kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with divorce

Humans are not a very bright species, and we express our profound misunderstandings of the universe by attempting to tabulate the scores of everything in perceived existence. The prevalence of autism has not helped matters, as autistic people tend to have an attraction to quantification as part of their disorder. To fan that fire, autistic people like myself often suffer from autistic literalism as a side effect of autistic narcissism, which means that we think following directions to the letter or “playing by the rules” will steer outcomes towards what they would be in our ideal world. If I had a dollar for every time my autistic literalism has blown up in my face, I would be a very rich woman.

We are all on the spectrum in some sense, and the worst afflicted are not necessarily bean counters. A bean counter is a human being who has fallen into the trap of gameifying every interaction in his or her life, hoping that there is a system beneath it all that they can exploit and reap the eternal benefits. Most religions are built by people who have gameified their particular god or gods, firstly presuming that their deity is superior to all others (or in the case of monotheism is the only deity that exists) and secondly presuming they are God’s chosen people. Monotheism is especially plagued with literalism, and that is why we have Christians who waste their lives living provisionally in anticipation of the Second Coming and Jews who believe avoiding pork will help them in the afterlife. Religion, being a creation of human idiots grasping at straws, is not good at grasping the subtle, and the spiritual is the subtle. Religion bulldozes the subtle and its metaphors with obtuse virtue signaling and grandiose carnivals of unearned wealth and fake charity. Churches and temples are great as social clubs in a civilization that has lost its ability to create social cohesion, but as far as getting humans any closer to the Divine is concerned, they suck at the one job they are supposed to perform.

Bean counting for 5 year olds

If we have good parents, we are taught as children to trade good behavior for approval. We are nurtured and not left to our own devices when it comes to learning to go potty, how to clean up after ourselves, how to share with others, and earning an allowance. The trouble comes when we are forced into school, or at least it came when I was forced into school with a bunch of strangers who immediately hated me and determined that I would be cast in the role of Outsider for the next 14 years of my life. A blissful youth spent at home was broken on the rocks of girls who forced me to sit by the bus driver because I had never met them or their friends at age 4. At age 9, I won spelling bees and had a handful of pals but was so generally hated by my so-called “best” friend that she admitted that her mother hated my guts and did not want me to hang out with her anymore. Popularity was a game and I was its biggest loser. I felt alone at the time, not understanding that my experience was being played out in every classroom across the nation and the world. School was not about learning — just about everything I ever learned during ages 4-17 was learned on my own or via my parents. Reading? My mother taught me that. Arithmetic? That was my dad, who showed me how to add and subtract. Typing? I taught myself on an old-fashioned ink and ribbon typewriter with the help of a book. School was about learning to comply with absurd rules to please unhappy and bitter “teachers” who lived lives of quiet desperation while trying to make it look like they knew what they were doing. School was about becoming a good little drone who knew what to say in order to keep the peace.

School sports

One of the ways to become popular in school besides being born to obscenely rich parents was to excel in athletics. It was not enough to be fit and healthy; no, you had to be the one who could hit a softball into the subdivisions beyond the creek and down someone’s chimney. You had to run fast enough to prequalify for the Olympics. If you were a cheerleader, you had to be able to do flips in the air and to be tossed around like a hackey sack without landing on the ground with two broken legs. If you were not that — heaven forbid you were fat, uncoordinated, or just plain not into sports! — you were shunned as weak and pathetic.

Those of us who sucked at sports were tasked to prove our worth elsewhere. The other school clubs and activities beckoned: Join the debate team to word-battle with other kids! Enter the sonatina festival! Qualify for National Honors Society so you’ll have better chances of getting into college! Join Yearbook so you can be of use to the school with all that free time you have after 4 hours a night of homework! It was never enough to just be.

You don’t have to imagine the surprise of all those who were repeatedly told they would get good jobs after graduating college to afford spouses, a home, and a yearly vacation somewhere because they are living that surprise. Zoomers, Millennials, and most of Gen X labored under the delusion that by following the script of get-good-grades-then-degree, they would be rewarded with a job that paid enough to cover the bills and a few small luxuries. They thought they would have enough to raise a family if they chose to do that. As it turns out, my decision to not have children was the best economic decision I have ever made for myself. Had I landed with a husband who wanted children (there was a guy I had a crush on in college who probably could have gotten me to bear his children if it my love had been requited) we would have been very challenged when it came to affording the basics for them. Both spouses have to work these days outside of an extremely privileged echelon of the upper middle class. Everybody has got to hustle, and even then, it is almost impossible to make ends meet.

