my married life

This article in The New York Times talks about how obsessed America seems to be with divorce. Between the Tiger Woods of the world and the multiple incarnations of Eat Pray Love, the topic of divorce is pretty much everywhere, and never before has it fascinated and entertained so many of us.

But on the flip side, real life divorce numbers are down -- way down -- 30-year-low down. So what's the deal? Why are we talking about divorce more and doing it less? Maybe we love reading about celebrity divorce because it serves as a cautionary tale (i.e., if I don't want that to happen to me, I'd better not do what they did), or maybe it's just a vicarious thrill like watching a horror movie. After all, we might enjoy being scared for a few hours, but that doesn't mean we want to live the plot of a scream queen. I mean, do we?

This post on The Nest Boards got me thinking about how far Holly and I have come regarding our home renovation upstate. We've been chipping away at DIY for well over a year now, and we've learned a thing or two. When we started working on the place, we were both obsessed with doing everything perfectly. I can't even tell you how many hours we logged online researching historic plaster ingredients so that we could match and repair the damaged plaster in our hallway.

The great news? The perfectly accurate plaster job I did was flawless. The bad news? The old plaster job wasn't -- and that old section continues to crumble and crack. Now I know. I should have done the quick and dirty method ("laminating" the whole mess with a thin layer of drywall). But I had to learn the hard way. Holly tends to want everything done quick and dirty. But, oh yeah, perfect too. So we struggle. Okay, we squabble. She has yet to find a source for the gray floor stain of her dreams -- and she won't settle for anything less -- but she freaks out periodically over the undone-ness of the place.

At times, it's really brutal but at others, so rewarding. Any DIYers out there that can relate?

Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren are finally divorced. Since I can't put it any better than this snarky article in The Mercury News, here, for your pleasure, is an excerpt: "We are sad that our marriage is over and we wish each other the very best for the future," Woods and Elin Nordegren said in a joint statement released by their lawyers. No, they don't.

Man, that poor girl. And don't try to tell me that the huge pile of money she is undoubtedly getting should make me pity her less. I don't buy it. I mean, can you even imagine her trying to date again? How much work will she have to do in therapy before she'll be able to trust anything a man (or anyone else for that matter) says again? Have you ever had a relationship so bad that it rocked you to your core -- like made you reevaluate everything you'd ever known to be true?

Let's hear it.

Listen, I'm a realist. I've pushed dying friends to create last will and testaments even though they were understandably resistant. "You hope your second cousins won't be battling over your dirty socks and divvying up your snow globe collection," I said. "But the only way to guarantee it is to get it all down on paper." So it might seem weird that I tend to be so anti prenup. I guess the main difference is that we're all going to die whereas a select few of us will actually avoid divorce court.

I just hate the idea of people acting as if divorce is as inevitable as death. In some ways, drafting up a prenuptial agreement signals that exact thing. But here's where I start to backpedal: when we're talking about billionaires. The reason? That much money makes people act caaaraaaazy. Sorry, but it's true. Have you ever seen/read an interview with the Getty children? The divorce of Stephanie Seymour and Peter Brandt is a great example. The duo has already been in court upwards of 12 times, and their complaints against each other are things like him snatching 15 Andy Warhol paintings from their home and her stuffing 17 Picassos into her purse in response. (Okay, I made up the Picassos but whatevs.) In cases like this, where either one or both parties have billions and billions of dollars (and not quite as much sense), I kinda think prenups should be mandatory.

What do you think?

I don't know if any of you guys watch The Millionaire Matchmaker, but Patti Stanger, the matchmaker herself, is always talking about "the nonnegotiables." In fact, Stanger recently ended her long-term relationship and disclosed (via Twitter no less) that it was due to the fact that she wanted children in her life and her fiance did not. Kids, it turns out, fall comfortably under the umbrella of nonnegotiables.

Now, Tres Sugar has posted a list of common nonnegotiables online. To some extent, I get it. One of the reasons Jack and I took so long to get engaged was that he wasn't sure he wanted kids and he knew that I did and wouldn't marry him if he was sure that he didn't. But here's the issue: I think that it's only all right to have two or three of these things max -- religion, children...stuff of that magnitude only. The reality is that to have a successful marriage, almost everything has to be negotiable. Why? Because people change, opinions change, careers change, priorities change -- and staying together requires being really, really flexible.

Recently, I was talking with two girlfriends of mine at a party; both are single, and both are adamant that if any of the 10+ criteria on their nonnegotiable lists are not met by a potential suitor, it would be an immediate deal breaker. I know this sounds horrible, but as I listened to them I thought, "Thank God I don't look at love that way!" Neither of these women has been in a serious relationship in many, many years -- yet they remain adamant. To some, like my friends, compromise just isn't worth it. They'd rather be alone than flex. Me, I'd rather bend.

What about you? What do you consider to be nonnegotiable?