As the sun went down on a remote property in NSW, a private investigator peered through the window of a storage shed and spied his target. Exposed in the afternoon light was about $400,000 worth of farm machinery - assets that the home owner swore he had sold before gambling away the profits. Click. The private investigator's client had an interest in those assets. She was the home owner's wife.
In the game of stealth to which the couple's relationship had descended, each was now plotting to maximise their outcome from the property dispute. He was squirrelling away goods, and she was having him shadowed.
Extraordinarily, in family law circles their tactics are viewed as run of the mill. Private investigators, secret tapes, the hacking of social media pages and the manipulation of children - nothing is above litigants in the highly charged atmosphere of divorce and custody proceedings in the Family Court.
"It brings out the worst in people," family lawyer Deborah Searle says. "Very occasionally it brings out the best in people, but not often."
Searle has been in the game for 25 years, which is longer than most lawyers can handle family law before the emotional disrepair of their clients starts to suffocate them. They deal extensively with litigants who are bitter and spent, and only briefly with those that have resolved their differences amicably.
Most of the time when couples employ dirty tactics, it is met with eyes rolling among family lawyers, who have nothing to gain and stand to be penalised if their clients are caught breaking the law. "Mostly they hide money and assets," Searle says. "And they think they're the first to think of it. We all have a laugh about that one."
The women hide it in their sister's account. "The men think they're a lot cleverer than that. They hide it in property in someone else's name and think we'll never find it. It comes out."
One case recalled by family law solicitor Max Meyer involved a wealthy man with an offshore bank account in Fiji who claimed that the account belonged to his mate. The pretence backfired after the case had concluded, when the friend claimed he was entitled to keep the money because it had been sworn to him under oath. The man then had to return to court and confess to perjury so that he could at least retain a portion of the money, even if it had to be shared with his wife.
"Sometimes after separation people will go out and buy a new car, because the minute they buy it, it loses half its value, so their wealth is spent in a more enjoyable way [than spousal maintenance]," Meyer says. "It's petty, of course it is. But we only see the worst examples. People who work things out for themselves, we don't see."
Private investigators are common. Searle has engaged them on her clients' behalf when she is looking for something specific. She arranged the private investigator who knew exactly where to find the farm machinery.
But often clients engage them on a speculative basis. "Drink-driving with the kids in the car, the boyfriend she claims she doesn't have...they're hoping something useful turns up," she says.
Private investigator Guy Oakley has worked on "many, many, many" such cases, and although he often turns up misconduct on the part of his surveillance subject, often the indictment is on his client. He helped one woman retain primary care of her child by confirming that her ex-partner was out taking heroin while the child was staying with him, and another by proving her ex-partner was watching child pornography.
But on another occasion he was able to demonstrate to his client that his wife was not having an affair with the son of a Fijian tribal chief, merely looking for a holiday from their unhappy marriage."I was able to go back and say, 'You're just so paranoid it's driving her out the door'," Oakley said. "A year later their marriage was back together and it was fantastic."
Such upbraiding advice is a luxury the Family Court does not have. The couples that come to judges to play out the miserable remnants of their relationships have exhausted all other options, and seek the clean certainty of the law. They are destined to be disappointed.
"Family law is different to other areas of the law in that it attempts to effectively legislate what are really personal relationships, and people really struggle to accept the boundaries that the law imposes," family lawyer Paul Doolan says.
"There's a lot of bad behaviour in personal relationships that just continues when the relationship breaks down. Whilst they're not common, we do see a lot of instances of people hacking email accounts, of opening mail, of recording personal conversations, recording telephone calls, hiring private investigators and of attaching GPS trackers to cars."
The evidence collected under such circumstances is often deemed inadmissable, but even in circumstances where it is accepted it is viewed dimly by judges. Federal magistrate John Coker said in a judgment published in January that a woman's secret recording of her ex-partner disparaging her reflected more poorly upon her. "It would seem, clearly, to be an evidence-gathering exercise and one that, in my view at least ... gives rise to serious concerns as to the behaviours of the party who records such evidence," he said.