Most of the women and men who went to college got rug-pulled. This has not stopped the current generation from flooding into colleges and universities as if the past 30 years never happened. They still believe in the dream of flowing into a luxe life after serving up 4 - 8 of their most productive years. Dreams are hard to kill, and bean-counting depends on a dream in order to prop it up.

Dieting

The bean-counting mentality becomes literal when it comes to psychoses over food, otherwise known as dieting a.k.a. disordered eating as a result of an attempt to create order in eating. Wallis Simpson, the train wreck socialite 2x-divorcee who married Prince Edward, quipped “You can never be too rich or too thin” She said this despite being a horsey looking mid who suffered throat cancer (probably from a combo of smoking and starving) and dementia. She could have benefited both health-wise and looks-wise from gaining a few extra pounds, just sayin’.

Anorexics turn calorie counting into a bona fide addiction. It's a talent in its own right.

At its core, anorexia is and always has been a disease of privilege. Anorexia, which rarely happens to men and mostly afflicts affluent young women, is a disease of ingratitude. When we are surrounded by easily attainable, beautiful, life-sustaining food, it is a truly vile and perverse act to starve ourselves to death.

Semaglutide drugs have thrown gasoline on an already roaring fire, and I would guess that most GLP-1 drugs are being used by people who have no business taking them such as Demi Moore. Anorexia is about counting calories as if they were lepers. The anorexic would like to expel all lepers from the kingdom (some claim to do just this by becoming supposed breathatarians) but some lepers must be admitted so the kingdom does not die off entirely. Why? You can never be too rich or too thin.

Liv is gonna die

Liv Schmidt, probably about age 18

Elliot Rodger

There is a creepy, possibly pedophilic, foul influencer named Liv Schmidt who is only known in certain circles of social media. Schmidt is known for being kicked off of TikTok and other social media platforms for her abusive pro-anorexia rhetoric and malevolent bullying. If there is any better example of how to profoundly fail at life than Liv Schmidt, I have yet to see one. She seems like an absolutely awful human being who should be pitied for her emptiness in every sense of the term.

Liv Schmidt wanted to be a haute couture model but was allegedly too “fat” to be considered for runway work. Yet as a younger woman, she was absolutely stunning. Had she been born a decade earlier, she might have been a Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie and Fitch model, with all its attendant Jeffrey Epstein and Mike Jeffries-related problems. Her look was all-American. Schmidt, however, apparently has severe body dysmorphia. She reported in 2024 that she had lost enough weight to walk a “real” fashion runway. Since at least half of her content is AI slop, it is unclear whether or not she ever achieved her dream to strut down a designer’s catwalk.

Schmidt’s entire life revolves around how little she can eat. She is 24 and thoroughly emaciated. Her social media presence consists of hurling abuse at women whose legs are thicker than the girth of a cheerleader’s baton. She often takes selfies where she is seen “eating” a small portion of food with puffy, overfilled duck lips. She hosts an online club cringily entitled the Skinni Société, a subscription club where the seriously anorexic can get lifestyle advice from a pro. To Schmidt’s credit, she has become an expert at making her own body disappear. She was never a big girl, but now she looks like the Grim Reaper if he stole and wore the head of Elliot Rodger, the incel who took his own life after killing 6 people and injuring 14 in 2014. Schmidt’s constant, whiny vitriol towards “fat” women is reminiscent of Rodger’s rants about sluts and Chads. I’m not saying she’s a massacre killer waiting to happen; only that she is entitled and autistic. She also has the dead Rodger boy’s glazed eyes, puffer fish lips, and perpetual frown. Rodger filmed countless hours and wrote a boring, novel-length manifesto about how he was owed beautiful women because he was a “supreme gentleman”. He literally thought that because he wore brand name clothes, drove an expensive car, and was reasonably good looking that women should have been falling over themselves to ride his dick. He was too proud to hire a prostitute, and when he took his own life, he was supposedly a virgin.

