What can we learn from this nasty high-profile divorce?
The Hamms’ divorce makes “The War of the Roses” look like a love fest.
Lessons, anyone?
(1) For the rich and especially the mega-rich: pre-nups are your friend.
(2) If he/she will cheat with you, he/she is likely to cheat on you.
(3) Don’t marry a lawyer.
(4) When love turns to hate, watch out.
There are probably others, but no doubt you can provide them. I predict that some of you will say that one of them might be “Don’t get married.” Others would say (and I’d agree with them wholeheartedly) “Be very careful who you marry” (okay, maybe I’d say “whom,” but you get the idea).
Others might add, “Make divorce a lot harder,” but I’ve already expressed my opinion on that (see this, this, and this, for example) and I don’t think that clock will be turned back.
A further observation: sometimes people marry people who later become incredibly, relentlessly, and creatively vindictive. I’ve seen it happen time and again; luckily, not to me. I don’t pretend to have a representative sample that will stand up to statistical analysis, but in my tiny personal grouping—off the top of my head I count four glaring examples, although I know quite a few lesser ones—the ratio of female to male perpetrators was 3:1. And infidelity by the other spouse was not the issue in any of these particular divorces, so that didn’t account for the virulence of the battle.
Never get involved in a major land war in Asia.
The Hamm tale is not so unusual except for all the money involved.
That Mr. Hamm is one of the major wildcat oil success stories of the last twenty years is quite a story in itself. Having worked in the oil business, I am familiar with the odds against this kind of success. I am also in awe of the way the directional drilling and fracking revolution has paved the way for a new wave of prosperity in the U.S. Mr. Hamm deserves a great deal of credit for pulling this off.
Like you, I have witnessed many divorces that started out amicably and inexplicably turned nasty – sometimes extremely nasty. IMO, the legal profession creates some of this. A couple decides they need a divorce and think they can easily work out their differences. Enter the lawyers, who get paid by the number of hours they spend on the case. Do they have an interest in a quick, amicable settlement? Nope. Often the lawyer for one or the other party convinces their client that he/she is getting screwed in the settlement. Not enough money, joint property, child custody, etc are the usual areas where trouble can be stirred by lawyers intent on “helping” his/her client get a better deal. (While also fattening their own wallets.)
I worked with one poor soul whose divorce began just that way. Three years and many thousands of dollars later he was no closer to a divorce settlement. But his attorney was playing golf with his wife’s attorney on a weekly basis. One would think two golfing buddies could agree to help their clients attain the wished for divorce in no time at all. Apparently not.
1. Air tight pre nups are a good idea. Though even those don’t guarantee a smooth proceeding.
2.If there are children involved, remembering that the children will be in both party’s lives for the rest of their lives is really necessary. Cooperating to make things easier for the children is the best path. If divorce is inevitable, often giving concessions in other areas to smooth things in the relationship with the children post-divorce is just being a good parent.
3. People are looking for the perfect partner to marry. We would all be better advised to realize that there is no perfect partner. Only hard work and compromise by both husband and wife can keep a marriage together.
JJ formerly Jimmy J.:
Let me clarify. Actually, I have observed no divorces that “started out amicably and inexplicably turned nasty.” All the divorces I was referencing started out VERY nasty and stayed that way. It was the marriages that started out amicably; by the time the divorce began, the nastiness and craziness was already present.
So the lawyers had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
As a person who has observed divorce personally and with friends, and who has quite a bit of knowledge of the areas of divorce law, mediation, and couples counseling, I will say that at least in my observation it is very very rare for the lawyers to be responsible for any of the rage and craziness of the rageful and crazy divorces I know (except for a couple of instances where one of the spouses was a lawyer him/herself).
I know a lot of people blame the lawyers. And you may have observed it happen the way you describe, where lawyers escalate things. But I most definitely have not. In fact, I’ve observed quite a few lawyers trying to calm things down. I don’t think my experiences have been completely atypical, either. Working with divorced or divorcing couples is extremely difficult and stressful. And sometimes things escalate in the natural course of events, due to very real anger and disagreements about very emotional issues like money and custody that emerge as the spouses try to iron out the details of the divorce.