The low regard in which judges hold such evidence was most spectacularly illustrated in a case in which the female litigant - dubbed Ms Langmeil by the court - tendered a DVD that she said contained proof "beyond doubt" that her former partner had molested their children. In a jurisdiction bedevilled by the self-destructive impulses of its litigants, Ms Langmeil's application was a classic own goal, which saw the court strip her of the primary care of the children. She had installed secret cameras in the matrimonial home and recorded 100 minutes of footage of herself with the children.
Justice Graham Bell concluded that, as a result of that and other evidence, Ms Langmeil's "unjustified, bizarre and delusional" allegations against the children's father was destroying their relationship with him. "I did not see anything untoward in the conduct of the children save that I thought the mother exhibited a total lack of control and discipline over the children … These DVDs in my opinion have strengthened the case of the father enormously." One of the family consultants engaged for the trial said Ms Langmeil's actions amounted to child abuse.
Since the couple's 2008 split she has tipped the arsenal of weapons available to family litigants at her hapless ex-husband - false accusations of sex abuse, the coaching of child witnesses and secretly taped conversations. The Family Court has delivered 14 judgments in relation to her applications, and she is now required to get permission before she can make another. Earlier this month, the full bench of the Family Court denied her such permission.
Ms Langmeil exemplifies the inability of some family litigants to accept the decision of the court but she is also an extreme demonstration of how children are manipulated to further their parents' own ends. Family lawyers refer to the "Disneyland dad" who has all the money and all the fun with the children at the weekends, while his ex-wife does the weekday drudgery. Aside from the personal kicks, some parents woo the children in this way to enhance their image before the judges. It also improves their chances of being awarded 'shared care', which means at least 128 nights with the children. From that point on, the number of nights that the children spend with that parent reduces the amount of child support that they have to pay and may strengthen their hand in making a claim on the family home.
"The percentage of time spent caring for the kids will also impact a property settlement, so a cynical approach would maximise the percentage of time in the orders sought to get the advantage and suddenly losing interest in having the kids thereafter," Searle says. "The child support would be altered to reflect the reality but the property orders have already been made and would not change."
Other parents try to disrupt their children's relationship with their former partner to achieve primary care responsibility. Meyer has been involved in cases in which the mother shadows the father's family excursions, sitting two rows behind them at the football for example. In one case, the mother rang her daughter and asked if she could come along to a dinner her ex-husband had organised with the children and his new partner, placing the child in the awkward position of having to turn her down.
"If they behave so badly that the children are alienated from the father, the court is faced with a terrible dilemma," Meyer says. "Sometimes the only thing the judge can do is say, 'Well the damage is done. I can't send this child to their father because they've been so poisoned by their mother. They're not going to see him at all.' That's when your personal morality is outraged but the interests of the child are the primary consideration."
So what of the best of human nature, which Searle also said could be witnessed on rare days at the Family Court? She recently acted for a man who was determined for his wife to sell their eastern suburbs house, where she lived with their children, including one who was disabled. Searle's client was adversarial as he stepped into the witness box, but as he parried the cross-examination he became contemplative. Finally he said: "You know what? She deserves that house."
How To Have A Longer Marriage Than Kim Kardashian.
Two decades ago, a team of researchers led by psychologist John Gottman set out to determine one thing:
Why do couples get divorced?
Gottman decided to answer this question by trying something very simple: Recording married couples talking for 15 minutes about a recent conflict that they were having in their relationship, and then carefully scrutinizing these recordings to see how happy and unhappy couples behaved differently. After all, every couple has problems; the simple act of fighting can’t possibly be the only thing that drives a couple to divorce. There must be something in particular about the nature of the fights themselves that distinguishes happy from unhappy couples. After gathering these recordings from about 80 married couples throughout the Midwest, Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson underwent the grueling task of coding these videos. This means that they made a note of every single time that certain things happened in the interaction. Was one partner angry? Was the other one getting defensive? How much did they use humor in their interaction? Did they show any affection? How about the nasty silent treatment – did that ever rear its cold, ugly head?