Somewhere along the line, Schmidt was told that the only way she could be worth more than the powder to blow herself to hell was via being emaciated. She reports that her mother was the original Skinni club member, which shows us that eating disorders run in families. Like Rodger, she seems to have been a child who was never told “No” unless it pertained to having a full slice of birthday cake.

Fake and gay

Schmidt has shaved her nose into a Michael Jackson fishbone. Because she is dysmorphic, she cannot stop getting work done despite her first nose job being quite terrible. She is now on her second or third. Her nose, however, is a masterpiece compared to her botched lips. Her pout looks like a female baboon’s ass if it was able to frown, and it is all the more disconcerting paired with the fake blonde hair, empty eyes, and horrific fashion choices on the bundle of sticks she has made out of her body.

Also, Schmidt is likely a closeted lesbian. There is photographic evidence that indicates that she has groomed and possibly molested a female 15 year old member of her Skinni Société. I will be talking about the gayness of anorexia in a future article.

Like Elliot Rodger, Schmidt’s entire existence is bean-counting and scorekeeping. Because she has enjoyed a great deal of privilege in her lifetime, she feels she is owed more and more as long as she lives up to the tortured image of privilege she has created in her brain. Every fat-shaming posts she makes makes claims that the “fat” who cannot lose weight are always, always eating too much. Lack of self control = fatter than Starvin’ Marvin Liv = you must be eating too much. Never mind that some people are genetically thinner than others or have diseases or medications that result in weight gain; nah, it all boils down to how much you’re willing to starve yourself like Liv.

Why we are all probably going to die alone

I recently stepped in it when I posted on TikTok about how I don’t nag my husband to do dishes. I explained that he does the dishes more frequently than he used to because instead of bitching or going on housework strikes, I thank him when he does do chores. The women of TikTok went into attack mode, saying that it was sad that I was gentle parenting my husband and that I obviously don’t know how to communicate with the man I have been married to for 26 years. One woman said that she was affirming her choice to be perpetually single via my video.

Whatever. They were triggered by my soft approach and my unwillingness to see myself as a commodity to be traded. When people divorce, they do so because of a long list of offenses committed by their spouse that amounts to physical, emotional, and spiritual debt in their minds. One divorcee I knew saw the writing on the wall when her husband started saying “That’s a divorceable offense!” in regards of some terrible thing she said in an argument or chore she was unwilling to do. He had been tabulating her unworthiness since the honeymoon or before it. The main excuse women use to divorce their husbands nowadays is that he is a man-child. He is not able to earn enough money and he does not help enough with the housework and child-rearing, so they kick him out and become single mothers, come what may. They try for alimony and usually get it, or at least they get what is known as a lump sum or all-at-once payment for their troubles. The main excuse men use to divorce their wives is that she has become unsexy or that she no longer puts out. Never mind that she has given him healthy children and put her own needs and wants on the shelf to care for those kids; she’s no longer hot, so it is time to trade in her moody ass for a girl who is about five years older than his children.

So of course a woman who has gone the Way of the Lone Harpy sees my nonconfrontational treatment of the other adult in my household as deficient because she would much rather see me join her Hate Club where all men are stupid doofuses who cannot do anything right. Tonight my supposedly-terrible husband insisted I open a new package of shredded lettuce for the tacos I made for dinner because as the woman, I should not be made to suffer the insult of eating old, slightly wilted lettuce. He ate the old lettuce on his tacos because “that’s what guys do” according to him. (I tried to get him to throw the old lettuce away, if you’re curious) This is the sort of sweet, chivalric interaction the Lone Harpy does not get to enjoy, and in my opinion, it is her loss. She will die as she lived — utterly alone.

I say this and I fully anticipate dying alone. My husband is 14 years my senior and as I mentioned earlier, I chose not to have children. People have children partially because they hold out hopes that those children will repay them by caring for them in old age. I certainly have put in my fair share of care for my aging parents. Nursing homes, however, are full of old people crying and moaning to go home. They are too far gone or senile to understand that home has been sold off by their children who almost never visit. Filial piety is not what it used to be, especially in America where most kids move far, far away from their parents the moment they are grown.

