“Marriage is a gamble, let’s be honest.”
Yoko Ono

“A divorce is like an amputation; you survive it, but there’s less of you.”
Margaret Atwood

“’E.T.’ began with me trying to write a story about my parents’ divorce.”
Steven Spielberg

A marriage is frequently among the most happy, celebratory and festive of social gatherings, an event in which two people formally join their lives into one unit in which to live happily ever after. Wedding ceremonies, whether grandiose or humble, are infused with hope for the well being of those being wedded as well as for the larger society.

Every day in America approximately 5800 couples are married. That’s a lot of happiness, celebration, festivity and gatherings of clans and friends. Not surprisingly, most people love to talk about weddings and how happy the newlyweds look and act. Whether the ceremony involves the couple being married by a Justice of the Peace in a City Hall with a couple of strangers called in as witnesses, a ‘proper’ wedding in a church before a man of the cloth, a gathering of the tribe in a mountain meadow presided over by a relative or close friend or a lavish formal procedure costing hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) at a posh resort, marriage is big business.

As, of course, is divorce, but, not surprisingly, most people don’t love talking about divorces and how miserable recent divorcees look and, sometimes, act. Statistics reveal that every day in America approximately 2400 divorces take place. That’s an average of 100 an hour. Nearly 50 percent of all marriages in America end in divorce. 41 percent of first marriages end in divorce. 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce. 73 percent of third marriages end in divorce. After the third marriage, even statisticians no longer bother to keep track, turning away from Einstein’s observation that “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” Einstein is best known for his theory of special relativity expressed as E=MC2, but before giving the world that description of itself he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his theory of general relativity. Despite his many outrageous accomplishments and his assurance that the world is comprehensible, so far as is known, he did not leave us with a comprehensible theory of marriage and divorce. Einstein was married twice and part of the agreement of divorcing his first wife was that he gave her all the money he received for winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.

That is, divorce, too, is big business.

In all cultures and societies the rite of marriage is the culmination of the emotional/practical/legal obligations the two people involved intend (or at least are rolling the dice) to honor, enjoy, share and live happily ever after within. When it doesn’t work out, as it doesn’t about half the time, the rite of divorce is the culmination of a different set of emotional/practical/legal obligations, and we all know people who have been enriched by marriage and impoverished by divorce, and, of course, vice-versa. If Einstein had left us a formula it likely would show that it all balances out in the end.