After keeping track of these couples and noting which ones ended up getting divorced over the course of the next 14 years, Gottman and Levenson eventually realized something incredibly important: They didn’t actually need to note down all that much. In fact, there were just four behaviors that could be used to predict which couples would still be married 14 years later — with 93% accuracy.
Yes; in case the enormity of what I just said didn’t sink in quite yet, solely based on how often you notice four behaviors occurring in a single, 15-minute conversation, you can predict with 93% accuracy whether or not a couple will still be married 14 years from now.
Now I’m guessing you probably want to know what these four behaviors — or, as Gottman and Levenson call them, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — actually are. These four toxic behaviors are called contempt, criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness.
And, funny enough, to understand what each of these behaviors looks like in action, one needs to look no further than America’s favorite briefly-unhappily-married couple: Socialite Kim Kardashian and “basketball player” Kris Humphries.
Contempt
Couples who eventually divorce express over twice as much contempt during disagreements as those who stay together for the long haul. In fact, Gottman himself believes that of the four “horsemen,” contempt is the most significant one.
What does contempt look like? It’s more than mere anger; all couples become upset or angry with each other at times, and this certainly does not mean that they will all divorce. Contempt in particular is a potent mix of anger and disgust. Expressing contempt involves speaking to your husband like he is “beneath” you, or mocking your wife in a cold, sarcastic way.
The clip below, from Keeping Up With The Kardashians, certainly elicited a lot of laughs when it aired. And many (including myself) thought it was kind of funny that Kris was clearly giving Kim a “reality check” about her likely-fleeting fame. Yet when considering their relationship quality, his response is completely toxic. It’s clear in what Kris says to Kim that he didn’t respect her or her priorities. It would be possible for these two to fight about where they should live without expressing contempt. Yet by telling her to her face that her career is essentially worthless – whether or not that is actually the case – he’s expressing contempt towards her. No good for their ill-fated marriage.
Criticism
The second horseman is criticism, which might immediately worry anyone who’s ever complained about a partner forgetting to empty the dishwasher. However, the toxicity of criticism does not emerge in a disagreement where the partners are simply voicing any minor (or major) concerns that they might have. Criticism specifically involves turning your complaints into some sort of “defect” about your partner’s personality. Rather than voicing constructive complaints about a behavior, situation, or incident, criticism specifically involves negative trait (not state) attributions.
In other words: A complaint focuses on the behavior. A criticism attacks the person.
We can see this in the following TV clip where Kim rants about her pet peeves. The very first one that she mentions is Kris’s habit of brushing his teeth so vigorously that he gets toothpaste on the mirror (seriously, people — you can’t make up these scintillating conversations). But note how she says it. She doesn’t say that it bothers her when he does this. She specifically notes that she hates the kind of people who brush their teeth so vigorously they get toothpaste all over the mirror. She has managed to take something fairly minor and, rather than phrasing it as a complaint (“It really bothers me when you do this. Could you try to brush over the sink, or at least wipe off the mirror when you’re done?”), she has turned it into a weird, dental-centric criticism of his character (“You’re the kind of person who messes up the mirrors when you brush your teeth!”) Over time, these trait- (or personality-)based attributions can build up and lead to resentment or a lack of respect for one’s partner, which will quickly breed that earlier sense of contempt.
Defensiveness
This strategy can best be summed up by one, simple line: “It’s not me. It’s you.”
Do you often “play the victim” in your fights, maybe by making it seem like everything that happens is your partner’s fault? Do you regularly deny responsibility for any role that you might play in a conflict? Do you find yourself trying to “prove” during a fight that your partner is “more wrong” than you are?
If so, you might be guilty of defensiveness.
It’s only natural to believe in a disagreement that we are right and our partners are wrong. After all – if we didn’t think that we were right, we probably wouldn’t be fighting! But the important thing about defensiveness is that it involves a tendency to consistently blame things on one’s partner, paint oneself as the “martyr” or “victim” who does nothing wrong, and make it seem like the partner is responsible for anything that goes wrong in the relationship.
