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Archive for the ‘Divorce’ Category

Baltimore

Brian Bercht cheated on his wife, Anne, 10 years ago. It was a full-blown affair, with clandestine lunch meetings and a growing emotional attachment to the other woman. It wasn’t that Brian didn’t love his wife of 18 years, he says. But he felt empty and vulnerable. And he was unprepared for the attraction he felt toward the co-worker who would become his lover. “I didn’t think it would ever happen to me,” he says.

For her part, Anne Bercht remembers the pain. She describes how she did not sleep or eat for months. “If we had been fighting, if we had had a bad sex life – if we had been struggling – maybe I would have been able to accept it,” she says. “But all of that increased my level of devastation and shock. I couldn’t think straight.” MORE

For couples with children, the risk of divorce is highest when kids are young. Taking care of little kids is both stressful and time-consuming, and parents often find they have little time or emotional reserve left over for their spouses. But once children hit their teen years and become more self-sufficient, parents get a break and the risk of divorce eases, studies have found.

So what happens to couples who have a child with an autism spectrum disorder? These kids require lots of attention even as they become teenagers and young adults. Potentially making matters worse, kids with an ASD typically have communication problems and engage in repetitive behaviors, which can add stress to an already taxing situation. Parents of autistic kids have been told that their risk for divorce is as high as 80%. MORE

Busted on Facebook!

When a married mom of two logged onto the social networking site, she stumbled upon the pictures of her husband’s storybook Disney World wedding – to another woman, according to the Daily Mail.

Lynn France had married John France on the Amalfi coast in Italy in 2005, and the couple were raising their two sons in Cleveland. But France, an occupational therapist, became worried that he was seeing another woman. MORE

It’s been almost two years, but it feels like yesterday. My Aunt Randi was taking me to buy wedding shoes – her gift to me. So there we are having a wonderful time chatting away in the car when my cell phone rang. It was my dad. He wanted to know (sort of kidding) whether, if I got two sets of dishes from my bridal registry, he could have one. He was in the midst of his second divorce and his ex took everything. I’m thinking – my dad? A successful periodontist and he has no plates? How sad is that? I remembered the pain I’d felt as a child of divorce all over again, but this time it was different. MORE

Dear Maddisen: I am at a cross-road in my life. I am divorced after a 21 year marriage and have no children or pets and very few responsibilities. I honestly feel paralyzed by my bounty and rather than focusing my energies on what I really want to do — writing — I find myself coming up with any excuse not to, and waste an inordinate amount of time on the phone and social networking sites. I end up feeling terribly guilty and … MORE