"Lawyer Trades $1,100 Monthly Porsche Bill for $700-Per-Month BMW, But Loses Bid for Alimony Cut."

Oh, the sacrifices!

"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States..."

"... against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

That's the wording of the oath of office taken by members of Congress, used yesterday as Chief Justice John Roberts "presided over a closed-door ceremony in the offices of the soon-to-be House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, to swear in his staff a day before Republicans are scheduled to take control of the chamber."

I'm linking to the NYT, where the first comment is "did he cry?" Boehner, famously, cries easily, and I think the oath actually is the sort of thing that would move him to tears. Read it. Seriously. Does it reach you in a deep place that gives rise to tears? If not, why not?

How many members of Congress take that oath with mental reservation and purpose of evasion and don't even feel a twinge of conscience when they say those words? How many members of Congress take that oath and it's just words — written more than a hundred years ago — and they don't even have a spark of awareness of what they are promising to do, so the purpose of evasion doesn't even flicker across a synapse?

IN THE COMMENTS: The Crack Emcee says:

And, after all that, you're surprised how I talk about marriage?

Strangely, the news that Russ Feingold will teach a course at Marquette Law School got me looking back at a post I wrote in 2005 about a lecture he gave at Wisconsin Law School, and I see that the lecture focused on the congressional oath and I brought up the issue of the marital oath:

I would never have said this out loud, but I couldn't help thinking how interesting it was that Feingold shaped his whole lecture around the sanctity of the oath, when just a few days ago he announced that he was getting a divorce, his second. Was I the only one who thought how strange it was to hear a man piously invoke a passionate fidelity to an oath when he had -- so conspicuously -- gone back on the marriage oath twice?\

But I like Senator Feingold. I do think he's a good man. I don't presume to know what happens to people in their marriages, and I am divorced myself. Nevertheless, he could have discussed his devotion to the Constitution from some perspective other than the fact that he'd sworn an oath. Taking an oath to the Constitution, after all, is not the strongest reason to support it.

HuffPo introduces a divorce section.

Collecting lots of news and opinion about divorce. Is that wrong?

It's something Arianna cooked up with Alessandra and Nora:

One morning, [NYT tv critic Alessandra Stanley] and I headed off on a long walk down the beach, and we ended up talking a lot about our divorces.

Two divorced women went out walking, and what do you think they talked about? Philosophy?

When we got back to Nora [Ephron]'s, we recounted some of our conversation, at which point she told us that she had actually been thinking that HuffPost's next section should be devoted to all things divorce.

Over breakfast, Nora came up with the tag line for the section -- "Marriage comes and goes but divorce is forever" -- and Alessandra offered up what has become our inaugural divorce aphorism (the first in a series): "His happiness is a small price to pay for my freedom!" As Nora says, "far too much attention is paid to aphorisms about falling in love and not nearly enough to those about falling out of love."

So, a divorce section, eh? How long do you think they will be able to stick with it?

Lisa Birnbach says:

Whatever happened to sticking it out? That's what most people did in the 20th century, if they found themselves less than happily married. Preppy couples were discreet, especially if there were children involved.

And blah blah blah endlessly, about your divorce. Or maybe not endlessly. Maybe pack it in when it doesn't seem so amusing anymore.

"[T]he question is not why do men stay for boys, but rather why mothers of daughters are divorcing more than mothers of sons."

Relax, they've figured out a female-favoring reason why couples with daughters are more likely to divorce than couples with sons. The old explanation that fathers prefer boys must give way to the new explanation: With a daughter at home, being good and supportive as daughters tend to be, a woman has less need for a husband. There, now, aren't you so much happier? The universe makes sense. Women, good. Men, bad.

Instead of divorce, an amicable permanent separation.

"Why bring in a bunch of lawyers? Why create rancor when there’s nowhere to go but down?"

Plus, there are all sorts of financial reasons to preserve the marriage — health insurance, pensions, joint tax filing status. If you both understand what you are doing, why isn't this a great solution?

1. One spouse may be more attached to the old relationship than the other and may see this failure to divorce as hope for getting back together. You might need the divorce to express that the relationship is truly over.

2. It makes it hard to establish relationships with new partners, who might feel uneasy or immoral consorting with you. You might need a divorce for the peace of mind and comfort of those outsiders to the marriage.

3. Maybe it's not ethical to collect the financial benefits of marriage if you aren't committed to each other in the traditional way, living together and having an exclusive emotional and sexual relationship. Is it as wrong as 2 individuals marrying solely to create an economic benefit and without any sex or love at all? But how wrong is that?

"Al and Tipper are clearly thinking not in terms of the years behind but the years ahead."

"For them, there is still a whole lot of 'everything' to come. It may not be the fairy tale, but it is a classically American tale, with its themes of hope and promise and new beginnings."

