31 July 2002

How not to leave your wife
Don't tell her you haven't loved her for X years. She doesn't need to know this.
Don't tell her you're not attracted to her body type. Bad enough you're leaving her - why destroy her self-esteem.
Don't tell her you're scrogging a 21-year-old co-ed. Yeah, she'll find out eventually, but she doesn't need to hear it now.
I'm sure there are more, but those are the mistakes one of my old high school friends recently made. At least IMO.
Divorce is no big deal when there aren't any kids or they're older. When you have small kids it should be an absolute last resort. Suck it up!

UPDATE:
Okay, just looking back over my posts and I'm laughing at my contradictory statements. In this post I'm dogging my buddy for leaving his kids. In a previous post (July 3) I stated that I thought my wife's friend should divorce her husband.


To try to clarify - I DO think divorce should be a last resort and a certain amount of sucking-it-up is sometimes necessary. But I also don't think you do your kids much of a favor if you continue in a marriage where you can't stand your spouse - where you come to despise them.


My high school buddy was probably at that point, and so it may well be for the best. And my wife’s friend has been separated for two years – her kids are already used to it.

18 July 2002

What to do with people who abuse kids
I was just reading about the rape and murder of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion. I don't understand. How can anyone do such a thing?
It doesn't help that I have a 5-year-old daughter. I can't help imagining how I would feel if it happened to her. I don't think that's something you can ever get over. It would consume your whole life. To know that the last hours of her life were spent in terror and confusion.
I don't support state-sanctioned capital punishment. ONLY because I think that one innocent person put to death by the state is unacceptable.
However.
If anyone were to rape and murder my daughter, I would certainly kill them if I could. If I were absolutely sure that they did it. Certainly if I caught them in the act.
Some people do deserve to die. Absolutely, they do.

03 July 2002

Monogamy
We were philosophizing last night after our softball extravaganza. (We won one, lost one - a good outing for us) Gerri and I were the oldest folks - at 40 and 36 - at the table and the only couple. Z was giving us a bit of a hard time and she said, "You're so OLD, and you act like a couple of 18 year olds."
Someone else said, "That's why you're still together."
Thinking about that the next morning (now) I think there's certainly some truth there. We are the happiest couple I know. We like each other. We like to be together. Not to say it's paradise, we have spats. We get crabby with each other, sometimes. But on balance I can't imagine being happy without her.
So how does that happen?
A lot of our friends are divorced or in not-so-happy marriages. One of Gerri's friends is just divorced (or almost divorced, I don't remember) and it was a torturous decision for her. Gerri and I had many conversations about her situation and what we thought she should do.
She's not in love with him anymore. But she's afraid of divorcing him and then suddenly finding herself in love with him again.
I just don't think that happens. So my thought is that divorce is the right thing for her. They have two small kids, but they've been separated for the last 20 months. Their kids are used to them not being together and I think divorce is actually easier on younger kids. (Guess I could do some research on that theory ...)
I'm rambling a little. What I was trying to get at was how do you know when you've found a soulmate. And I guess you just know. I never had any real doubts about Gerri and me, and we had quite a few obstacles thrown in our way. We just knew that we had to be together.