She loved to gossip, and she was good at it.  She was quite masterful when it came to the art of hearsay – the delicate procedures of simultaneously striving to please people while besmirching people were now second-nature to her.  And “the best part” was that she was blissfully unaware of the devastating relational wreckage left in her wake.

He was hyper-sensitive.  Whenever you crossed paths with him, he had a “fresh” sob story to tell about how he had been mistreated, or disrespected, or undervalued, or unappreciated, or unnoticed, or only slightly celebrated, etc.  He was – perhaps – the most insightful person to have ever walked the earth, for he had an uncanny ability to detect conspiracies (wherein he was always the target) that no one else could see.  He had so saturated his identity in the deluge of “being the victim” that he was now utterly desensitized to the fact that he was making all his friends and family miserable.

He was angry.  He HAD to be angry, he honestly felt that he had no choice in the matter.  It was simply who he was – he was born this way.  It was nothing personal (his lifestyle wasn’t really hurting anyone; it’s not like he was abusive, he was just angry).  It was pragmatic – it was how he had learned to function in the world for as long as he could remember.  And if people sincerely wanted him to be less angry, then they should simply learn to avoid confronting him about it – for addressing his anger only made him more angry (these morons where attempting to extinguish a fire by throwing fuel on it …such stupidity was maddening to him).  People just didn’t understand him.  He was courageous, he was willing to be bold, he was willing to be the bad guy!  And this was all-the-more-crucial in his case, for his wife was a softie, and their family would never experience the “blessings” of tough love if it weren’t for him.

She had made up her mind.  She wasn’t happy and that settled the matter.  How could anyone expect her to stay if she wasn’t happy.  Of course he was “a good guy,” but he couldn’t make her happy.  It wasn’t his fault, and it certainly wasn’t her fault.  This kind of thing just happens; it’s just part of life; it’s normal.  Happiness was king, and nothing could be done to re-enthrone Lord Happiness within the confines of their marriage anymore.  Her only real grievance toward her soon-to-be-ex-husband was how he had recently attempted to manipulate her, and blackmail her into staying.  He had said, “But you leaving will make me unhappy!  If you claim to be so loyal to Lord Happiness how can you stand to inflict me with such anti-happiness?”  Bless his heart (though she was peeved with him for attempting to tamper with her dogma, she always chose to take the moral high ground by regularly couching her replies in a smattering of condescending preambles), he was too simple and childlike to realize that he too – eventually – would be happier once she finalized their divorce.  Some had suggested that this choice of hers would be devastating to there 2 year old daughter, but of course that was easy to rebut: (a) assuming it were even remotely traumatic (which, of course, it wasn’t), their daughter was too young to understand what was really happening and she’d never remember it, and (b) this was a courageous and momentous decision – a watershed moment to be sure – and it would be through fires of precisely this sort that their daughter would be refined into a great woman of happiness! …Now that she thought about it, she realized that she was being extraordinarily heroic! – she was practically a martyr!, not merely fighting for her own pursuit of happiness but the happiness of her entire family, and the noble cause of happiness everywhere!