Below, we can see Kim flip her switch to Defensiveness Mode the very second that something goes wrong in an interaction with Kris. She is perfectly happy to be playing around with Kris by the water, but as soon as something goes wrong (she loses an incredibly expensive earring in the ocean), the entire incident immediately becomes his fault. She accepts no blame for any part she might have played in the disagreement, like also horsing around…or even simply wearing earrings that expensive around the ocean. Instead, she becomes the “victim,” and Kris becomes the villain. Unfortunately, no one likes being the villain all of the time — which is why defensiveness can suck the life out of your relationship.
Stonewalling
Stonewalling is when, during a conflict, one (or both) partners will completely tune out from the discussion — maybe by texting, turning on the TV, or simply not responding to a partner’s attempts at conversation. Stonewalling is usually accompanied by increased physiological responses like an accelerated heart rate, higher blood pressure, and sweating. This indicates that it might be a response to physiological overarousal; after dealing with too much physiological stress, someone’s response to a conflict may simply be to “shut down” and block out the argument.
Stonewalling is toxic because it shuts down productive conversation. Rather than hashing out any differences in a mature way, someone who stonewalls just succeeds in raking over the underlying issues, not really resolving anything, and also making one’s partner feel like he/she is not being taken seriously or heard.
Below, we can see Kris engaging in some very clear stonewalling. Kim has told him that she does not plan on changing her last name, and this clearly bothers him. However, rather than talking this out and coming to some sort of compromise or reasoned conclusion, Kris completely shuts her out. He turns to his phone while she’s trying to speak to him, doesn’t really listen to (or process) what she is saying, and disengages from the conversation. As mentioned above, this creates a twofold problem — not only does it not solve the true, underlying problem, but it makes Kim feel devalued.
What To Do?
Now that Kim and Kris have conveniently demonstrated the four worst things that you can possibly do in a relationship, how are you supposed to combat them?
Gottman and Levenson suggest that each of the four horsemen actually has a healthy counterpart.
Rather than phrasing a complaints as a criticism of your partner’s personality or traits, try to emphasize state attributions. Instead of complaining about your partner’s personality, raise complaints or problems about the situation or the behavior.
Instead of “playing the victim” and getting defensive, accept responsibility for your role in a conflict. This doesn’t mean shouldering all of the blame; rather, it means recognizing and acknowledging anything that you might have done, or any way in which you are not blameless.
Build a “culture of appreciation,” so both partners see each other with respect and appreciation instead of contempt, resentment, and disgust. Emphasize the importance of respecting each other and seeing each others’ interests, hobbies, and passions as worthwhile.
If you are someone who frequently ends up stonewalling, or disengaging from potential conflict, figure out if this is because the fight is too overstimulating. If so, you can engage in something called “physiological self-soothing,” which basically just means taking deep breaths and trying to mindfully relax. By focusing on the breath and calming down, it can become easier to have a difficult conversation without becoming so emotionally overaroused that disengagement seems like the only way to cope.
It’s also important to note that if you’ve noticed any of the Four Horsemen in how you or your romantic partner tend to behave, this should not be interpreted as a “death knell” for your relationship. Although these studies do not establish the direction of any presumed causality, researchers in the field believe that the truly important contribution of this work is not the ability to identify doomed relationships and “predict divorce” as a cute party trick. The important note is that these behaviors themselves are presumed to be the cause of marital dissatisfaction, not the other way around. Just as we learned that it’s important to attribute your partner’s mistakes to situational (rather than dispositional) factors to avoid engaging in too much criticism, we can think about applying this state vs. trait idea to our attributions about the overall relationship as well. If you tend to be defensive and your partner tends to stonewall, it is much more productive (and optimistic!) to focus instead on addressing the individual behaviors themselves that are causing problems, rather than assuming that this indicates that your relationship is destined to fail. Based on what Gottman and his colleagues have argued, being aware of these four behaviors and trying to actively combat them is not a futile task — it should actually greatly increase your odds of staying happily committed.