Is that right?
	Yes, if by "a whole lot of 'everything'" you mean decline and death.
	Yes, in a lot of ways, life begins at 60.
	No, with 40 years of your life invested in a marriage, it's fantasy to think you can start over.
	No, 60 is old. Face it, and cling to the one person who's stood with you all these years.
pollcode.com free polls

Should Elin settle for $750 million from Tiger...

... if it includes "a lifetime 'confidentiality clause' that would prevent her from writing a book or doing any interviews about the split"?

Should Elin take the money and shut up?
	Yes. That's so much money!
	Yes. We'll all be better off if that nasty material never sees the light of day.
	Yes. Elin, you will be better off looking for the future and not dwelling on the past.
	No. Tiger must pay for what he did and shouldn't get anything back in exchange.
	No. You need to explore and air this all out for your own good.
	No. I want to read all about it! Come on! Dish it out!
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: LOL.

2 questions about Larry King's 8th divorce.

1. When you're that old — he's 76 — and you have a mate who's more than a quarter of a century younger than you, shouldn't you look at the odds and hang onto her as someone who'll be on the hook to care for you as you decline into extreme old age and death — considering how difficult it will be to enlist someone new when that is the deal?

2. Larry King is only 76?!

What is, at long last, driving Elin Nordegren to divorce Tiger Woods?

Supposedly, her friends are saying the last straw was that Nike ad, the one with him staring blankly while the voice of his dead father gives him a talking-to.

"What this film was about for me, which are the moms that take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from."

Said Sandra Bullock, accepting her Oscar, after fighting alongside her husband Jesse James to win full custody of his 6-year-old daughter, Sunny. There are 2 other James kids — Chandler, 15, and Jesse Jr., 12 — who have had Bullock as a mom. Moms take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from... but what is she supposed to do now that her husband has betrayed her? Stay together for his children? Or are they her children now? She has dropped plans to adopt them. Presumably, James's children will go back to their real mothers, now that James is consorting with that tattooed, Nazi-arm-band-wearing stripper.

Emily Bazelon and Dana Goldstein talk about Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough."

I'm embedding this because I can't embed the diavlog that I did last week with Gottlieb herself. "Marry Him" is the book I was talking about back here, where I responded strongly to someone who said that books based on Atlantic magazine articles aren't worth much more than the original article. (Here's the original "Marry Him!" article.) And I said:

I just paid $25+ for a 300+-page book that was an expansion of an article from The Atlantic. I did that for a Bloggingheads diavlog, and — you'll see when it's up — the author scolded me for skimming. Did that open the door for me to scold her for padding? Readers and writers — we all have our tactics and must guard our own interests. You pad. I skim. Or I take a look in the bookstore and put that thing right back on the pile. Unless I'm scheduled for a diavlog. In which case, I tough it out. Up to a point. Then I just scream. On my blog.

But you won't see when it's up, because it will never be up, because Gottlieb's side of the diavlog disappeared somehow. Technical difficulties, I'm told. All that work of skimming 300 pages and talking for 47 minutes.

The book is written in a breezy, chatty style, but I couldn't get a conversation rolling at all. When I asked questions based on what was in the book, she mostly said read the book, it's in the book, etc. etc. I was trying to get past the actual contents of the book and to understand her motivation for writing it. Did she really want to get married? Would she really settle for Mr. Good Enough? If so, why wasn't she married yet? Was she really giving women good advice?

Gottlieb relied heavily on social science surveys about how married people are happier, but married people are the people who got married. You can't say, then: The people who aren't married would be happier if they got married too. They are the people who couldn't find what they felt they wanted or couldn't find real love in their own hearts or inspire it in others or had a greater skepticism about the value of relationships or who put a lot of stock in personal freedom or any number of other things. It was irrational to extrapolate that marriage would make them happy too. Even assuming those surveys about who's happy are sound (or even say married women are happier than single women).

ADDED: Look, some NYT reporter spent an evening with Lori Gottlieb and got just about nothing interesting out of her. Here, you can see me in real time, trying to get Lori Gottlieb to talk about something less trivial than how tall or short people are. This is late in the conversation, and I am struggling to remain decently gracious:



AND: Let me give you 2 more of my clips. In this one, I'm trying to get at Gottlieb's complaint about feminism (and getting nowhere):



In this clip, I invite Gottlieb to talk about divorce.



Could you tell what the other end of the conversation was like? At first, Gottlieb didn't understand what I was saying. She thought I said that she'd already written something called "Divorce Him." (I wonder if "good listener" is one of the factors we should toss out in our search for Mr. Good Enough.) When she got my question, which was whether she would also advise married women to divorce men who had stopped being good enough, she was clear that the answer was yes. She said "You're not dead" very sarcastically. The idea that marriage is a permanent commitment seemed not to be ping-ponging around anywhere in her head. You stay with that man to the extent that he serves your interests.