'I Like My Wife, I Just Can't Live With Her'

Not me.

That's John Frost, at NYT (FWIW), "The Un-Divorced":

... at 58, he sees no reason to divorce. Their children have grown and left home. He asked himself: Why bring in a bunch of lawyers? Why create rancor when there’s nowhere to go but down?

“To tie a bow around it would only make it uglier,” Mr. Frost said. “When people ask about my relationship status, I usually just say: ‘It’s complicated. I like my wife, I just can’t live with her.’ ”

And check this out:

One woman, a 39-year-old mother of two from Brooklyn, who like many interviewed for this article wished to remain anonymous, has stayed separated for nearly two years at the suggestion of five lawyers.

“There’s no advantage to getting divorced,” she said. Both she and her husband are in new relationships. Most people assume they’ve officially split. But given the health insurance issue and the prospect of legal fees, she said, “I feel like we could just drift on like this for years.”

Not being divorced is also an excuse not to remarry.

“In my day, we’d refer to a man as a bon vivant, a gadabout who doesn’t want to worry about marrying anyone else because he’s already married,” said Sheila Riesel, a New York divorce lawyer for more than three decades.

In the end, some people just don’t want to divorce. Perhaps one spouse desires it and the other drags his or her feet. Sometimes, people are just confused; separation can be a wake-up call.

In other cases, initiating divorce ultimately serves that purpose. Last year, a 67-year-old professor in New York filed for divorce from the man she married in 1969 and separated from in 1988 after she had an affair with a woman.

“I had images of Vita Sackville-West, but it was very messy and the children suffered a lot,” she recalled. “My husband had been more attached to me than I thought.”

And she considered him a pal; they even took vacations together. “I think I liked that we were still married in some way,” she admitted. “But last year I met someone who minds that I’m still married to someone else.”

And thus, time to divorce. Call it an old-fashioned romance.

Man, that'd be rough if my wife left me for another ... woman?

And how about that "my husband was more attached to me than I thought"? Amanda Marcotte could go a mile with that one, LOL!

Via Memeorandum.