If nothing else, at least Kim’s 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries did provide the world with one valuable thing:
A play-by-play demonstration of exactly what not to do in your own romantic relationships.
Silver Splitters
I have a close childhood friend whose parents I have always liked and respected and who for the sake of this article I shall call Mr and Mrs Smith. Last year Mr Smith retired and promptly told Mrs Smith that he would be filing for divorce. It was sad news but I assured my friend that no one who makes biscuits as delicious as her mother does could be unreasonable, so the whole process was likely to be painless.
I was wrong. Over the past 12 months both parties have shown they are capable of a level of psychological warfare that would be impressive if it were not so cruel. While the legal wrangling drags on, neither has been able to move out of the family home, so they pace the rooms like angry bears, developing new and more extreme methods of annoying each other. The latest flashpoint was etiquette-related: Mr S had installed a flagpole at his end of the house and had taken to hoisting a Union Jack when he was “entertaining”.
My friend and her fiancé play the role of United Nations peace envoys, patiently picking their way through the detritus of the Smith marriage in the hope that in the not too distant future they can all stand in a wedding venue without launching missiles at one another. What stuns me is that the young couple still want to get married; with a backdrop like this I would be tempted to put the ring on eBay.
The nation is engulfed in a wave of late-life marital meltdowns and it’s getting bigger. Official statistics released last week show that while the divorce rate is dropping across all other demographics, it is soaring in the over-60s and has now reached a 40-year high.
These “silver splitters” have had countless column inches dedicated to them — in which they are most often depicted as a herd of frisky pensioners who have swapped aprons and gardening shears for lucky pulling pants, setting off in search of adventure (ahem) without a backward glance.
What we don’t dwell on is the effect that late-life divorces are having on the children. It’s easy to think that because they’re grown up it makes no difference. But as the casualties pile up, I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that silver splitters are having a dramatic effect on their offspring; because when people divorce in their sixties their children are often thrust into the front line of the split.
Unlike with the younger children (who are usually shielded from the worst of the fallout), parents often turn adult children into confidants, companions, therapists and mediators when the marriage disintegrates.
The popular illusion that silver splitters enjoy a sun-filled life of sex and sangria is an unrealistic one: when a marriage breaks up after 30 years there is bound to be some soul-searching and even finger-pointing over what went wrong. Unfortunately, a grown-up child can appear to be the perfect sounding board.
In most cases this is about as much fun as it sounds. I’ve lost count of the number of friends I’ve seen getting sucked into a vortex of pettiness; accused of disloyalty for paying an unscheduled visit to the other spouse, fielding booze-fuelled late-night telephone calls from a parent who wants to ponder the meaning of life and even a mother who was hellbent on discussing the sexual failings of her former partner — that is, my friend’s father.
Talk about too much information: no amount of wine, my friend told me sadly, would block this out.
Despite the oversharing, they answer the phone anyway. Ultimately, children and parents want more or less the same things for one another: safety, security and happiness. The thought of a parent struggling, lonely or distraught is just as likely to keep the child awake at night as vice versa.
The troubles of this group, dubbed Acods (adult children of divorce), is spawning a host of internet forums and support networks. On these the Acods talk openly about the gory details, particularly which parent cheated, how often and with whom — they know, of course, because they’ve had to listen to it all.
They discuss the late-night phone calls from tearful parents who are terrified they will end up alone, and ask how they will cope with this pressure in the long term just as they themselves are becoming encumbered with mortgages and children.
It doesn’t end with the decree nisi, either. Once the papers are signed the Acods are left supporting two parents as they try to negotiate single life in their fifties and sixties.
Today’s romantic landscape could not be more different from that of the 1970s (for a start, there’s less hair), so this often requires a long spell with training wheels during which parents need to be motivated, guided through the maze of dating websites and given a crash course in flirting (grinning like a loon won’t do it). On the plus side, it earns you the right to express disapproval when they turn up with someone you don’t like the look of.