When people turn relationships into transactions, it all becomes hoe math. Hoe Math is a snarky guy with an eponymous channel on the internet (we never see his face) who draws flow charts of people ranked on a 1-10 scale of attractiveness. Women, who he calls females, used to date in their own range, for instance, a female 5 would date a 4-6 male. Nowadays, every woman from 1-10 only dates the hottest guys fro 8-10, leaving the 1-7s like poor old Elliot Rodger in the lurch. Hoe Math, though it claims not to be serious, is a perfect example of how the autistic brain attempts to reconcile human behaviors into rational units that can be stacked and organized. The Hoe Mathematician thinks he is dealing blows to the slutty femoids who choose Chad over him — never mind that Chad actually attempted to treat her like a human being and not an animated doll. When he finally pins down a femoid and makes her into his wife because she checked enough boxes, he is ironically blindsided when she dumps him for someone who is less enthralled by his own, tiny, narcissistic world.

I am not going to go into it here about how gratitude and generosity break the rules of negative bean-counting due to their sublimating effect. I have many other essays on that. Here are two of them:

The Glad Game

How to Attract the One: Advice from an Old, Married Woman

I will leave you with the observation that bean-counting should be saved for actual accounting, such as in the scrupulous avoidance of high interest credit cards. We humans are simply not intelligent enough (present company very much included) to see the ripples in the pond and how they intersect. Better to go with thankfulness and thoughtfulness than to be absorbed into the fray of retarded bean-counting.

Life is unfair and difficult for human brains to understand. Count on it.

Irreconcilable differences are the primary reason cited when two people divorce. The designation is amorphous and vague. She cheated? Irreconcilable differences. He is a raging alcoholic? Irreconcilable differences. Her nagging got tiresome, and her body was no longer desirable? Same. He left his dirty socks on the floor in front of the hamper? Good enough -- now let's get the ink on those papers so we can break up your family and devastate your children.

I have a bad habit of watching Facebook reels, and like Instagram and TikTok, the reels tailor themselves to what they believe you'll watch. Underneath them, however, there is a discreet agenda for those willing to look. Facebook would like me to end my marriage. It would like to see my 26 year commitment in tatters and shreds so statists and their cronies can milk me for whatever assets I managed to accumulate, including the etheric energy or loosh I have saved up in my middle aged body. It would like to see me dependent on the teat of the algorithm, continually seeking it out for the next dopamine hit. It would like me to be informed by it and to act according to its will.

Facebook knows its target demographic is middle-aged women and it wants us to blow up our marriages and lives so we can be cast adrift in hostile waters. The more violent and petty our divorces, the better. Facebook has a voracious appetite for drama, and there is a wealth of divorced or soon-to-be-divorced women on it complaining about the awfulness of men. The other social media platforms are the same.

Facebook isn't so bald and out in the open about trying to brainwash me. Mostly, it shows me innocuous videos of women improving their own homes. They restore furniture (furniture restoration videos were what hooked me in the first place as I like to re-work and repurpose old things) and they put up molding and wallpaper without help from men. There is one lady who has re-done her entire house. She has done much of the labor while heavily pregnant. We never see her husband in the shots, and the one time we did, she openly shamed him for doing a bad job framing a wall. This brief humiliation ritual seemed to say "men are vestigial and useless except as sperm donors". Mind you, she was not much to look at in body or face, and as much as I tried not to judge her, I did make the assessment that she was well on the road to divorce. The more famous she got on the social media machine with her pretty pictures of cleverly decoupaged kid's furniture, the further she got away from the notion that men have value. Her house is beautiful but I do pity her children.

The agenda behind the superwomen who can frame a wall, find a dresser on the roadside and spiff it up and sell it for $850, and rake in more than their ex or soon-to-be ex-husbands make on social media from sponsors is to make more divorced women and men. More divorced women means more households as families atomize, liquidating generational real estate to scatter to apartments or the more ideal purchase of a "me and my kids only" home for the new set of fragmented people. More divorced women means tremendous bonuses for family counselors, therapists, and other know-nothing shills who profiteer off of emotional pain and suffering while also acting as direct and indirect drug pushers for Big Pharma. But most of all, more divorced women free up the ultimate resource and money maker: the children of divorce. The System survives off the energy of children, and that is why it wants them to be abandoned, thrown into foster care, and pre-digested in the juices of hatred and discord. The formidable wall of loving, intact husband and wife must be at least partially demolished so the children can be vampirized by the Epsteins and Diddys of the world and their copious followers. Divorce makes it far, far easier to get at those precious children, and it is the perfect tool for distracting the parents and literally removing the kids from their sight.

