I don't. I don't give one iota of a damn about
the break up that seems to be dominating the damned television and online news since Friday. Why? Because their marriage was "our" fairytale and to think that any marriage could last in Hollyweird with so many temptations, bazillions of bucks to blow, complicated lives, the paparazzi and such -- is just not realistic stuff for most of us. So why spend a freakin' weekend grieving over an apparently dissolved "rich and famous" marriage?
One of the trillion news stories on the subject speculates:
When Melissa Brittian, 32, of Milton found out the Pitts were kaput Saturday morning, she spent the rest of the day grieving - and watching E! News to find out more.
"It's devastating,'' she said. "I wanted to call their publicist and get more of the scoop and see if she could get them back together. They were supposed to have babies! Beautiful babies! They were Mr. and Mrs. Whatever High School You Went To. What went wrong?''
Who knows, but the real puzzler is: Why do we care?
"In spite of so much divorce, Americans deep down want marriages that last,'' said Susan Newman, social psychologist and author of "Nobody's Baby Now: Reinventing Your Adult Relationship with Your Mother and Father'' (Walker & Company, $24). "Since we spend so much time idolizing celebrities and seeing them in the news, when they split, they, in a sense, fail those who believe in the institution of marriage.''
The institution of marriage -- as it applies to Hollyweird? C'mon. Let's be level-headed about this folks. The failure of a famous marriage should not have us all lookin' in the mirrors or reflecting upon our own marriages as if the institution of marriage relied solely upon a bunch of famous rich folk. Let's come back down to earth, shall we? Me thinks we are a society that obsesses over and idolizes these people wayyyyyy too much. The reality is, with a national divorce rate hovering somewhere around 49% it's probably a fluke that they lasted this long.
They should be thankful they don't live in red state Nevada (with a 9% divorce rate) or they probably would have been divorced before now.
What they should have done is move to Massachusetts -- you know, one of the blue states -- where the divorce rate is just a wee bit over 2%, 2.4% to be exact. If they had done that, they may still be together.
And I'm assuming because they are Hollywood types that they tend to favor the Left, politically speaking.
Maybe? I dunno.
Whether they are church-going or consider themselves Christians is also unknown to me -- nor do I really care -- but apparently even the divorce rates among the faithful have been analyzed to death with the self-righteous and pompous conservative Christians rankin' right up there on the top of the list of failed marriages:
Barna released the results of their poll about divorce on 1999-DEC-21. 1 They had interviewed 3,854 adults from the 48 contiguous states. The sampling error is within 2 percentage points. The survey found:
- 11% of the adult population is currently divorced.
- 25% of adults have had at least one divorce during their lifetime.
- Divorce rates among conservative Christians were much higher than for other faith groups, and for Atheists and Agnostics.
George Barna, president and founder of Barna Research Group, commented: "While it may be alarming to discover that born again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time. Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that when those individuals experience a divorce many of them feel their community of faith provides rejection rather than support and healing. But the research also raises questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families. The ultimate responsibility for a marriage belongs to the husband and wife, but the high incidence of divorce within the Christian community challenges the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriages."
and
Barna's results verified findings of earlier polls: that conservative Protestant Christians, on average, have the highest divorce rate, while mainline Christians have a much lower rate.
See -- marriages are failing everywhere. Even the self-righteous cannot be righteous on this one.
But marriages are also succeeding. Somewhere.
To get all in an uproar and to see so much valuable web and television space (yes I am contributing to it) devoted to one couple truly escapes my comprehension. It's really time for most people to get a life -- and perhaps that life should include focusing more on their own marriages than those of strangers they foolishly idolize and uphold to some fictitious and perhaps unattainable moral standard.
(Cross-posted here)