1. You feel like wearing pants that are not of the “sweat” variety.
2. You’re craving brunch.
3. You’ve watched everything in your Netflix Instant queue.
4. You’ve reached the limit on cats permitted in your apartment and you’re still lonely but you don’t really care for reptiles.
5. You purchased a ‘buy one get one’ Groupon for gelato.
6. You’re in the mood to play an awkward round of miniature golf with someone you hardly know.
7. You started dating before your divorce.
God, brunch is dumb.
As our male fans frequently like to point out, sometimes, women cheat too. Women! Right? So this one’s for you, fellas. This handy flow chart will help you answer the question – Is SHE cheating?
Well, as you may have heard, the Supreme Court struck down DOMA. To that we say, “Great! Now what are we supposed to do with our powers of defense??” Marriage is obviously a lost cause. But we’ve come up with some other things that still need defending.
You’ve probably been so worried about the crumbling institution of marriage that you’ve forgotten all about the Leatherback Sea Turtles and the Western Lowland Gorillas. The moral fabric of society is a lost cause! You might as well save some whales instead.
Remember this thing? There’s still a hole in it.
So tiny. So… DEFENSELESS.
What? You don’t HAVE a castle? Oh boy. Did the gays take it from you?!
This might come as a shock to some of you, but occasionally, you aren’t the one getting divorced. Sometimes, it’s your CHILD that is getting divorced. And you suddenly have feelings about it. Maybe even sad feelings. And it’s pretty common that your child won’t understand your feelings. Maybe your child is actually quite happy to get divorced, and you’re sad about it. Or maybe your child is sad, and you’re happy about it. Either way, we want to help you get on the same page so then you can both focus on planning and paying for that second wedding. So we’ve decided to answer some FAQs. For the parents.
See? She understands.
We weren’t going to blog today, seeing as it’s Flag Day and we know you’re all probably out, attending Flag Day barbeques, and watching Flag Day parades, and checking out those big Flag Day mattress sales. But then we thought, what better day for a THEME blog?
You hear a lot about “red flags” in relationships. They are, disappointingly, not real flags, but rather less tangible things that should serve as warning signs that you are in a bad relationship. Unfortunately, these flags are almost always completely invisible until after you are already divorced.
But love is blind. And sometimes, “not love” is also blind. Maybe a better way to say it is, “sometimes we are stupid.”
So in honor of Flag Day, we’ve compiled a cheeky little list of 5 Wedding Day Red Flags. (Somewhat based on actual events.)
An actual flag is much easier to see than the fact that you and your spouse are horribly incompatible.
By now, we’ve all heard that Facebook pretty much causes everyone to get divorced. Or something like that. And it’s not hard to believe, when you think about it. In the olden days, if you wanted to catch your spouse cheating, you had to do a lot of legwork. Those were the days of sitting in the dark in a parked car, waiting for your husband to emerge from a local motel with lipstick on his collar and an off-kilter necktie. You had to look for real clues. Break into a briefcase or two. Or wait for them to really slip up.
Nowadays, you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your almost broken home! Just wait for your spouse to fall asleep and then go bananas on their computer! Email, internet history, Facebook, Amazon orders, whatever! The thing is, you don’t even have to wait around for them to cheat on you. Facebook spying really lets you nip it in the bud. Oh, you “poked” your high school girlfriend? I’M CALLING A LAWYER.
Anyway, the point is, Facebook is, indeed, a slippery slope for marriages on the rocks. But did you know that it’s not the only website that is ruining our lives? We did some of our own research here at EGD and found a few other websites commonly cited in divorce proceedings.
Thanks a lot, home wrecker.
One of the worst things about being newly single is dealing with “wedding season.” (In case you’re not familiar, wedding season is when most people get married, usually falling somewhere around May through August, but also September through December and February through April.) It’s not that getting divorced makes you a horrible bitter person, but when it seems like everyone you know in the world is getting married or engaged, but your life is crumbling all around you, it’s hard to want to celebrate love. It is quite easy to drown your sorrows in a jar of peanut butter, but we’ve been told that we prescribe that home remedy far too often, so we’re going to give you some non-nut-based tips for coping with other people’s happiness.
Tips for how to deal with EVERYONE YOU KNOW IN THE WORLD getting married or engaged when your life is crumbling all around you:
Time to commit this to memory.
We’ve all read “facts” about divorce. Some of these facts try to show you that if you get divorced you will ruin your life and your children’s lives, and probably the lives of innocent bystanders. But sometimes these “fact makers” don’t give you the real reason behind the fact, and that can change everything. So unlike those science-y statistical weirdos, we’re going to get real and drop some truth bombs on you.
FACT: In 2005, some stupid science person released a study showing that children of divorce are more likely to divorce as adults. This study was done ONLY to make you feel TERRIBLE.
GETTING REAL: Think about it. How many people do you know that stay miserably married because of one of the following reasons: 1) societal pressure 2) familial pressure 3) religious-related pressure? We guesstimate that it is somewhere between four and one million people that you know. We bet a lot of people don’t get divorced because their parents and family would disown them if they did, and they would lose their only support system. Instead, they stay in miserable, horrible, destructive marriages, and their kids turn out just GREAT (sarcasm!). Now, imagine instead that your parents ARE divorced and you are in a terrible marriage. You certainly wouldn’t feel any pressure to STAY right? Because what is your MOM going to say? She’s divorced too! Well, since she’s your mom, she’ll still probably say something, but at least you’ll know she’s being horribly hypocritical.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Everything you do in your life is going to somehow ruin your children. Trust us. There exists a study somewhere that says so. So we say, don’t worry about it. Or at least, don’t OVERLY worry about it. No matter what, your child still has a 100% chance of being obese and miserable as an adult. Just like everyone else. Sorry.
We give it five years.
Believe it or not, there are people out there that think they can save your doomed marriage from its inevitable divorce-y end. OK, they don’t ACTUALLY think that, but they think they can convince you of it and/or they want to sell you something. The people trying to sell you something are usually pastors, but not the real kind, the kind that appear on TV and try to sell you books. These TV pastors would be happy to sell you a book entitled something like ” HOW TO SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE FROM THE BRINK OF DIVORCE BY FORCING THE DEVIL OUT OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP AND ACCEPTING GOD’S LOVE” (note: We have no idea if this is a real book. But if it is, we think it’s stupid. To be safe, don’t buy any books that we haven’t written.) Other non-pastor people might write articles about saving your marriage, for seemingly no other reason than to make you feel like a failure. These people aren’t doing it for money, just for the satisfaction of feeling superior to you. Maybe one of these people *believes* she’s saved her own marriage from the brink of divorce, but what she doesn’t know is that the only reason her husband is acting happier now is that he has a secret 25 year old girlfriend. Here’s the real deal, ladies and gentlemen: you can’t save your marriage from the brink of divorce. You CAN’T! If your marriage is already on the brink of divorce, it’s because someone (either you or your spouse) no longer cares. Maybe you or your spouse NEVER cared. Maybe you’ve both been miserable the whole time. Maybe you or your spouse fell in love with someone else. Or one of you just got bored and wants to start over. That’s ok. It happens. But don’t blame yourself. That isn’t going to help ANYONE.
Bathtub caulk: saving marriages since never.
If you Google “I think my spouse is cheating on me” you will get approximately one million different webpages that purport to tell you how you can determine whether or not your spouse is cheating on you. We’re going to be real with you: if you Googled that, he or she probably is. But if you still aren’t sure, we’ve created a flow chart that might help:
