The death of love

I was talking to a friend today about prenups, and we both support them. That may be a sad commentary about our belief in permanent relationships, which I know is due to our own parents' divorced status. It leads to distrust of and even disbelief in love, fear of committment, and inability to trust. Which leads to prenups. Because since love is only temporary, you need to protect yourself, because your ex certainly won't.

She doesn't even want to tell her future husband how much she has in her 401K or in the bank. (For me, it's so little it's a nonissue anyway.) And the joint account is just for bills, not for the rest of your money. And that sucks b/c I agree with her. Love isn't anything permanent, and if you don't have a prenup, you are going to be divorced in 10 years and shit out of luck. If you were the one who made the money and bought the house and supported the lifestyle, you might as well kiss it goodbye, because it's half split. Even what you brought to the table before you got married. Any inheritance? Gone. Doesn't matter if you have to sell a house that had been in the family for generations. It's joint property.

At the same time, it really sucks to be getting married and thinking about getting divorced, which is what a prenup does. It demands you pay attention to what would happen in the event of a divoce as you are planning the wedding. Though it takes money out of the occasion. You have no doubt that the person is marrying you for reasons having nothing to do with money. That's somewhat comforting. There may be all sorts of other reasons to marry you, but it ain't money. And you're practically negligent NOT to discuss a prenup as you are getting married. I mean, 50% of marriages end in divorce. OK, so you want to think that yours won't. Join the crowd. What makes you smarter in selection than 50% of the people you know? Actually, I know my taste, I have no doubt the 50% pool I'll be in. In the immortal words of some female singer whose song I heard from 15 seconds on the radio this morning, “You don’t know half of the demons I’ve battled. You can’t save my with your mindless psycho-babble. I’m damaged goods.”

And the worst part of this is, at the same time, I am one of those romantic girls who wants to believe in fairy tales and prince charming and all that silly nonsense. I want to believe in forever, in just knowing that someone is the one, or that there even IS a one out there in the world for everyone, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. What's that quote? "And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in... underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money." ~Erica Jong (OK, I admit it, I didn't remember the entire quote word for word. I had to go to Quote Garden to find it. Quotegarden has everything. Actually, I started with google, and it was one of two that had it.) Gak. I'm pathetic.

Oh, and I mentioned this before, and I'll do it again today. Opposing counsel (the same bitch). I want to point this out to her…as has been said many times, credentials on the wall do NOT make you a decent human being. So your law degree (not even from a top school anyway) doesn't make you better than the guy who pressed the buttons in the elevator. She literally gives trash a bad made. (She also produced NINE boxes of documents, and so far, they are almost all irrelevant.)