Marriage really does seem to be a weak institution. I, for one, would back up my spouse against the world. I thought that's what spouses for for. To have somebody in your corner. I wouldn't want the writer's at Salon backing me up in a difficult situation. They are cut and runners. Or as we used to call people like that...cowards.

Seems to me, when some broad get's knocked through an affair, the people here want the guy to stay around to take up paternal responsibilities for the child fathered by somebody else. Rather inconsistent.

Jon & Kate have a heck of a time dealing with the kids together. How do they think they'd make it alone? It's crazy. They bought into the reality show nonsense and now they have to just suck it up. Take the good (big, new house and more money) with the bad (fame leeches). It's pretty pathetic that a reality show dad with 8 kids and a wife is somehow attractive to a 23 year old but it takes all kinds I guess.

It's complicated. There's a lot of stuff going on - a large segment of mommies don't seem to like Kate all that much. I agree that she's a bit self satisfied and has dealt with the public attention in an almost cynical way, using it to gain lots of material goodies for herself, her husband and lastly the children...and she's not above asking for it directly.

Plus she's inspired others such as "Octomom" to seek their own publicity based on fecundity.

I think part of the attention is backlash, a pointing of fingers, saying "See? Look what happens when you..."

And then there's the matter of the children. Someone has to think of them. Some would say they've been exploited since they day they were born - or maybe before. And yet, don't they still need a mother and a father? If the Gosselins divorce, then Kate is a single mother of 8. Won't that just lead to more embarassing public disclosures and rounds of begging?

That idea, in and of itself, would lead me to vote for them to stay together, if someone asked me what I thought of it. I don't even watch the show and I can't escape the news of Kate's newest drama...

All the public airing of this kind of dirty laundry is just . . . well, most distasteful. Get your own lives, folks. Leave others to theirs.

maybe she was a shitty wife.

More dignified reporting on issues relevant to women's lives, I see.

Your mother must be DAMN proud of you!

The ending of a relatively lasting marriage with eight kids would be a tragedy, regardless of whether it is better/worse/the same level as cheating. The snark here is disheartening.

... in which shallow women all over the nation found themselves torn between Team Jennie and Team Angelina, can there possibly still be anyone, much less a gossip writer, who can wax astonished at how the American public can get themselves emotionally invested in the lives of people they not only don't know, but whose lifestyles make their experience totally alien?

...they quit making their children's everyday lives into entertainment for the masses, and we, in turn, will butt out of their marital difficulties?

Look, I realize their situation is highly unusual and there are unique challenges to raising a set of twins AND a set of sextuplets. I understand that the financial burden is massive. But their eight children are eight individual children. They have the same needs as other children. The only thing truly remarkable about them is that they were born in litters instead of singly.

Raising kids in a house wired with cameras and with a film crew basically making a documentary about them three days a week, every week, cannot be good for these kids psychologically. The twins are definitely old enough to know when the camera is running and feel pressure to "perform" for it, and the sextuplets are getting to that age. The Gosselins shop at Wal-Mart and Target--the kids know that past "seasons" of their show are being offered for sale to the general public on DVD, in addition to being beamed into the living rooms of America. (Imagine growing up knowing that all your parents' embarrassing home movies of you as a kid had been seen by millions of people, and you were largely powerless to stop their further distribution.)

Look at what happened to the Dionne girls in their adulthood--ALL of them said that being made into the human equivalent of zoo animals screwed them up royally.

Looks like it's turning out Kate's the one who's been stepping out on poor Jon -- all this proves is there's no reality in reality TV!

"The sobering implication for American women is that staying together, even if you're a tough-talking, straight-shooting dame, even if the father of your kids is off partying with a 23-year-old, remains the one true path to "happiness."

Happiness for your family? Yes, of course two parents staying together is the true path to happiness. They have 8 freaking kids together. 8 lives that could be devastated by a divorce. If there is any way to repair their relationship and focus on their family then they should do so. This column seems to place the revenge of the wronged spouse ahead of the lives of the children. Stunning.

to question why she doesn't just walk away. I think that many married couples (and I count myself a recent addition to this group) do not have a bright line where cheating = divorce. Divorce itself is a very difficult and painful thing for both parties, and many of us would deal with a lot before we got to that point. Now, I hope that if that has happened, they are working on figuring out why it happened, and trying to come up with a way to improve things (although if part of it is just the stress of 8 kids I'm not sure what the solution is). No need to be knee-jerk about it.