Mediation is hardly a panacea either. I’ve long thought that mediation tends to work in divorces where the problems have not reached such a high level of bitterness and probably never would have no matter what method of divorce the spouses had chosen. But in the bitterest of divorces mediation is contra-indicated, and lawyers are best to at least attempt to preserve the rights of each spouse as best as possible, and to keep them out of contact with each other, contact which tends to be toxic no matter how skilled the mediator.
I was lucky (well, in a manner of speaking) to have an extremely amiable divorce. We were young, poor, and there were no kids and, to my knowledge, no infidelity. Above all, there was no hostility; we just decided our lives and personalities were going in opposed directions, and thought it best to get out before we wasted more time butting heads with each other.
I defer to neo’s experience on a lot of this stuff, but I want to say that I agree with Jimmy J’s last point about “hard work and compromise.”
The way I would put it is that it is very important to be as sure as both parties can be that they both understand what a marriage is, i.e., what they are getting into. Starry-eyed, utopian-type notions are not a good sign. Part of this is just trying to be sure to really know each other.
None of that is foolproof, of course, and people do change (that was the cause of my divorce). But when it came time to part ways it helped that my wife was a fundamentally non-vindictive person, and that I had at least been right to judge that her heart was big enough to continue to care deeply about my well-being, despite the “in love-ness” being gone.
I’m trying to think of a situation where I could get vindictive, and as of now I can think of only one: where I had become convinced that my wife was an evil and malicious person, and that my “going after” her in divorce proceedings was justified. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine.
I’d be interested to hear neo’s speculations on what the root of the vindictiveness might be in the cases she’s witnessed. Is it that some people just have a vindictive streak in their hearts? Or is it more of frustration deep down that things didn’t go how one supposed they should – sparking a kind of projection of rage at the realities of this fallen world onto their partners?
As I said, I find it hard to conceptualize how one could get nasty and vindictive unless 1) one believed the target was truly evil and malicious; or 2) one believed that it was in self-defense against vindictiveness from the other party.
Why would someone just try to ruin or harm someone who, yes, they may not love anymore in the amorous sense, but who they still care about on a human level?
kolnai:
In the cases I know, some of the vindictive people were, IMHO, either psychopathic personalities who had managed to keep “the mask of sanity” on for the earlier years (or in some cases, months, because the unraveling happened pretty quickly) of the marriage. People can present a very good and very deceptive facade; you might be surprised how skillful some are at this false face. It is actually quite terrifying.
Others were people with what you might call borderline personality disorder. Again, the disorder was masked at the beginning, because such people can seem really wonderful when things are going well and you are on their “good person” list. But a misstep can switch things over in an instant, and once you are on their “bad person” list you become the enemy.
So I would say in my observation in every single case it was not due to any of the ordinary stresses in ordinary divorces, nor to lawyers, but to the inherent (and previously veiled) character disorder of the person.
Actually, in one case, come to think of it, that character disorder wasn’t so very well-hidden previously at all. But the person’s charisma and physical attractiveness, and the youth and naivete and neediness of the spouse, led to making what turned out to be a very bad decision to marry the somewhat disturbed person anyway.
Here’s a bit about BPD in marriage. It’s not really about divorce, but it shows the pattern, which includes a black-and-white all-or-nothing attitude towards the other person. To the borderline, you are either with him/her (and beloved, good, wonderful) or against him/or (and hated, bad, the enemy):
I think that, for some, love withdrawn feels like a betrayal, whether or not there is a transfer of that love to another. In fact, some find a transfer of love (infidelity) more understandable and tolerable than simply being no longer loved–as if no longer worthy of love. In any case, feeling betrayed can lead to intense rage.
Jim Nicholas:
In the cases I’m familiar with, that’s not the way it happened. In three out of the four it was the vindictive spouse that withdrew the love and initiated the divorce. The other spouse had done something that had earned their enmity. That “something” was something seemingly minor (to anyone objective who heard about it, that is, NOT to the vindictive one) or even something that was misunderstood and not even offensive at all. Or sometimes the offense wasn’t even stated or described, there was just a turning away by the vindictive spouse, not the other.
It’s hard to understand until you’ve seen it, because there’s nothing rational about it, although it seems very very rational to the vindictive spouse.
Read my comment above yours, as well, in case you haven’t already.
neo, you have interesting friends.
I guess I have lived a rather sheltered life. My friends in the Navy were all reasonably well adjusted (The selection and training process weeded out those less stable.) Pretty much the same in the airline business. Several divorce proceeding in those two fields that I was familiar with (6) seemed to start out amicably and then escalate into nastiness.
The only time I saw a marriage such as you describe was a cousin who was married to an alcoholic psychopath. He would beat her and then apologize profusely, plying her with gifts and attention until he flew off the handle again. My cousin toughed it out a lot longer than she should have because of their children. After she divorced him, he stayed drunk for several years and then committed suicide. No lawyer difficulties there. But they could have used some psychological help.
neo –
It’s interesting when you write from your psychological expertise – recently I’ve been reading here and there about BPD, pretty much by chance (a blogger I was interested in had a link), and I’m learning all kinds of stuff I’d never encountered before (e.g., Adlerian psychology – which I was aware of, but never studied).
Anecdotally, I can report on one instance of the false face phenomenon from my own life. I dated a girl who I now know was what some call an emotional vampire – basically a narcissist who found the chaos she caused and the “narcissistic supply” it gave her to be an end-in-itself. What happens, apparently, is these emotional vampires attract guys like me – caretakers, or, less charitably, codependents – who gravitate to the vampires in order to win their love and thus prove ourselves worthy of being loved (in Adlerian terms, we’re compulsively repeating our primary inferiorities).
Normal people view drama as a sunk cost – an investment that is a means to peace and harmony as an end. The narcissist takes those means and views them, it seems, as ends. So the codependent gets caught in a sunk cost trap, having invested so much energy and time and stress and anxiety in building toward the end, every bit of drama making it harder to pull away (ironically), while the narcissist in fact experiences every chaotic moment as pure psychological win – the narcissist is maximizing, that is, and so has considerably less investment (psychologically speaking, again), and thus finds it easier to walk away.
This woman convinced me, as we got to know each other, that she was a completely different person than she was – calm, level-headed, reasonable, indeed rational, and kind of sweet – but in reality, as time went by, she became this unholy monster, a raging ball of mess, mercurial, angry, extremely irrational (I’d straight up assert she is the most irrational person I’ve ever known), manipulative, and selfish.
Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, in short.
That was an education.
It doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy; get the prenup. This is not 1955.
Quoting Chris Rock: “You don’t have to be rich to get a prenup, oh no. If you make $20 million and your wife wants ten, big deal, you ain’t starvin’. But if you make $30,000, and your wife wants fifteen, you might have to kill her! I ain’t movin’ back in with my momma ’cause you ain’t in love.”
Reminds me of a guy that I dated briefly and very intensely during one of my overseas tours; not (I think) a borderline type, but manic/depressive. In the manic phase, charming and fun and all of that. In the depressive … oh, lord. I realized very soon that if anything came of it, I would spend a good part of my life running interference for him … and I’m not that much of a saint or caretaker type. There is a time when you just have to cut your losses and walk away.
“…. maybe I’d say ‘whom,’ ”
Always so eager to “share.”
Lessons: 1) don’t get married unless you decide to have kids; 2) choose someone who loves you, not someone who fills a ‘need’; 3) prenup.
neo, were the 4 psychopaths you knew ‘liberals?’ My view is the dem party attracts psychopaths. I see less of that on the right.
Steve,
Most people I know are liberals; I know very few conservatives. But of the four people I described, one is a conservative, one is a liberal, and I don’t know the politics of the other two.
A story about pre-nups.
One of the people I knew who married one of these four vindictive spouses had an interesting history with that. He isn’t a billionaire, but he has a fair amount of money. At the age of around 30 or so, he met a lovely woman and fell in love with her and she with him. I met her, and she seemed great. They got engaged. He told her he wanted to draw up a pre-nup, and she got very upset because she felt it was both unromantic and showed a lack of trust and faith.
He tried to explain that it had nothing to do with her, etc. (this was a first marriage, by the way). She continued to feel very upset by it, and broke up with him over it. He was in turn very upset by that turn of events, as you might imagine.
A few years later he met and fell in love with another person. She was lovely too in both personality and physically (I met her, and attended the wedding, and can attest to that). She was a successful lawyer and made a good income herself, and her family had plenty of money, too. After his previous experience he decided not to try to seek a pre-nup, and he figured since she had her own resources he was less likely to even need one.