My husband, the child of divorce, spent the first 11 years of his life in the most sheltered of Christian fundamentalist environments. He was not allowed to watch television other than Flipper or Animal Kingdom. There were no sleepovers. When he hit 12, three years before he would truly go through puberty, his parents began the excruciating process of a long and drawn out divorce. Overnight, he was left almost entirely to his own devices as his father ran off to live with the woman he had been cheating with and his mother scrambled to get a job after being a housewife her entire adult life. My future husband, then an adolescent, started smoking that year and did not quit until he was in his 40s and married to me. He began drinking an entire case of Coca Cola every day as if it was water. He got in such bad trouble at church school for scrapping and falling asleep in class, he was sent to a religious boarding school in a nearby state which utterly failed to put him on the straight and narrow. Just imagine how his teenage years would have gone if he came up in the age of online porn.

Divorce opens the floodgates so the vampires can eat the children, and often they have been grooming the children and both parents for a long time before the ink is on the divorce papers. For instance, the videos of the women doing all of the "manly" construction tasks all by themselves are a form of grooming. They quietly say to the women that we can have the prettiest and most peaceful of homes as soon as men are out of the picture, either subjugated and dismissed by being forced to live in a sea of Laura Ashley-esque chintz, brass bath caddies, and wall-to-wall sage green paneling or foisted out of the home altogether with a suitcase and a footprint on their rear end next to the welt where the door hit them on the way out.

The self-satisfied divorcee can then engage in the fragile virtue signaling of somehow making a living by perpetually photographing her single-woman household, as if that is sustainable long term.

Despite the above rant, I know plenty of women who have died alone in their reasonably clean houses and who did not perish in catastrophic poverty or abject loneliness. I myself will probably die that way unless I manage to pop off before my husband. Fear mongering around those women who will die as lonely cat ladies is highly exaggerated, though it has been known to happen. I fear for the middle aged women currently driven to homelessness who live out of vans like the movie Nomadland, where Frances McDormand plays a widow who has no choice but to take up van life. At some point, we become feeble in mind and body, and the part of Nomadland we never see is how McDormand's character dies. Is she taken in by her few remaining relatives or friends? Does she park the dying van near a large wilderness area and then wander off into the trees to allow nature to do its work?

Are men lonely enough?

Women are not as afraid to die alone as men, that is for sure. They marry and re-marry. If they are single, unlike women, they would rather be paired off.

There is one particular dude bro influencer who shall remain nameless who often posts about the detestable characteristics of females/femoids. He is apparently married to a woman and has at least 5 children. The men who swarm his comment sections are mostly older and married. The middle aged ones are tired of their wives, and with good cause. Their wives are nags who live to complain that their men can do nothing right. Not that the wives are doing any better in their husband's eyes: they overlook the fact their wives are, were, and remain the mothers of their children. My decision to marry a poor man who truly didn't want kids is continually validated by these men's endless posturing that it is OK to dump their wives with the other trash for not wanting sex at age 54 with a balding, grumpy, pot-bellied, lazy, perpetually angry 58 year old. The solution is to replace the aging, used-up harridan with a younger model, preferably about 15 years his junior so that way the adult children won't be as freaked out by the pedophile aspect of their father's remarriage.

In one of his comment sections, Married with Children Dude Bro observes that he finds it interesting that prostitutes, E-girls, and other forms of women he views as trophies can find it in themselves to service men when they are not in the mood, but wives (especially those of middle age) cannot suck it up, either metaphorically or literally. He then suggests that because she isn't in the mood that her man decides not to be in the mood to pay her bills.

