from wikipedia
Ross Perot later said, “After he came home, he walked with a limp, she [Carol McCain] walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain, his current wife] and the rest is history.”[21] Carol’s three children were initially upset with John McCain about the divorce, but later reconciled.[19]
You’re using not just Wikipedia as a cite, but a statement from Ross Perot? Even assuming Perot actually said that, what makes you think he’d have any special insight into the McCains’ marriage?
The above should not be read to imply that John McCain’s current wife is not an android.
I’m having a hard time reconciling that scenario with what **Skald **posted in the OP:
emphases added, of course.
But fine. If he’s emotionally abusive, it’s the same as you’d deal with any spouse. Ask them to stop, explain your needs, see if they’re willing to work on it, and so forth. Divorce is a last resort. But that’s essentially saying the disability had no bearing on the case, which is basically not the hypothetical.
I am coming at this assuming that the disability is causing her to seek divorce. Otherwise, it’s a silly question. The quadriplegia would be extraneous information, like his hair color. I don’t think that’s interesting to talk about.
If either party is unhappy with the arrangement, then I think they are bad reasons. If both people like it, then I see no problem. I often see situations where neither person actually wants to be in the marriage anymore, but they think the forces keeping them from separating are insurmountable, so they stay married with unhappiness all around.
Granting all that, I happen to like Cindy and Mehgan McCain.
I’m not buying the “mutual parting” crap they are now peddling.
But you’re pretty sure it was about Cindy’s disfigurement? Not his being a captive in a small cell in Vietnam for six years? Not growing apart? Not him having a midlife crisis and banging PYTs? 11 years after her car accident, 7 years after he got home from Vietnam, he sued for divorce. I just can’t conclude it was her physical disability that led to it.
What about the vows, often personally written? Of course one can dissolve one’s legal contract (depending on where you live), but if you vow eternal commitment, surely you must intend to honor that or your word means nothing.
I can excuse overconfidence in your own ability to predict the future and making vows you intend to keep as not being a moral failing, but marrying someone and pledging unconditional eternal commitment to them while thinking to yourself about how you can always bail later if you feel like it seems quite crappy.
Actually, the way the OP is worded, you can read a lot into it. If she wants to travel the world, and cannot now, the most obvious reason would be because she can’t leave her husband by himself. She might feel obligated to tend to him instead of enjoying time for herself, or his medical needs might preclude her absence, but another reason would be that he forbids it. “You need to take care of me; you can’t be gallivanting around the world having adventures.” If that’s the case, his quadriplegia is the root cause of his emotional neediness or abuse, and so is highly relevant and would be a significant impediment to his ability to “work on it.”
You yourself agree that Erica needs to “explain her needs.” That implies that Erica might have needs that Geoff is no longer capable of meeting, because of health or depression or medical issues or personality or whatever other factors are in play. At what point and to what level does Erica need to subsume her needs to her wedding vows? That’s the question Erica must answer, and who can answer for her?
Do you have a problem with all divorce? Because if you don’t have a problem with divorce in general, but do if one party becomes disabled, does it end up with essentially the idea that the disabled person is supposed to get a pity marriage?
Carol. Cindy is the new, rich and pretty wife.
Note that if the husband with the disability were not independently wealthy, presumably he might be entitled to support from her.
If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon.
No, I don’t have a problem with all divorce. I probably am more anti-divorce than the average person, but I’m not against all divorce.
But leaving somebody who has changed in a way they can’t control is qualitatively different than both spouses agreeing to end the marriage. And it’s different from leaving somebody who is abusive, or unfaithful.
Unilateral abandonment is pretty much the polar opposite of what marriage vows promise.
And I would shake my head in disbelief at anyone who would agree to be Erica’s second spouse.
But it isn’t as if the only two choices are to be married and half of a team or to be alone. Marriage makes it difficult and expensive to break up the team when either party wants it to dissolve. I don’t want to be on a team with anyone who doesn’t want to be on it and stays because of bureaucratic hassle, money, social standing, etc. The “lifetime commitment” could only come into play if someone wants to break it, like any contract.
