The way marriage is treated in society is appalling. I have zero problem with any set group of grown adults who want to go through a ceremony, be it a big Catholic wedding or throwing rice over one's head and doing the Hokey Pokey, Londo-style, and say "Now, we've changed our titles; we're married." Good for them; hope they're happy. My problem with it comes when it's not just between two people, but the government and other parties have to stick their noses in. Things like being treated differently on your taxes, insurance, hospital visiting rights, etc. are extremely disturbing to me. It's the government giving privileges to people making a romantic decision, which should be as far from the government's priorities as possible. If DalekJim and I did the Hokey Pokey in front of our Body Double Appreciation Society and then we said, "I'm his Shalamooze and he's my Trykalak; treat us differently on our taxes!" people would laugh us out of the building, but... marriage is more of less the same thing; it's just the silly, superstition-based ceremonies and meaningless titles are older and therefore more culturally accepted. Terms like "divorce lawyer" are a complete oxymoron. Two people deciding they don't want to be together anymore shouldn't have anything to do with the "law." If we've reached a state where in order for two married people to break up, they have to go through a lawyer to untangle the web of financial insanity from two households becoming one then becoming two again, then that says to me that we need to seriously reconsider how the government approaches the subject and cut this Gordian knot by just letting two married people handle their lives for themselves and remove this godawful spectator show by telling everyone, government and gawking public alike, to fuck off.
Awesome post, agree with most of it. I do think though that even if marriage wasn't a legally binding contract you'd still get idiots that are obsessed with this tabloid gossip. Sadly, there's a very genuine public appetite for this information. See the success of Celebrity Big Brother and Heat magazine. If somebody is a successful director or actor then they apparently owe it to the public to give up all their privacy and be judged. All these people obsessing over celebrity break-ups would react very differently if one of their friends in real life cheated on their spouse.
Of course they would. The double standard between celebrities and "real life" people is sickening. There's an entire parasitic culture of people who take pictures of famous people doing anything and everything from leaving out the house, walking the dog, getting some ice cream, etc. If these people did the same thing to any regular person doing the identical things, people would be weirded out and disturbed, but think about it; the photographer isn't doing anything differently, the people being photographed aren't doing anything differently. The only thing that's different is the profession of the one being harassed. I think it's because we as a culture still can't get past the divide between fiction and reality. Now, that may sound a little extreme, but moving pictures are only a little over a century old. When Rudolph Valentino died, women committed suicide because they SAW him up on that big screen and felt like they knew him, loved him. We really haven't moved very far past that. People still watch actors and musicians emote and bare their heart out on moving pictures and we feel like we know them. In some ways, it's the worst of both worlds because the close-ups of their face as they cry about their (fictional) mother dying convinces people that they have a personal, special relationship into the life of this person as if it was their friend, but the detached, intangibility aspect of being only on a screen gives them a God-like reverence. This toxic combination leads to people having incredibly unrealistic and insane expectations for people who just, uh, are doing a job and makes us want to know everything they do in their private life and makes us want to hate them when it turns out they're flawed people like the rest of us who make mistakes. For a great song on this phenomenon, see "Turn It on Again" by Genesis on the album, Duke, now available on vinyl and 8-Track.
Really sucks for everyone involved. It's bad enough going through a divorce, I can't imagine having people rushing to post links when it happens.
but you get to have some squint write a book which you sign your name to, and then some suit gives you ten million dollars. Or would you rather flip Burgers at McDonalds?
Property ownership is a matter of the law. When people fight over who owns the property how do you propose it is settled?
Yeah, divorces can get very nasty very fast if both partners are wealthy or if there are young kids involved.
Down here, kids get appointed their own lawyers who tell everyone else to calm the fuck down. Is it like that in the rest of the world? If it isn't, it will be.
In Australia divorce is separate from property and child issues. You put in the application and provided the right amount of time has passed it is always granted, there is no way to stall it with property or children. It cannot be contested.
I am still convinced that this Stewart/Pattinson thing is faked. It has all the hallmarks of something that's drummed up by their publicists to generate talk about all this Twilight crap. And yes I am also convinced of the fakiness of a lot of celebrity "relationships". I mean, isn't it a bit suspicious that whenever we hear of one, it's always BOTH parties who are famous? You never hear of one in which there's one famous partner but they date a plumber or librarian or whatever.
^ Doesn't have to be that. I just view celeb relationships the same way as I do reality TV: These things exist for ratings, so how can they NOT be faked? Think about it.
Because that would be too much like Superman dating Lois Lane. In real life, Superman would get with Wonder Woman. Actors would have more in common with each other and tend to form relationships.
Superman isn't real, well, he's considerably less real than Clark Kent. They rebooted continuity last year at DC Comics, the last 70 years didn't happen, but right now, Superman and Wonder Woman are dating getting to know each other, and she laughed so hard when he told her that he's also sometimes Clark Kent.
Well, that's sort of a chicken-and-egg situation. Naturally, relationships that involve two celebrities get more press than the ones where a celebrity is involved with somebody who is not in the public eye. Such relationships exist; they just don't tend to make the cover of US Weekly. (Quick! When the last time you saw Anthony Hopkins' wife on a magazine cover? Or Julia Robert's husband? Or Christian Bale's wife?) You only hear about the high-profile celebrity hookups because those are the only ones that are newsworthy.
They're rewarded for not trying so hard? That hardly seems fair. Heh. Jennifer Anniston should really think about offering herself up for the bachelorette. She keeps dating celebrities who think that they are her equal and treat her like a regular person. What she needs is a stunned bunny who obeys and marvels.
I think that Julia looks better now than she did then. Of course saying that, the picture in my minds eye is probably 5 years old. (And her niece is less jailbaity every year, who is turning 22 in 2 weeks.) But how on earth do these Bachelor shows keep selling when the prize is always so low rent? They're making a reality show for us have you seen? King of the Nerds. Curtis Armstrong and Robert Carradine rip off Donald Trump. There's this little sad fatgirl who keeps crying to the confessions camera "All I know about is Batman, and that's not enough, they're going to cut me, I know they're going to cut me because they're all so mean."