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• Monday, October 29, 2007 09:26 AM

  Thanks for this article, because...

  A woman in my department at work hung up the phone the other day and yelled with excitement. We all prarie dogged up to see what the fuss was and she just said "it's done...finally."

  I don't know her very well, so I thought she was talking about a big project she was working on. But when several other people gathered around her desk and someone brought champagne, I thought "wow, that must've been a really big project." Trying to stay out of the way (some of us have work to do when we're not reading Salon!), I asked my neighbor what the fuss was, and she replied "her divorce is final...isn't that great?"

  And I looked at her, sipping a completely inappropriate-for-the-workplace glass of champagne and thinking "wow. So that's what we do now?"

  I mean, I echo the previous poster's sentiment that it's great that it's easier for people to get out of abusive marriages, and I'm glad the shame of divorce has subsided, but...champagne? It made me think that maybe I'd be in favor of having just a little bit of shame attached to divorce, at least temporarily. Otherwise, it just seems like you're celebrating your life's most significant failure. Not just her failure, mind you, it takes two people to screw up a relationship. But regardless, a divorce is an acknowledgement of some kind of failure, and I think it's kind of gross to celebrate it for it's own sake. Of course, exceptions would be totally understandable if there were abuse issues involved, or outrageously poor treatment of one person by the other, but the sense I get here is that none of these things apply either in my example or those profiled in the article.

  Now, if you were to ask about letting some time pass, and celebrating "being back on the market" or "your new-found freedom" or something like that, I could see it, but hanging up the phone with your lawyer and drinking champagne with your co-workers? Ick.

  And by the way, my discomfort applies equally regardless of gender. A man in the same situation would be just as gross craking open a bottle.

  Just one slightly old-fashioned opinion, I guess.

  —dkmoorhead Read dkmoorhead's other letters
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