At one of our dinners-for-8 on Empress of the Seas, a lively fellow told us about his life in The Villages and how he could be more popular with women if he were a dancer. He said that he was just getting out of a marriage that began in 2015: “I’ve been single, married, widowed, single, half-single, married again, and now divorced.” (his three–year marriage isn’t long enough to trigger Florida’s permanent alimony provisions)
An Irish passenger explained that the Irish tradition is for adult sons to build houses on their parents’ land and thus settle down with their kids right next to the grandparents. As a significant chunk of land may be only 1 acre, the houses are quite close to each other. This system worked well for centuries, but with today’s no-fault divorce law a common outcome is that the daughter-in-law divorces the son and the Irish family court will award the house and children to the mother. “The son has to move out and the grandparents now find themselves across the garden from an unrelated female and her new boyfriend.”