Gee, is it your sensitive verbiage that keeps me coming back to the hook?
For your information, sister, with so many women now drawing their own sizeable incomes, the incidence of women 'throwing away the old one' is pulling right up behind the men...its (sadly) called corrupt human nature, and neither men nor women have any special immunity to it...many women today make nice incomes yet are conflicted by a desire to still be 'taken care of'....so they often dump their (in their minds) 'less successful husbands'...kind of the flip side of the husbands who dump their (in their minds) 'less attractive wives'...
If you keep the interests of the children in mind first, you will stay married. Period. No matter what.
But no-fault divorce has made divorce an appealing, even tempting, option for millions of men AND women - and it is the children who have suffered the most....
Forgetting the general "war between the sexes" talk and the important issue of how many men betray innocent and loving wives, let us imagine that, in this case, which we know from the left-wing Guardian article that we don't know the full story on...
The article says she is a liberal. It doesn't say whether the ex is conservative or whether the new wife is conservative. Especially on FR, this is relevant to the compatibility issue (but not to the financial compensation issue).
Maybe, after 9-11, her becoming politically liberal and possibly completely disagreeing and disrepecting her husband's views on protecting the country, supporting the troops, her identifying with Cindy Sheehan's treason, etc...was, in this case, an insurmountable incompatibility and a reason for finding someone who hadn't been around to be "Clintonized"...making the older Clintonite, who possibly didn't "grow" with her husband after 911, an inappropriate example for those who specifically support her on a conservative website like FR.
In the New York area, a lot of women between 30 and 45 are Clintonites...they were Clintonized. And maybe a lot of men are, since 9-11, finding out to their horror that they are married to someone who remained Clintonized and just didn't "get it" on 9-11. Now this isn't necessarily a reason to divorce and certainly not hurt any kids...but it must be quite a disappointment. The wonderful Reaganite women are generally over 45 now but this woman clearly wasn't one of them (or was she? We don't know). The Guardian article says that this woman is now the liberal mayor of Nyack, New York (Rockland County). How many anti-Iraqi-freedom demonstrations has this particular woman organized? Again, we don't know.
I am not saying that this is the scenario, just that on a site like FR...this is the way the thread could have gone.
I met an old girlfriend from New York City last year who had voted for John Kerry...and we remarked how, had we gotten married when I was a twentysomething male who didn't really know the world, the John Kerry-George Bush battle in 2004 would have been like an atomic bomb to our marriage.
A lot of young women marry young guys who don't know what the difference between liberal and conservative is. If the guy later turns conservative (a big change in a man's life) and she doesn't...then she better hope there isn't a new generation coming in where younger women are enjoying Fox News, challenging liberal professors and listening to Ann Coulter. We might want to forget the insecure rants against the "younger" part of the person he now gets along with better and ask when and how often the problem is that the man goes conservative while the wife stays liberal in general life philosophy.
Again, I am not necessarily stating that political differences are always or even often serious enough for divorce.
Edith Wharton wrote "Ethan Fromme" on the general topic of failed marriages.
Also, how often have we heard about a conservative man dying with a fortune like the one Theresa Heinz received...and the woman, after her husband's death, turns out to stand for everything that he did not stand for? What was up with that? I met a woman in Los Angeles 2 years ago who bragged about how, after her father died, her mother could finally breathe easy and become a Democrat! What is that all about? Did the men have an idea that would happen?
We don't know.
I'm not particularly interested in being sensitive about a woman who contributes actively to the breakup of someone else's marriage. There are a number of words that can be used to describe such a person, and "slut" is probably the least coarse of them.
If you keep the interests of the children in mind first, you will stay married. Period. No matter what. But no-fault divorce has made divorce an appealing, even tempting, option for millions of men AND women - and it is the children who have suffered the most....
There I am in total agreement with you. Unfortunately, when one partner in a marriage decides that he or she wants to leave and refuses to put the interests of the children first, the other spouse can do nothing to prevent a divorce, no matter how devoted a parent he or she is. So it's too simplistic to say "If you keep the interests of the children in mind first, you will stay married. Period. No matter what." You may not have a choice. You may be involuntarily divorced by your spouse.
And by the way, I am not, so far as I know, your sister.