There is a sort of man who will always see his wife as the Queen of All Whores who beat out the other contenders to be the mother of his primary children (he likely has other, less legitimate sets of kids elsewhere). He frames himself as an alpha and is the dictator of his own banana republic. He often has a background in video game design or engineering or both, and he ardently believes that he and everyone else construct their own fates and that there is no such thing as chance, which is rather Calvinist of him. He supports that which helps solidify his delusion that other people, including his own wives and children, are to be used and shat upon for the glory of his ego and solipsism. She is an old sow who was once a young heifer and will always be reduced as a depreciating asset.

We are in a dark pit of Meatworld at the bottom of the Kali Yuga -- luckily there is nowhere to go from here but up! -- and that is why this sort of man does reasonably well in the modern day milieu. He has the sort of retarded, left-brained thinking that makes him think he can avoid the consequences of his actions forever, and that is why he is serenely unconcerned about unearned wealth or being treated as he has treated others.

Women who marry this sort are to be profoundly pitied. She naively believes the hype and enjoys the trappings of material success he is able to provide, and before you know it, she is moored to him and his abuse via their children. He does not grow fonder of her as she ages. When she is middle aged, she had better be nearly as svelte, hot, healthy, obedient, and ready as she was before the umpteen children, or he will replace her with a new Queen of Whores that he has determined will yield better dividends than the current model. She will be cast out of the home she foolishly made, and he will pride himself on the pre-nup that allows him to escape paying for her not to fall into a lower class that she may or may not survive. Naturally, she will be full of hatred, vitriol, and bitterness, and he will never once look in the mirror and own up to having helped make her that way.

For the love of the game

Patriarchy treats all as a game, and we are about 10,000 years into patriarchy as is evidenced by data centers being installed with zero thought towards potable water and a functioning electrical grid and wars that promise to rage until the last child on "their" side is melted down into a puddle of formerly-human grease. Patriarchy seeks to game-ify everything from commerce to intimate love, forcing us all to participate in contests until we collapse in exhaustion and the ecosystem along with us.

In our long standing patriarchal systems, all men are either pimps or simps. All women are whores. Even babies are not exempt from the gruesome reality of human trafficking. Women, like animals, are to be controlled, bought, and sold. A woman's worth is therefore determined by her youth, and it goes away as soon as she no longer is desirable or wants to have sex. The game is far more beloved than any human being outside the self.

For men, the goal is to make manhood a big competition where, like the old Highlander movies, THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE, and the Alpha King will rule his feudal empire until one of his sons takes his place. A man's worth is determined by the size of his penis, his harem, and the delusion that his inflated ego makes him intelligent.

We can hardly wonder with women and men in such a state that nobody in their right mind wants to take a chance on marriage. Women think they're winning the game by being the fairest of them all and scoring a good provider until their looks and sex drive fade and the good provider turns out to be a shallow egomaniac who has never considered them to be human. Men think they're losing the game because the self-appointed Alphas tell them they don't have what it takes to win. Meanwhile, there are plenty who would seek a third and better way, and that is where I come in.

Even if I get divorced tomorrow, I have been married to the same man for 26 years. It is excruciatingly obvious that I did not marry for money. Despite all our troubles and the fact I am the primary breadwinner of my household, my husband and I have a good marriage, and that is why I feel I am at liberty to give some advice for choosing and staying with a mate long term.

1. Stop keeping score

If you read nothing else in this article, read and re-read this first point. Score-keeping is what happens when you game-ify all your relationships (this advice can easily be applied beyond the realm of your mate) and think that you are somehow owed because of the good deeds you did and can somehow escape all the bad deeds you've done. Score-keeping is misery. You did the dishes, so she owes you sex. You changed the baby's diapers, so he owes you a foot rub. You pay the mortgage, so she owes you a clean house. You look good at 40, therefore you can easily leave and snag a richer man than him. And so on. Score-keeping is a fixation upon the negative and a discounting of the positive. It also turns all women into chattel and all men into whoremongers or would-be whoremongers. The solution is to focus on the good the other has done instead of where they do not measure up in portfolio or cup size. Instead of getting mad he hasn't mowed the lawn, smother it with cardboard and mulch for a pollinator garden and be grateful he helps with the yard and maintains the air conditioner. Instead of being mad that she no longer puts out, thank her for all the housework she does without thinking about it and hug your precious kids.

