Chazmo

I really think Warren makes the right point here... There's no win/win scenario in a divorce; there's only different degrees of losing. How can anything be equitable when two people make a life together and then split it up?

In Hollywood, perhaps, raw economics makes it easy and most of these high-profile couples don't stay together long enough to actually significantly affect each other's lives (let alone their individual careers). Jane and Joe Shmo, on the other hand, have it rough when they split.

For those of you who've posted that you've never seriously considered divorcing your spouse -- I'm amazed and delighted! I think you guys are so lucky! Some of you have met me, and god knows I love my wife to pieces, but we've been on that brink a few times. Fortunately, the reality of splitting up has kept us together through some tough times. I'm not proud of it, but marriage is a definite roller coaster for me/us.

MsPerky

^ Well, I never seriously considered it, either, until a couple of years before I left, when I realized that I was turning into an unhappy person because he was an unhappy person. Not really anything to do with the marriage itself, but it definitely influenced the relationship. We are still friends - he took me out to brunch for my birthday. But I think it is very honest of you, Chaz, to admit to problems. As always, it isn't the problems, it's how you handle them, whether in marriage or in life.

Kyras

Same here, Charlie. We've never gone as far as getting attorney's but the threat has been mentioned. It's been much better the past 2 or 3 years, but it took a great marriage counselor to get here.

Traveler

As to whether a spouse should get alimony, I think they should. Not for an eternity, but at least until they can get on their feet. After all, if you are splitting the property and the debts 50-50, why not split the cash flow also? The debts were incurred with that cash flow in mind. Or just give the debts to the person who has an income.

I think that "assigning blame" and distributing the money and debts accordingly is a bad idea. The person who files for divorce isn't necessarily the one who wants to leave. A friend of mine wanted to leave his wife, but didn't want to upset his Catholic parents. So he just made his wife's life so miserable that she eventually filed for the divorce. Should he have gotten special treatment because she was the one leaving him?

tomcatt

[quote name='Chazmo' date='Feb 15 2005, 09:09 AM'] For those of you who've posted that you've never seriously considered divorcing your spouse -- I'm amazed and delighted!

fltsfshr

finally I can comment on the divorce topic. I know nothing.

34 years and it keeps getting better.

Once I hired the meanest divorce lawyer in Jackson Mississippi to bail out my wifes sister. I have never been proud of what that atty did to my ex bro in law.

what more can I say.

fltsfshr

Ulrich

Different subject... Would you want to live forever?

Inventor preserves self to witness immortality

The inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away. [...] Kurzweil writes of millions of blood cell-sized robots, which he calls "nanobots," that will keep us forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded via the Internet. We won't even need a heart. [...] The claims are fantastic, but Kurzweil is no crank. He's a recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize, which is billed as a sort of Academy Award for inventors, and he won the 1999 National Medal of Technology Award. He has written on the emergence of intelligent machines in publications ranging from Wired to Time magazine. The Christian Science Monitor has called him a "modern Edison." He was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002.

Personally, I am not sure I'd want to. This world has got to become even more screwed up if nobody ever dies and it becomes more and more corwded and there is a greater draw on its resources. I'd think at some point in time this would become a rather uncomfortable place to live.

Wasn't there an old Star Trek episode where they encountered an overpopulated planet?

Crisis

I remeber an old Star Trek episode where the "bad guy" took over a planet where everyone lived really long, over 1,000 years, and hoped to become nearly inmmortal by staying there. By the end he found out that the folks there lived long because of there genetic makeup, not environment. That sort of took the wind out of his sails.

As far as immortality, the older I get the less attractive it seems. Life gets hard and complicated. While I certainly don't want to check out too soon, the thought of going on indefinitely would be terrifying.

Matt_in_VA

There is always two sides to every coin. Gee, I wonder what she wasn't doing to keep him happy?

It also happens the other way: I have a female coworker that has a male friend that has a successful insurance business. He met a female that apparently was just a gold digger. He had a nice house around 2,200 Sq Ft, but that was not "good" enough for her. She had him buy a new 4,500 Sq Ft waterfront home on the river. She quit her job to stay home and take care of the house. After four years (no children in the loop) she divorced him and in the settlement because his business was worth quite a bit, as well as his other assets. She "settled" for "just" their almost million dollar home that was her idea to buy.

My wife knows a person that is a corporate type lawyer. He owned (had a mortgage on) his home for about twelve years when he fell in love with a women that had almost thirty thousand dollars in credit card debt. He travels extensively on business and turned over the domestic account to her (bad move). As she convinced him that she should quit her job and become a home maker (love is blind). Over a period of years she re-decorated the house, used the house hold money to pay down all of her credit card debt and towards the end stopped paying his mortgage and his credit cards. She hid the mail (and late notices from him). He came home from a trip one day to a completely empty house except for a big box of all the late notices. She trashed his credit, and he wound up losing his house. She ran away debt free! If ever I have heard of a case of justifiable homicide, this would have to be it.

Matt_in_VA

When it comes to how long I want to live I think that I would use the analogy that Einstein used to use to explain his "Theory of Relativity" to people:

Two minutes of sitting on a hot stove seems like a lot longer than two minutes of kissing your best girl friend.

To me that translates to a quality of life issue in regards to my health. My father always used to say that "you live until you die" and he did not deprive himself of any foods that he liked, etc. His typical breakfast consisted of a half dozen eggs cooked sunny side up in the grease from the pound of bacon that he cooked and about a quarter of a loaf of rye bread. (I know) Four days before his 70th birthday he woke up ate breakfast, when to the supermarket (he loved to food shop), came home ate lunch. Went into the living to watch TV, got up and went back into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee, had a massive heart attack and was dead before he hit the floor. So he got his wish.

Sudden death is hard on the people that one leaves behind. It was extremely hard on my mother. But what a way "to go".

In summary, like Johnny Carson once stated when ask many years ago on the Tonight Show on how he would like to die? His answer was: From asphyxiation. When Ed McMahon questioned him on it. His response was: From the fumes after successfully blowing out all the candles on my 140th birthday cake!

I want to LIVE until I die, not waste away.