

What can we learn from serial celebrity break-ups, billionaire bust-ups, misbehaving spouses, pants-on challenged politicos and the ever-shifting landscape of divorce law? Question is, "What CAN'T we learn"? With latte in hand and clicky finger at the ready, dive in for the best in divorce news, views, gossip, and buzz – assembled below for your reading pleasure.
Our current contributors are Jill Brooke, Maureen Dempsey, Naomi Dunn, and Linda Lee.

An Indian man filed for divorce because he found his new bride's facial blemishes unbearable, according to The Times of India. In fact, he was so turned off that they never consummated the arranged marriage. He said she tried to hide her "condition," — that she attempted to fool him. (Reminder: This is a case of acne.)
The family court judge that presided over the case noted that although the women's acne was devastating for her, he was also sympathetic to the husband, for whom it must have been "traumatic." Sure, file this under "divorce news of the weird," and end of story, yes? No. It gets a bit stranger.
The man divorced his ex in 1998, and the court ruled the marriage was null and void in 2002. So why is this current day news? Because for the past six years, the woman has been fighting family court to have the negative remarks regarding her appearance expunged. In her own words:
Pimples are curable and don't hamper peaceful co-existence in married life, she said in her petition to the Bombay high court six years back.
The court has finally withdrawn the allegations last week.
Not sure if we'd call that "justice," but it's a start.

Rosie O'Donnell never minces words. Part of the reason we love her, right? In supporting Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, whose mother, brother and nephew were tragically murdered in Chicago, she blamed "guns and domestic violence."
In her blog, O'Donnell wrote, "Guns and domestic violence are a lethal combination — injuring and killing women every day in the United States. A gun is the weapon most commonly used in domestic homicides. In fact, more than three times as many women are murdered by guns used by their husbands or intimate acquaintances than are killed by strangers’ guns, knives or other weapons combined. Contrary to many public perceptions, many women who are murdered are killed not by strangers but by men they know."
Those men could be husbands, ex-husbands or even stepfathers.
She also cited these stats:
• Nearly one-third of all women murdered in the United States in recent years were murdered by a current or former intimate partner. In 2000, 1,247 women, more than three a day, were killed by their intimate partners.
• Of females killed with a firearm, almost two-thirds of were killed by their intimate partners.
• Access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner homicide more than five times more than in instances where there are no weapons, according to a recent study. In addition, abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners.
• In 2002, 54 percent of female homicide victims were shot and killed with a gun.
Details are still sketchy on who shot Hudson’s family.
Hudson’s mother, Darnell Donerson and brother Jason Hudson were with the Oscar winner’s nephew, Julian King, at the boy’s home in Chicago. His mother, Julia Hudson, was not in the house at the time of the murders.
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She was beautiful, and had a 5 year old daughter with her husband, the actor Danny Huston. She committed suicide this month before their divorce was even final, but the divorce did not “cause” her suicide. What caused it was bipolar disorder.
Katie Jane Evans, 35, was a born and bred English beauty, and her husband, 46, was the illegitimate son of the director John Huston and the English actress Zoe Sallis. They married in 2002, and moved to a house in the Hollywood Hills, in California, while Huston appeared in movies like How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. They visited Huston’s half sister, the actress Anjelica Huston. She was friends with the aristocratic Emma Parker Bowles, who also lived in LA.
Life seemed glamorous and exciting. Then things turned bitter.
The divorce proceedings, which she filed in California last year, were fraught with charges and countercharges. He used drugs. She tried to commit suicide with pain killers and alcohol, and had gone into rehab. He wasn’t capable of caring for their child. She wasn’t capable of caring for their child. She told Huston’s talent agent that she was bipolar, and had hidden that from her husband for their entire marriage.
Bipolar disorder is a serious mental illness also called manic depression; people with a severe form live chaotic lives on the edge, take risks, have periods of exhilaration and wild creativity, followed by deep depressions. Some 20 percent of the most seriously afflicted commit suicide.
Despite the acrimony, the terms of the divorce were settled amicably: Huston gave her their Hollywood Hills house and $17,500 a month, half his income, and they agreed on shared custody of their daughter, Stella.
But, her friends said, she went into a deep depression over the end of her marriage.
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After going through the stress of many in vitro fertilizations, I vivdly remember signing a paper giving the unused embryos to scientific research. In my mind, it was the least I could do since, thanks to this modern day miracle, I could possible conceive the child I so desperately wanted.
But I also realized that the pain — both physical and emotional — of this process could also break couples apart. It was right there in front of me, as I witnessed the cumulative strain on people in the waiting room.
What, I wondered, would happen to their embryos if indeed they broke up? A woman on fertility drugs can produce as many as 20 or 30 eggs. Who would get them?
The nurses would smile and tell me not to worry about it, especially since my husband and I were, they said, such a happy couple. Naturally the reporter in me wanted answers. Where exactly did the embryos go? Did they go into one large unpatrolled laboratory where a rogue nurse would sell them elsewhere. And then, in years to come, I'd meet my lookalike in the mall.
Yes, I know, it seems like something out of a Robin Cook medical thriller, and I laughed at how fertile my imagination could be. So did the nurses. Everything, they assured me, was properly monitored and nothing could happen to the embryos without both parents’ consent.
With in vitro fertilization (IVF), doctors usually implant no more than four fertilized eggs to prevent high-multiple births. In Oregon, a divorced couple split on what to do with their six frozen fertilized eggs, and the case ended up in the Oregon Court of Appeals.
Laura Dahl and her former husband, Darrell Angle, had stored their “embryos” with Oregon Health and Science University, where she had undergone IVF. (For the sake of argument, the court called the fertilized eggs “embryos,” although they said that, technically, they would become embryos only once implanted in a woman’s womb.)
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Last week, we highlighted the story of a husband who threatened to divorce his ex-smoker wife if she lit up again; this week, cigars are the point of contention.
An otherwise happy Egyptian wife is divorcing her husband — and his stogie habit — reports Russian news source Novosti. The woman alleges that her partner refuses to smoke outside their home, and, consequently, she has developed a heavy allergy.
In her own words:
"My husband deliberately puts my life to danger. And I am not ready to sacrifice my life for the sake of love for him," she said.
She calls him "inflexible"; he calls her "inhumane":
"I am a draftsman engineer, and I often take additional work home to earn more money for my loved but ungrateful wife," he lamented.
Feels like everything's going up in smoke these days...

