A friend of mine is dating a man in a very bad situation. He's divorced and has two kids with his ex-wife who has full custody of their children and keeps suing him for more and more child support. The net amount he has to pay every year in child support, court costs and legal fees, hovers around $80,000. And it can get even worse any day. His ex-wife is not greedy (she's already remarried to a filthy rich guy). She's much worse than greedy; she's taking pleasure in his suffering. She once told my friend, "By the time I'm through with him, he'll beg for mercy."
You have no idea how many times I've heard people react to stories like this with a self-assuringly judgmental remark to the effect of "Why would you ever marry someone like that?" To all of you who ever said this about someone, here's something you might want to consider. Your wife may be someone like that. Your husband may be someone like that. You may be someone like that. Do you think people are stupid? No one ever marries anyone like that. It's just that one day some people have the bad luck to discover that their spouse isn't really the person they thought they were. Nicole Brown did not marry "the kind of guy who beats his wife, threatens to kill her, stalks her in order to consciously instill the sense of imminent doom in her, and then eventually does kill her." As one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite movies goes,
You have no idea how many times I've heard people react to stories like this with a self-assuringly judgmental remark to the effect of "Why would you ever marry someone like that?" To all of you who ever said this about someone, here's something you might want to consider. Your wife may be someone like that. Your husband may be someone like that. You may be someone like that. Do you think people are stupid? No one ever marries anyone like that. It's just that one day some people have the bad luck to discover that their spouse isn't really the person they thought they were. Nicole Brown did not marry "the kind of guy who beats his wife, threatens to kill her, stalks her in order to consciously instill the sense of imminent doom in her, and then eventually does kill her." As one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite movies goes,
Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.
Ah, so what's the threshold for marrying? And exactly how can a potential bride or groom know whether they've gone far enough?
ReplyDeleteThere's no threshold. There's no way to really know.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good case for legal protection prior to entanglement!
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but it isn't a silver bullet solution. It's one of those unfortunate facts of life you cannot possibly insure yourself against. For one thing, this sort of risk is present in some non-marital and non-sexual contexts as well. For another, legal protection wouldn't have helped Nicole Brown much.
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