce/
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