If you and your spouse are happy with your arrangement and remain so forever, that’s wonderful and I’m happy for you. I’ve seen too much unexpected awful behavior from people to ever think it would make sense for me, but I wouldn’t assume the same for others.
Well, what do you mean by “fully supportive”?
I might dislike it for various rational or irrational reasons, but I guess I don’t feel, as someone not experiencing the experiences of the person making that choice, that I have any real idea what is driving a decision to divorce (in all but the most extreme and explicit scenarios).
It seems pretty presumptuous for me to pass judgment on a person’s reasons for divorce; I find it pretty difficult to imagine any scenario in which a person ought to stay in a relationship with another person if he/she doesn’t want to, regardless of a decision made sometime in the past.
(I’m all about marriage . . . and if I get married I fully expect that I’ll work 100% to stick with the person I’ve chosen (and who has chosen me) through hardship and change. But, I am very uninterested in uttering the words “till death do us part,” nor do I want to hear them from somebody. Sometimes there are specific promises that we just can’t guarantee, and so those words become meaningless.)
I have been in this position, sort of. In that case the genders were reversed - the husband left his wife because, or at least after, she became paraplegic or nearly so (multiple sclerosis). I am still friends with him (not her, because she died some years back).
It’s not my place to judge. It was also not necessarily all his fault. Some people become difficult to live with after becoming disabled. I saw a little of that from the outside. The SOs of disabled people are not necessarily saints, and neither are disabled people.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
Not to make this about gender, but I suspect there would be a much more negative reaction if a man divorced a crippled wife because of her being crippled.
[/QUOTE]
I have no idea how I would have reacted if the genders were reversed.
Regards,
Shodan
Then she’d be your grandwagon.
Well, yeah, being uphappy is one of the base reasons for divorce.
I think there are a sizable number of people unhappy with a particular situation or detail who are nonetheless happy with their on going relationship.
Of course, if we’d all assume a lot less about other people we all might be happier as well.
Seeing (and thus treating) your spouse and marriage as an albatross around your neck, breeding nothing but resentment is, IMO, a much graver life mistake for both partners. These types of situations arise all of the time IRL and the reactions from people on the outside who just see an able-bodied partner leaving a recently disabled one are usually fairly uniform. They condemn the leaving spouse as a horribly shallow, selfish person who callously is leaving their partner at life’s lowest moment.
But severe spinal cord injury changes everything. It changes things even in ways one would never expect or could ever prepare for. Life radically, traumatically changes in the blink of an eye. For both injured spouse and caring spouse, the injury itself is a devastating tragedy with myriad physical and psychological impacts. However, there is one crucial difference between the injured spouse and the caring spouse after a spinal cord injury (in theory, at least). One of these people can get up and leave this terrible nightmare. Now, knowing, at least a bit, of what such a life entails, I would NEVER judge a person who fled the horrors of a severe spinal cord injury. I think everyone deserves at least a chance at real happiness.
The scenario hits too close to home for me to be very objective about hypothetical Erica. When my husband and I married five years ago, we were both relatively healthy. We had two children together, and shared a commitment to one another and to our family. Two years ago, he was seriously injured in a car wreck, and it remains to be seen whether he is permanently disabled, but it’s now been two years of caretaking, parenting without a heap of help (as much as he’s able, but he has limitations,) and so forth. We can’t get out much, due to financial difficulties and physical ones.
But I married him because I can’t imagine my life without him. A whole notebook full of injuries doesn’t change the person he is. I would probably distance myself from someone who apparently married someone based on who he was at 30, without considering that he will change physically and intellectually, just as she will. Barring some sort of abuse (not “allowing” her to travel without him, expecting her to be a full-time nurse when there are other good options, that sort of thing,) I’d find Erica’s decision to be very self-centered, possibly cruel.
But like I said, I can’t be very objective right now.