Morning Thoughts: October 12, 2017

“He always baited her hook for her when we all went fishing.” My aunt said that about my father and mother, inseparable for more than 45 years before Mother’s untimely death. Aunt Essie thought that really meant something, baiting your girl’s hook.

I guess there are many measurements of love. This started me thinking about un-love, and then about divorce rates. After a little researching, my hair began to itch. The so-called “facts” began to collide with one another and wrestle like men in a tag-team match gone bad.

If we have been listening to coffee shop talk, we know that the divorce rate in America is 50 percent and rising. That’s something we can be pretty sure about as a start.

Oops. Wait one. It seems that, like about any other thing you can imagine, the experts don’t agree. They don’t agree by a large margin. Some say the rate is soaring and is closing in on 60 percent.

Others say the rate is falling, soon to fall below 40 percent.

Why the spread? Oh, we can round up the usual suspects. It’s not as easy to define “divorce” as we might think. Sure, when one person obtains a restraining order, hires a “marriage dissolvement” attorney, and receives a legal document from a judge, we can be fairly sure about that one.

What about, though, couples who separate but never bother to go through the cost and aggravation of obtaining legal certification? Are two people who are married but living separate lives in New York City and San Francisco to be counted in the divorce column?

Also, like crime statistics, the divorce rate depends on who’s doing the counting. Some states, I understand, don’t even keep divorce statistics.

Another oddity. I heard about a couple recently that had just re-married for the third time. If my public education “ciphering” holds out, that accounts for three divorces in one marriage, or is it one, or none? Further, my guess is that they aren’t through yet. What then?

Oh, and here’s a bizarre one. A friend of mine years ago told me, with some anxiety, about finding a set of photographs in her mother’s dresser depicting two girls of varying ages. After much wrangling, her mother told her that her dad, when very young, had married another woman and produced two daughters, whereupon he and his wife discovered that they pretty much despised one another in direct proportion to the extent that they loved their daughters.

Don’t ask. I can’t explain it either.

Anyway, the couple agreed to live together, stay married, and raise their kids until the youngest daughter was 18. They then divorced. After World War Two, the man came back, and married a young woman, the result of which was my friend.

Into what column of the Excel Divorce Table did that marriage fall into for more than 20 years? Incidentally, going through life with an inquiring mind, I’ve found that this strange story is not as isolated as one might imagine.

Next, an over active libido and mass quantities of alcohol, have produce an untold amount of annulments to day-old marriages, as have irate fathers with baseball bats. How are they counted?

Then we have what they called, in Daddy’s day, “shacking up” but in our more gently euphemistic times “living together.” That’s when two people, or one of them, just say they don’t want to bother with legal recognition of their union. If they split up after a few years, is it a divorce or the “greener pasture syndrome?”

Well, there you have it. You might wonder what got me off on this. Is there some personal origin for the inquiry? You have to careful. We once knew an overly-inquisitive lady (read: “nosey bitch”) who attended a small church near our farm. She would have already been on the phone with: “Are ya’ll having trouble?”

No, nothing as salacious as that. Hell, we raised one another, my wife and I. It’s no time to abrogate that investment. Besides, the Galilean was quite clear about forbidding divorces.

Rather, I was just thinking how complicated things are and how badly we want to simplify them into sound-bites. That’s an innate desire among so many of us and it certainly creates some situations. Heck, it even got a twice-divorced man elected president. Thinking is hard.

What about divorces? If we can’t even count them, how could we ever assess a rate, or scientifically predict the probability of the success of an individual marriage?

I think maybe we should just stick with the “He always baited her hook for her” test.

Worth a little extra attention?
Yeah, I think so.