One side of the storey
I want to get married one day.
A simple enough ambition, but one that gives me a one in three chance of being a divorce statistic by the time I blow 46 candles out, 20 years from now.
One friend just hosted her second ‘my divorce is final' party. She is 29. A sad state of affairs to say the least - no pun intended.
It seems like it is just too easy to get a divorce these days. Did you know you can get divorce papers from a cash point in America? That may go someway to explaining why America has by far the highest divorce rate in the world and why the divorce court has become as much a part of the American existence as McDonalds or baseball diamonds.
My parents waited ten years to get married. My mum wanted ‘to be absolutely sure.' Last month I attended my Grandparent's 60th wedding anniversary party with my parents, fresh from their 30th. Do you want to know the best thing? They are all still happy-they aren't just staying together for the sake of it.
I hope that's me one day. Still, if that sad D-day does ever roll around in my life, I may well take drastic action and follow the example of a Cambodian couple who sawed their house in half after their split.
In order to avoid the country's convoluted divorce process, Moeun Rim and his wife, Nhanh, split the building in the remote Prey Veng province.
Mr Rim removed his share of the property and the couple divided their land into four parts; two for their children, and two for them.
The husband's friends helped him move his wife's belongings to one side of the property, before chiselling and sawing half of the building off.
The wife will stay put with the upright half while her husband has carried away his half to start again on the other side of the village.
Now that is a good story. It's got a bit of everything- comedy, tragedy and romance (even if it had gone cold. Very cold).
I'll go out on a limb here, from the naïve vantage point of never encountering what it is like to be stuck in an unhappy marriage. Of course, there will be millions of exceptions to my next statement, but, to me, divorce isn't a liberation worth celebrating, it's a tragedy that it didn't work out.
After all, humans and (Cambodian) houses would surely be happier with their other half.