Arianna Huffington is a fount of bad ideas, so it’s not really surprising that she’s recently added to the Huffington Post an entire section dedicated to divorce. Heading up the project is thrice married film director Nora Ephron who says her theory is that “marriages come and go, but divorces are forever.” Ironically, Ms. Ephron makes “romantic comedies.” Perhaps she should make “divorce comedies” instead.
Nevertheless, while I think the HuffPost’s approach to the subject will be a disaster, I have to give Huffington and Ephron credit for posting an article by Beverly Willett on “ Saying No to No-Fault .”
Willet, you may remember, is the woman I mentioned back in August who did what many people consider unthinkable—refused to give in to her husband’s demand for a divorce.
After the original article ran at The Daily Beast, the response was overwhelmingly hostile:
Hate mail had already begun rolling in to the website. Eventually, there were e-mails and messages waiting for me on Facebook, too. I never expected such an outpouring of venom from total strangers. More than anything, though, I was bewildered, as baffled perhaps as I’d been the day my ex announced his departure.
What was controversial about a woman who loved her husband and children more than anything and wanted to save her family from the heartaches of divorce? Was she really an “idiot,” a “psycho” bent on “revenge,” out to hog-tie the man who freely said “I do” into “forced slavery” because of her hard-headed sense of right and wrong? That’s what some anonymous commenters thought. Maybe divorce brings out the worst in people.
The comments on the article reinforce her point. One reader added what is likely to be a common view on the new divorce section: “My position on marriage is simple: I find it highly unreasonable, and in fact, insane, to promise UNDER CONTRACT to deliver a specific emotion to ONLY one person, with the length of the contract being FOREVER. Americans don’t even like 2-year cell phone contracts, where they actually GET something out of it.”
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