I have been married once, so far, to the woman to whom I am still married, so far, and one thing I have noticed about being married, so far, is that it makes you a lot more attentive to divorce. Divorce used to seem like something that happened to other people, but not any more, because of course every marriage is pregnant with divorce. Now I know a lot of people who are divorced, or are about to be, or are somewhere in between those poles, for which shadowy status there should be words like mivorced or darried or sleeperated or schleperated.
People get divorced for all sorts of reasons, and I find myself taking notes, probably defensively, but also from sheer amazement at the chaotic wilderness of human nature.
For example, I read recently about one man who got divorced so he could watch all 60 episodes of The Wire in chronological order. Another man got divorced after 30 years so he could, he said, fart in peace.
Another man got divorced because he told his wife he had an affair. He didn't have an affair, he just couldn't think of any other good excuse to get divorced. He liked his wife, and rather enjoyed her company, but he just didn't want to be married to her every day any more, he preferred to be married to her every third day, maybe, but she did not find that a workable arrangement, and so they parted company, confused.
I read about a woman who divorced her husband because he picked his nose. Another woman got divorced because her husband never remembered to pay their property taxes and finally, she said, it was just too much.
It seems to me that the reasons people divorce are hardly ever the dramatic reasons we assume are the reasons people get divorced, like sex in churches and cocaine for breakfast and discovering that the guy you married ten years ago has a wife in another state.
It's more a quiet decay, as if marriages are houses and unless you keep cleaning the windows and repainting here and there and using duct tape with deft punctilio, after a while everything sags and mould wins and there you are signing settlement papers at the dining room table.
I read about a couple who got divorced because of irresolute differences, a phrase that addled me for weeks. Another couple filed for divorce on the