"Honey, I've got a headache" could take on a whole new meaning, say Italian researchers. According to expressindia.com, the burden of cheating brings about stress, which leads to a migraine, which can possibly lead to a life-threatening aneurysm.
The researchers studied hundreds of patients. Some of those who reported the worst headaches were also cheating on their spouses.
The funny thing: Instead of backing up the research with additional research material and stats or cautioning women of the signs that husbands may be straying, the President of the Italian Migraine Society, Lorenzo Pinessi, offers helpful tips for the migraine-prone, cheating husbands!
His advice for frazzled adulterers was to "take a time-out from the affair and have a brain scan."
And, according to him, headache-prone cheats should "avoid the Karma Sutra and stick to simple sexual intercourse" to limit pressure on the heart.
"The sexual position chosen can also have affect as the more physical the more pressure on the heart -- it is probably best to avoid positions where the male is on his feet," Pinessi said.
Right. Of course! Please, guys, stick to "simple sexual intercourse"...with your mistress.


Ever notice the girls who mature quicker?
It's easy to chalk it up to an evolving society. Everything happens quicker, faster, earlier for the generations that follow. Exposure to the media, the Internet, and an immediacy for information puts our children (or in some cases, our children's children) in fast forward.
New research, however, shows that environmental factors of early puberty might hit closer to home than you think.
International studies have cited divorce as the culprit behind a range of medical conditions, from asthma and eczema to diabetes — in addition to deteriorating the environment.
Now you can add early puberty to the list. The University of Arizona, in conjunction with New Zealand's University of Canterbury, studied the effects of absentee fathers and divorce on adolescent development, and found that young females without a positive paternal influence developed earlier — sometimes as much as one year's difference.
Early puberty has been linked to teen pregnancy and various health issues, including breast cancer.
Researchers haven't determined why this is so, but have suggested an evolutionary biology link. Says the University of Arizona article:
"The idea is that children adjust their development to match the environments in which they live," Ellis said. "In the world in which humans evolved, dangerous or unstable home environments meant a shorter lifespan, and going into puberty earlier in this context increased chances of surviving, reproducing and passing on your genes."
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Now another reason why divorcing parents should minimize fighting – it’s bad for your kids’ health. No, not just their emotional health – we knew that – but stress affects your kids’ immune systems too and could create increases in asthma and eczema.
According to a story by Jane Collingwood at PsychCentral, research in Germany at Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research discovered that stressful events during childhood are increasingly suspected of playing a role in the later development of asthma, allergic skin disorders, and allergic “sensitizations.”
The researchers took blood samples from 234 6-year-old children participating in the ongoing LISA (Life style-Immune System-Allergy) study. The blood was tested to measure levels of a stress-related neuropeptide called VIP and immune markers, such as the cytokine IL-4, related to allergic reactions.
Children with separated or divorced parents showed particularly high VIP levels and immune markers, as did those who had moved. However, severe disease, parental unemployment or death of a family member led to “no remarkable changes.”
As lead researcher Gunda Herberth told Collingwood, “As tragic as these events are, they are obviously of less significance for the stress reactions of children than for example a separation or the divorce of parents.”
The study is in the journal Pediatric Allergy and Immunology.
The link between stress and the immune system has always been suspected — common sense — but science is only now beginning to tease out risk factors.
Another study supports these recent findings. Parental stress can raise the risk of wheezing among children with no family history of asthma.
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Psychology Today blogger Dr. Stephen T. Sinatra tipped us off to a recent study on the effects of marriage and heart health. Turns out, staying in an unhealthy relationship can do more than damage your psyche: It can calcify your arteries. Says Sinatra:
Married people experience less cardiovascular disease than single people, however, a bad marriage can be disastrous to the heart.
Researchers studied married couples' communication styles while also tracking their heart health, concluding that women who experienced severe hostility during marital disputes had the highest level of calcification. Husbands who exhibited the most controlling behavior during marital disputes had the highest of all men in the study.
What's happening? The body is producing stress chemicals, and the angrier or more controlling you are, the more your arteries suffer.
I'm thinking a new slogan here: "Divorce: It does a body good."