This anxiety may never go away. Relate, the relationship counselling organisation, has recently produced data to show that — fuelled in part by the rising divorce rate — people born in the postwar bubble of 1946-64 will be the first generation for whom living alone in old age may be the norm. The prospect of caring for two lonely, single parents is even more daunting than caring for two cohabiting ones.
You might expect this would result in a younger generation loaded with commitment issues, especially as these divorce dramas come at an age when they are often settling down or starting a family of their own. Except this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Paula Hall, a counsellor at Relate and the author of How to Have a Healthy Divorce, says that while a silver divorce can lead to grown-up children rejecting the idea of long-term relationships, in at least half of the cases she has dealt with it has had the opposite effect and made the adult child more determined to create a stable partnership.
Certainly the feedback from friends is not that their parents’ divorces have put them off commitment, but they have used the experience to teach them what not to do.
As one said: “My parents’ divorce has given me a lot of tips for how not to behave — but most of all it’s showed me that if you want the marriage to last all the way through to the end, and not just three-quarters of the way there, you can’t take any of it for granted.”
Consequences
I’m looking at a survey — commissioned by a diet site, naturally — that shows what we all already know, namely that happily ensconced couples fatten up like those poor foie gras geese. And that’s nice. It’s cosy. Also, true love should know no impediment. It should be grand and magnificent and all-conquering.
Women’s bodies — men’s, too, for that matter — should be theirs to do with as they please, even if it pleases them to eat all the cakes and end up weighing 20 stone and wheeze when they walk. We should all be high-minded enough not to care if the object of our affection turns into a massive slob. So what? They’re still the person we fell in love with. Right? Who’s that shallow and misanthropic?
Well, plenty of people, actually. It’s to do with love versus sexual desire, where you love the person to bits, and wouldn’t leave them in a million years (probably), but you don’t fancy them any more.
It’s very hard to force yourself to fancy someone. And now you’re on a business trip, and it’s been months — years, in some cases — since you last had sex with your husband or wife, and oh, look, who’s this vision hurling themselves at you?
True love should know no impediment. It should be grand and magnificent and all-conquering And you’ve had a good day, and a couple of drinks and . . . well, where’s the harm, given that nobody’s going to find out? Now you feel alive with possibilities, plus there’s the thrill of risk . . . Afterwards, depending on what kind of person you are, you’re either filled with remorse or cheery and energised.
It doesn’t matter: I absolutely guarantee that, having done it once, you’ll do it again. If you’re caught, you’ll say it didn’t mean anything (which it didn’t), that it was just sex (which it was). The one thing you won’t say is: “I love you but I really don’t fancy you any more. Like, at all.”
It’s a slippery path, because what you end up with is the notion that people — and by “people” I mean largely “women” — have a “duty” to not “let themselves go”.
This is a terrible thought, the thought that fuels the shaming of anyone in the public eye who isn’t physically perfect — which is to say sexually desirable — 24 hours a day. It’s how you end up with magazine articles about so-and-so “failing” to lose baby weight, and with paparazzi shots of some poor woman looking a bit tubby in a bikini, complete with humiliating caption. It’s awful.
It also occasionally happens to men — last week Leonardo DiCaprio was photographed on holiday, wearing swimming trunks and exhaling. The implication is that it’s a wonder nobody’s mistaken him for a whale and harpooned him forthwith. Actually, he’s just a 38-year-old man breathing out.
Now a survey has found out — “found out” is a bit strong, given that everybody knows this is true — that going to the gym and watching what we eat goes out of the window about a year into a relationship. You keep yourself as attractive as you can before hooking a partner, then you get cosy, maybe pop out a couple of children, and before we know it we’re talking jogging bottoms, takeaways on the sofa and reinforced flooring.
Does this matter? I think it does, because it’s often the, er, elephant in the room. Obviously, people in relationships don’t expect miracles: nobody — apart from the readers of the Daily Mail’s Sidebar of Shame and of the magazines mentioned — minds if their wife or partner doesn’t emerge from childbirth with the body she had before she got pregnant.