2. Know your real limits

There are deal-breakers in relationships, and if someone is genuinely preventing you from who you ought to be, you do need to leave. More often than not, however, it is a matter of not feeling brave enough to strike out on your own. In my younger years, I was afraid to put my foot down with my husband where our finances were concerned. Only as an older, more confident woman was I able to say "My way or the high way", and that is why we no longer live with my parents and we do reside in our own modest home. This home, though it ain't much, would be easily pissed away if we were still chasing unearned wealth via speculation and risk-taking. If you are the one maintaining the scaffolding and sanity of your marriage, stand your ground. For me, unearned-wealth chasing and cheating are marriage deal-breakers. My aunt had to deal with a gambler and she rightfully divorced him. Others I know had to deal with cheaters and some are still together, some are not. Aside from the true deal-breakers, I can make the best out of the pitfalls that come.

3. Ask yourself "Who benefits?" from your separation and divorce.

We all know that weddings are a racket, but did you ever consider who is making money off divorces? When two people shack up, they do so because "two can live as cheaply as one". Traditionally, large families used to live in one multigenerational house or compound, which offered safety in numbers as well as in-family wealth transfer as the home was passed from parents to children. Atomization is monetization, and not for the families themselves, but for the array of parasites that feed off of the assets and loosh released by broken homes and broken hearts. Maybe, just maybe, we are all being groomed all the time to see marriage vows as temporary and for our convenience. It's also useful when we see each other as pimps, simps, and hoes and use transactional thinking to game-ify our connections with each other, as if they were not priceless.

4. Defeat anxiety with gratitude and score-keeping with generosity.

Gratitude is the only force powerful enough to battle the Wendigos of our demonic age and win, and generosity is a function of gratitude. The kind of anxiety that ends marriages is not only annoying, it is rooted in fear. Anyone who genuinely believes in God or gods should in theory be able to dismiss fear and with it, anxiety, including anxiety created by one's mate for not living up to an ideal. Clearly there are plenty of people who say they believe in God without meaning it. One way we can put more belief in the Divine, even if that divinity is only the best and noblest aspects of ourselves, is to counter each anxious thought with 3 grateful ones. Going nuts over the crappy looking porch steps? Counter it with gratitude for having a porch and not dodging bombs and drones. Be grateful for clean water to drink and the sun on a beautiful day. Yes, the porch issue was not solved, but you put your thinking brain towards things that are actually important instead of whatever rat race the material world insisted you run. Gratitude, as I have said many times, has that weird trait of sublimating whatever it touches by the power of seven or more and radiates exponentially and fractally from its source. Harness the power of gratitude and you'll improve your marriage and every other blessed thing in your life.

I once knew an old, married couple who fought bitterly. The man was constantly down-dressing his wife, calling her stupid, fat, and ugly. She did not give it back all that frequently, but every now and then, I would hear her sass him back and the fights would escalate in tone and volume. Misery radiated from the two of them as if they were nuclear waste. Anyone who overheard their bouts would think both parties would be better off alone... or would they? The miserably married who get divorced often find themselves married again and divorced again. If they do not seek to remedy their status, they go to a lonely end of sorrowful, decrepit singlehood. For women, who obviously live longer than men, going it alone can be wonderful, but it can also be terrifying. Those of us who are not rolling in dough and who lack essential skills when our homes demand to be maintained are in a precarious situation. I had two single aunts, one rich and one poor. The aunt with money died in a far better set of circumstances than the poor one. As much as it is fashionable to believe in the independent woman who can kick ass on her own behalf until the day she croaks, I have seen for myself that sometimes elderly women become extremely dependent, usually through no fault of their own. Senility happens. Old men aren't the only ones found wandering on the side of the highway, forgetting why they left the house to begin with.

Old men without a woman (or a gay man who is an etheric male) to take care of them quickly suffer extreme etheric starvation. Most women and girls are etheric males, which is to say that their energy signature is male. I discussed this in a couple of posts here and here. Old people in general are skewed toward the etheric feminine or yin energy. The energy of homemaking is male on the etheric, which is why women and girls tend to be the best homemakers. When an old man does not have an etheric male influence in his life, he becomes the stereotype of the codger rotting away in a destitute heap, slumped over his table and drooling on a pile of yellowed papers. This is classic etheric starvation and it is not a pleasant way to die.