Wrong. Before the year was up, the previously lovely person had turned into the female version of Mr. Hyde. A complete personality change. She instituted a divorce, pulled out every stop (including allegations of abuse and everything else in the book). It took many years for it to get straightened out. He went through an absolutely horrific experience, financially and emotionally and legally.
You can see, though, how complex the pre-nup question can be.
Pre-nups may not be sexy — but they are now an absolute requirement.
Just as, during the formation of a business partnership, provisions must be made for its dissolution.
BTW, female attorneys are the running joke of the PUA community.
I’d rule one out — as a spouse — right off.
Try nurses, instead.
BTW, you can’t hardly believe the political bent of law school professors. It isn’t in favor of white husbands, let me tell you.
the woman you marry is not the woman you divorce
dont matter now…
the population is collapsing, there are no replacements, and the younger guys dont want to divorce or even work (cause if you do, merit wont get you a promotion, and she walks away with perks)
its all a moot situation given the feminists have managed to self exterminate in less than 4 generations…
and with marriage on the verge of its death (took longer than god), its not much of a bother….
there is a marriage strike..
Young men giving up on marriage: ‘Women aren’t women anymore’
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/young-men-giving-up-on-marriage-women-arent-women-anymore/
33 Reasons To Dump Entitlement Princess’s
http://rexpatriarch.blogspot.com/2013/06/33-reasons-to-dump-entitlement-princesss.html
Census Benchmark for White Americans: More Deaths Than Births
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/us/census-benchmark-for-white-americans-more-deaths-than-births.html?_r=0
White Share of U.S. Population Drops to Historic Low
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-13/white-share-of-u-s-population-drops-to-historic-low.html
its moot…
let the people who believe they are the future die out crowing about all the things no one will do as there is no one to do them and no one to pass them on to
you might be surprised how skillful some are at this false face. It is actually quite terrifying.
not surprised at all
but then i have seen the terrifying more than once
and even survived two exceptionally terrifying
and my comments were not limited to divorce or relationships, but in the general population
It’s hard to understand until you’ve seen it, because there’s nothing rational about it, although it seems very very rational to the vindictive spouse.
thats why i have trouble explaining things to people who are not experienced in it, as they consistently think that there was something rational i could do, or someone could do. ie. “that if only” disease set in
there was nothing rational to do, as there was nothing rational in the internal process, and so there was no real way to avoid the outcome as one state of two can never be maintained in perpetuity.
ESPECIALLY once the princess and the pea syndrome kicks in.
ie. over time of not having any real altercations or bad somethings, the more sensitive over time the person gets to more minor somethings
the less issue there is, the more their issue scale slides until minor issues are large enough to act upon and scratch the itch.
think of it as a form of emotional cabin fever
and why some volatile relationships are successful. they keep the sensitivity to small crap low, by blowing up all the time, and not being big enough to break it.
in a bizarre way, these personalities are the kind you have to have when your with a cheater. cheating does run in genetics, just as other strategies do. so just as cheaters and layabouts exist, what is the complimentary personalities for such?
of course, this is misery for the average person male or female who is not the complimentary crazy for the others crazy.
with nuttiness being normalized as assertive and other things, thanks to feminism, nuttiness is something to deal with not suppress and fix. (while mens not nuttiness, like fishing, has to stop)
you would be surprised how much of the issues that go on are a product of a feminine feminist press that plays on women and puts their relationships in turmoil.
maybe mrs normal thinks the article on the 10 ways to know he is cheating is funny, but ms wacko doesnt catch on. and suddenly guess what? ms wacko normal wants a divorce as she knows, and goes back to her old name, ms wacko borderline, buys a bunch of cats, gets toxiplasmosis gonddii, and the rest is a very common outcome (tongue in cheek and all)
Hot Flash! Men May Be Cause of Menopause
http://www.livescience.com/37430-male-preference-younger-women-menopause.html
Everything is our fault..
so once us guys are gone, then its utopia
“If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.” — Mary Daly, former Professor at Boston College, 2001
Psychology Today:
Our Low Birth Rate Is About Liberation
We miss the point when we talk about low fertility only in terms of economics
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-and-only/201302/our-low-birth-rate-is-about-liberation
plummeting birth rates of the class that has to be removed is a form of progress for the leaders who think that what remains is theirs with a lot less competition (oh boy, don’t look at china).
the article ends with:
If you read between the lines she is celebrating the success of Sangers eugenics.