Many women don’t mind either — see the Duchess of Cambridge in a dress that accentuated her post-partum bump when she left hospital last month. You tend to be busy with other stuff, you’ve just had a baby. And if a man gets a bit of a gut over the years — well, whatever. As long as he doesn’t start looking pregnant. Well, no more than three months. Okay, six. Nine. And then one morning, he looks 14 months gone. Who cares? Well, you do.
I know marriages that have broken up over this — well, over the repercussions of one incident — and it annoys me because it’s fixable. A wise friend of mine once said “nobody over 40 can get away with not exercising”, and it’s true. Equally, nobody over 40 — both genders — can get away with zero grooming (men: no, it doesn’t make you “gay”. It makes you a person who doesn’t have hair sprouting out of their ears).
This isn’t to say that everyone should be thin, or look like a fashion-plate: most people can’t manage either, and being comfortable in your body, whatever size you are, is the ideal. Plus, given that most couples’ preferred activities, according to the same survey, are watching television and eating, nobody’s calling for the honed bodies of Olympic athletes.
But I think it probably does mean that if you become unrecognisable — if you show people old photographs and they say “Who’s that?” — it might be time to do something about it. Of course it’s true that people’s bodies are their own business — just as it’s true that other people are free to take their custom elsewhere.
Blame It On Buddha
I t’s not you, it’s me. The ubiquitous break-up line has appeared in more than 30 films, in TV shows, comics, books, video games and countless times on Sex in the City. Of course, as Joey said in an episode of Friends, the deliverer is lying: “‘It’s not you’ means it is you.”
But there’s a new cliché in town. Though the person delivering it is not usually lying, because this time it really isn’t about you.
‘It’s not you, it’s Buddhism’: the line was reportedly delivered by Russel Brand to then-wife, Katy Perry. It was also proffered last year to a Wellington woman I know by her then-husband. Astounded, there was little she could say. “I felt like he was telling me, ‘I’ve advanced and you haven’t,’” she said. “My friends found it very peculiar; isn’t Buddhism meant to make you accepting and open?”
Clearly not. But enter into debate, and the dumper can pull out sagacious lines from Gautama Buddha, such as, “You only lose what you cling onto.” Getting angry and shouting just makes things worse. As Buddha also said, “You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
And begging for forgiveness won’t work; Buddha (surprise) had an opinion on that, too: “To understand everything is to forgive everything.”
Whatever you do, never ask the fatal question, “Do you still love me?” as Buddha had a nebulous reply for this also: “He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes,” giving your soon-to-be ex the best excuse in the world to deny love, while simultaneously presenting as Zen.
And never try to allot blame, or you will be toast. According to Buddha, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought,” rudely suggesting you thought your way into the break-up all by yourself, which sadly loops straight back to anger. Which, you may recall, you will be punished by.
There is no way around this line, which makes it the best break-up line in the universe. What they’re really saying is that it’s not them, it’s the fact that you aren’t striving for nirvana. And if you think bad thoughts about this, it will, according to Buddha, lead to some kind of very bad future.
According to a Huffington Post survey last year, ‘You can’t afford me’ is one of the shallowest break-up lines around, closely followed by, ‘I don’t like your arm hair’ – making ‘It’s not you, it’s Buddhism’ appear infuriatingly deep in comparison. God, you can’t win. Not that blasphemy will get you anywhere, because there is no blasphemy where a god is not concerned.
No, if somebody tells you the greatest generosity in life is non-attachment and they are off to seek higher awareness rather than waste time in a relationship with you, there is only one retort: ‘It’s not you, or Buddhism. It’s me, because I’m no longer enlightened by you.’
Italy
Italy’s elderly are defying their reputation as defenders of traditional family values as they rush to take advantage of a new law granting quick divorces.
The law, passed in May, cuts the time that separated couples must wait before being granted a divorce from three years to six months if the divorce is consensual, and to one year if contested.
It has caused a stampede by ageing Italians to the divorce courts, with about 25,000 over-65s expected to request a divorce this year — 25 per cent of the total number of divorces, up from just 5 per cent of total requests 20 years ago. “The elderly have long thought ‘Why splash out on divorce lawyers if you might be dead in three years?’ ” Gian Ettore Gassani, the president of the Italian Association of Matrimonial Lawyers, said. “They want a new life and so are going like Usain Bolt after quick divorces.”
