A round-up of divorce attitudes from the neighborhood (rich Boston suburb)…
“She had a fresh pedicure and manicure and looked fantastic,” said one mom about a recent divorce plaintiff, encountered at the supermarket. “She didn’t have any of her kids with her.” (The plaintiff sued her husband due to an expressed desire to “protect the children” from what the defendant’s “addiction issues” (apparently not severe enough to prevent him from bringing home a physician’s paycheck every two weeks). Now the kids are fully protected by being parked unsupervised with the addict every other weekend. [Also, apparently nothing is better for an adult’s mood than to be completely-off-the-child-care-hook roughly 30 percent of the time (while still being paid to provide child care). See also Newsweek for a report on a recent Harvard Business School study that found that leisure time was the key to happiness.]
“He would have had a good reason to divorce her,” said a 60-year-old married-with-kids friend regarding a former colleague, a Manhattan-based retired financial services industry executive (he didn’t know whether the wife or the husband was the plaintiff, only that his friend was no longer married). “She was bipolar.” In other words, the “in sickness and health” part of the marriage vows didn’t apply, in his view, given the wife’s mental illness. Now the man is enjoying the NY dating scene, mostly with divorcees in their 40s, though he says “all the women are lying about their age” so it is tough to establish a precise age.
An Arab immigrant renting a neighbor’s mother-in-law apartment explained that he and his wife, also an Arab immigrant, had started a business and purchased a house together. The wife sued him and obtained the business, the house, and the kids down at the Middlesex Family Court (our statistical study of what happens there). Asserting “I am afraid of him,” she got a restraining order against her defendant. Among other things, this keeps him from saying anything regarding their mother to the children, who are over 18 (they can yield child support profits through age 23 in Massachusetts and are therefore still a fit subject for family court litigation). He endures a lot of hassle whenever he returns through U.S. immigration due to the fact that the border agents find a red flag in his record from the restraining order.
From a woman who apparently followed her heart rather than optimizing her life and reproduction to align with Massachusetts family law: “Recently divorced mom, 14 yo son, and a 10 yo daughter in need affordable rental, 2-3 BR ASAP. Would be willing to help with some of the maintenance.” (Safe to assume 5 years of happiness, 10 years of annoyance/irritation, and, going forward, decades of financial struggle?)
The scaramucci divorce is an interesting one. She in her ninth month decided she couldn’t take him anymore–just as he was selling his 100m business. She seems to have just discovered that he has “naked ambition” according to the Post and therefore she is “fed up” with him. She is a former PR person at his investment firm, I.e., good looking, probably no particular talents beyond that.
I guess my Mom got divorced about 35 years too early. In 1980, my father divorced my Mom, and left MA for CA. She immediately went to work full-time managing the office of a large auto repair shop. My Dad, on his mechanical engineer’s salary, was ordered to pay $40/week total child support for three boys through age 18. My Mom got the house after paying off my Dad for $10,000. She sold it fifteen years later for $200,000, but the nursing home eventually got most of that.
If 1 in 4 women in the US are on anti-depressants (Huffington Post, 2011) what does that say about the mental state of most women these days? The advances in female rights so far (a very good thing btw, I’m all for women being treated as adults and not children) have clearly not been enough. Life is still so awful for a sizeable number of women that marriage, work, or having the lion’s share of consumer spending (~73% according to https://hbr.org/2009/09/the-female-economy) is just unbearable. Life as a woman is so unbearable and unfair that more needs to be done. How much more Social Justice will it take to bring the number of women on anti-depressants down to 5% (the expected extreme on a normal distribution) ? If only Hillary had won the election…
@Jack have been following the Scaramucci saga, but they have been separated since early 2017, and she sued for divorce on July 6th. Her attorney has denied that politics played a role and said that reports to that effect were erroneous/fabricated. According to one source, they were delaying the announcement of the divorce until after the baby (due August 8th) was born. Due to premature labor, that plan went awry. Deidre Scaramucci may have alleged abuse as part of her July 6th divorce lawsuit, and may have obtained a restraining order barring the Mooch from Lenox Hill Hospital. Perhaps she relented (and came to her senses IMO) over this past weekend, when he visited his son on Long Island. Let’s hope they reconcile, as this is so sad for the 3 yo and the newborn. But meantime between Bill Ackman and Scaramucci, the potential windfall to divorce litigators in NY from the woes of financiers could be major.