The lesson here, I think, is we aren't always better off alone. It is horrendously difficult to know where to draw the line of what constitutes abuse. In the case of the married couple I mentioned above, the man was abusive and to my mind, the choice was clear: she needed to run away from him and never look back about 30-50 years ago. Other cases are not quite so clear. I knew an old man who liked porn long before it was cool; he and his wife still stuck it out until one of them died and they were not worse off for it. There were and are a great many couples who got divorced who probably should have never split. There is also the disturbing statistic that children are 100 more times likely to be abused if one of their parents is a stepparent known as the Cinderella Effect. In the Cinderella Effect, we have a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation where people who divorce already have a propensity for distancing themselves in family relationships are unable to reconcile the distance between themselves and someone else's child. The result is a rate of child abuse several orders of magnitude above what tends to happen in marriage between biological parents.

They're Not Helping

Far too much of relationship and marriage counseling amounts to making lists of grievances and then coming up with baroque labeling and procedural terminology for addressing those grievances. Yes, it does help to put names to phenomena, but it is a classic cart before the horse strategy to put so much focus on the negative. Allow me to save any couple in marriage counseling hundreds if not thousands of dollars (and not by switching car insurers) by saying if you focus on the negatives more than the positives in the relationship, YOU ARE GOING TO SPLIT. As much as ostensibly well-meaning professionals think their credentials, degrees, and professional status help them to help others, the bottom line is that they are not helping if:

1. They do not live as they preach/advise
2. They do not find the positive within the person and situation and encourage it

All too often, counseling is a blame game where one partner is made into a scapegoat and the other luxuriates in endless lists of why breaking the union is justified and necessary. In other words, counseling is often a funnel into the divorce attorney's office with some pit stops at the drug store for psychiatric medications. Can't leave Big Pharma waiting beside the gravy train!

There are plenty of abusive women and men who deserve nothing less than to be shoved rudely to the curb and if they die Forever Alone, that is their just comeuppance. Some relationships and people are not worthy of being saved. But in many cases, society and perhaps our civilization itself has made it all too easy to burn down the marriage house with everything in it, including the kids. We have arrived at the statistic that more marriages end in divorce than death do us part. Kids are the sacrificial lambs on the altar of divorce. Even in so-called amicable divorces, I have seen kids utterly destroyed and their worlds torn apart. The following is merely my opinion: most people should stay married for the children's sake and try to work out their problems by focusing on the positive. Once the children are out of their teens, then it is the proper time to begin the process of divorce if the relationship has not been saved. Children need two parents, preferably a man and a woman or at the very least two people who adequately represent those opposite roles.

There is a great deal of false transcendence around divorce, especially among women, who frame it as the inevitable consequence of a series of oppressions dealt to them by their marriage partner. Never is divorce considered as the potentially avoidable outcome of a failure to communicate and heal. Yet we all want to heal; that is why Aphrodite, the goddess of healing, is also the goddess of love and marriage.

I have known plenty of happy divorcees. I have also known my fair share of unhappy divorcees who refuse to face the music of "wherever you go, there you are". Those who keep running from personal culpability and lack of gratitude in relationships will come head to head with those things in other situations and relationships. Yes, men take women for granted, but women do the same thing to men. I speak from experience as I am 100% guilty as charged of taking my man for granted. I am trying to turn over a new leaf and avoid taking him for granted because I myself don't like being taken for granted. If I want to be valued, I need to recognize others for their value while appreciating my own worth.

The moral of the story is sometimes we are better off sticking together. Not always! One size definitively does not fit all. However, if you can take anything away from my 24 year marriage to a poor man and my parents' nearly 60 years together until my father passed through the Gates in 2023, let it be to focus and be thankful for the good in all around you instead of dwelling on the bad. The bad needs to be acknowledged and addressed for sure; just don't make it into an obsession. The gods want us to love and cherish each other. They encourage us when we encourage each other because like attracts like. I believe that to no small degree, our self-realization as human beings involves deliberate ignorance of our fellow human's annoying traits and an amplified focus on good deeds, sweetness, goodness, and inner beauty.