The strong Italian family unit, cemented by Catholic values, produced a nation of careful savers and homeowners who loved to spoil children. However, in recent years, birth rates have plummeted while marriages have slipped from 425,000 in 1972 to 200,000 in 2013, Mr Gassani said. That left the country’s grandparents as a last bastion of married stability in many families — until now.
“Drugs boosting libido have encouraged older men to think they can start a new life with a younger woman,” Mr Gassani added. “Today’s grandfather is tanned, goes to the gym and wears a leather jacket, compared to the old grandpa who went to church, tended his garden, played cards, picked up grandchildren and watched TV. Women are redoing their breasts at 70. The new Peter Pans in Italy are 70 years old.”
The reputation of Italian grandfathers has been dented abroad, in the eyes of some, by the antics of Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister. He was divorced by Veronica Lario after 25 years of marriage following a series of revelations about his alleged cavorting with younger women. Ms Lario said she “could not stay with a man who associates with minors”.
It was no coincidence that 3,000 marriages a year in Italy were between ageing men and their cleaning ladies, often migrants from eastern Europe, Mr Gassani said.
The trend for divorces among pensioners reflects an all-round boom for divorces thanks to the new law. MrGassani predicted that Italy would have 100,000 divorce requests this year, double the previous average number.
“The three-year waiting period was an Italian compromise following the legalisation of divorce in 1970,” he said. “Ninety-eight per cent of couples did not change their mind.”
Sergio Scicchitano, a Rome-based divorce lawyer, said the three-year wait had often turned into six or seven years. “If it was not consensual, court proceedings often ran to three trials, which took years,” he said. This autumn would bring a boom in requests, Mr Gassani said. “After the law passed in May, many looked at the cost of hiring a divorce lawyer and decided to spend their money on going to the beach first. We now expect a lot of requests in October.”
The elderly, he said, would be among the first in line.
“We used to get them in the office once a year, now we see them every day. The law has given them the keys to their freedom.”
American Over-50's
America is in the throes of a grey divorce revolution as married couples over the age of 50 split up in unprecedented numbers.
American divorce rates remain the highest in the world, but have fallen significantly since their peak in 1979. There is, however, one group whose attitudes to matrimony have bucked the trend. Divorce rates among the over-fifties have doubled since 1990, research by the National Centre for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio shows. For those over 65, the rate has tripled. In 2010 one in four Americans who divorced was 50 or older. In 1990 it was fewer than one in ten.
Theories abound as to why. Some experts suggest that women have come to expect more from life than a merely “not awful” marriage — and that they now have the wherewithal to act. Other causes cited include a generation that is inured to the stigma of divorce, and the tendency of retired men to hang around the house all day.
Most people who divorce after the age of 50 have already been through one marriage break-up, Susan Brown, of Bowling Green State University, said. Second marriages tend to be shorter than first marriages — people feel less invested in them and the probability of a mis-match between spouses is relatively high. “When people get remarried they find that the marriage market pool has shrunk,” Professor Brown said. “They marry people less like themselves.”
Second marriages must also often bear the strain of managing stepfamilies, as well as related conflicts over wills and healthcare decisions — challenges that many fail to overcome, according to Professor Brown.
Advances in medicine and lifespans have also been cited. “Let’s say you’re 50 or 60. You could go 30 more years,” Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle, told The New York Times. “A lot of marriages are not horrible, but they’re no longer satisfying or loving. You say, ‘Do I really want 30 more years of this?’”
Women, research suggests, are more precise barometers of the ups and downs of a marriage — and now they feel more able to act. Such was the experience of Max Smith, a Washington DC lawyer, who divorced his wife when they were both 62. “I perhaps would have continued along in what was not an ideal situation,” he said. “It was [my ex-wife] who had the balls to say ‘this isn’t good enough’.”
The divorce rate for couples under 24 dropped by a third from 1990 to 2010.