The population of X declining, but don’t worry the population of the whole is increasing…
to the ones that don’t get it (and i am sure that neo and others do), that is called replacement
the wealthy women are replacing their competition and their children’s competition with ‘others’ and calling it progress…
of course, its progressive…
Chapter three of this saga is going to be interesting…
“A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, for that precisely is what the Soviet Revolution promised.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (New York, Random House, 1952), p.806
I was married to a woman who “exploded” with Borderline Personality Disorder at around the 20 year mark of our marriage. Straight out of “Fatal Attraction”. Signs were there, I know now, and things deteriorated from about the 5th year. Always on the road 5 days a week, it took a long time. Destruction of family and fortune was almost complete. The most incredible and unbelievable part of it all was the court system and the medical Nazis. Like art said, everything is the man’s fault, and by god, he’s gonna PAY.
I am so sensitized to it, I see the signs in every female, and much prefer guitar playing and wood working.
The thing about female lawyers is, you can always get a sense of who they are by looking at their work and what they do when they play. And try not to make judgments based upon how they treat you, but the other people around them. Even narcissists have leaks on this venue.
The only bullet proof people that can’t be detected easily are the sociopaths who basically “mimic” all social relationships, including their family ones. Those people are never “out of” disguise.
Catching evil people amounts to the same as catching spies. Give out disinformation, set a trap, and then watch the experiment unfold. A normal person would act perfectly natural in the trap and do logical things. A non normal person… won’t. There will be leaks. Inconsistencies.
If a person has always done good things in their life, to the point where you can’t find dirt on them, then it doesn’t matter if they are pretending. Because that kind of pretense might as well be the same as truth. If that person always treats people weaker than them with justice and kindness, if that person always respects the authority and wisdom of those stronger than them, then you at least have a very good chance of being treated the same, for a long time.
br549:
Actually, in the four cases I know, one of the perps was a man.
In another, the perp was a woman, but the court decided (finally, after a lot of games-playing by the woman) in the man’s favor entirely.
In the third the man won in court (against the woman perp) but found it impossible to enforce the decision because the woman basically had turned the child against the man.
Same things in the fourth.
So the courts were not in favor of the vindictive, weirdo women in these cases. But the courts were relatively powerless against the woman’s psychological warfare involving the child.
Artfl:
}}} Menopause, in which women stop menstruating and become infertile, has been a long-standing puzzle for biologists: Why would evolution have led to a trait that essentially reduces the reproductive potential of an animal?
Most other animals don’t go through menopause (although killer whales do). Even chimpanzees, humans’ closest living relatives, seem to reproduce into old age in the wild, and males even prefer older females.</i
This is just positively ephtarded:
“Most other animals don’t go through menopause (although killer whales do).”
MOST other animals don’t experience continuous estrus — that is, they aren’t “in heat” 24/7/365. So the burden of late-in-life menses is hardly the same.
Artfl:
}}} Menopause, in which women stop menstruating and become infertile, has been a long-standing puzzle for biologists: Why would evolution have led to a trait that essentially reduces the reproductive potential of an animal?
Most other animals don’t go through menopause (although killer whales do). Even chimpanzees, humans’ closest living relatives, seem to reproduce into old age in the wild, and males even prefer older females.
This is just positively ephtarded:
“Most other animals don’t go through menopause (although killer whales do).”
MOST other animals don’t experience continuous estrus – that is, they aren’t “in heat” 24/7/365. So the burden of late-in-life menses is hardly the same.
And that’s in addition to other matters that clearly apply, mentioned in the article and/or comments.
Unfortunately all too large a percentage of the female populace in the USA are complete whackjobs, with, thanks to feminism, nothing whatsoever to ground them in reality. They’ve all been taught that their feces smell like roses for way too long for them to believe anything else, and that all the problems of the world — especially THEIR personal issues — are the fault of men in the world, and they deserve to be punished for it.
Present company likely excepted, mind you. There’s been little sign of abject whackery around here…
P.S., probably not a higher percentage of whackjobs anywhere else in the female populace, but the number of women disconnected from reality in other places tends to be a lot less.