72 Comments

It is nice to see when someone has clearly moved on...

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Why get married? Just find a woman who hates you and buy her a house. 😭

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Chef’s kiss here.

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It sounds like you're in a good place, emotionally... lol

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This question might be helpful in normal married life: "Would you rather be right . . . or be married?"

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If being married requires questioning your own sanity, then I would take being right and keeping my sanity.

The technical term for what he was experiencing is gaslighting.

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You just improved my marriage. Asshole.

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Jeff, buddy, you and I don't know each other from a hole in the ground, but this post sounds like your ex-wife left you with something that you must avoid passing on to your current wife at all costs.

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The trick is to only date people with whom you have insane chemistry but hate already; that way, you're not tempted to marry them.

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😆

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For me, the post-divorce decade showed me I was right that her stonewalling (including every broken promise to reconvene later for calm discussion) was not just corrosive to our relationship but deeply psychologically and emotionally abusive to me. I wasn’t asking too much—she was.

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This is funny and yet there is some serious depth here and incisive knowledge about human interaction and relations:

'I know now that “almost compatible” is a synonym for “incompatible”'

'love is often expressed through modest tasks'

'Plato’s Allegory of the Cave comes to mind, with its lessons about the limits of knowledge within constrained experience.'

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Wow. I just subscribed, after months of reading 2 1/2 paragraphs each week, thinking, I should subscribe. And this, this is NOT funny. The first "column" of yours that I do NOT like. Be better. Describing your side of a divorce is not amusing.

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Perhaps you simply didn't get it, or you see yourself in the ex-wife too much...

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This woman moves & loses her husband's shit btw

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You could have easily said nothing and scrolled on. If you don't like the flavor of writing, try another flavor. Or write your own. I can't wait to not read it.

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You seem to be taking this lighthearted article personally. You be moving shit, don’t cha? 😉

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Nope. How a guy who can make the Whigs humorous, writes some trite shit about a first marriage - not my cup of tea. Agree to disagree.

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I can imagine Jeff taking pride in writing "trite shit". 🙂

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You *might* want to have your humor mechanism checked.

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I cannot tell if this itself is a joke. If so, it is really funny.

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Maurer-Bot, write me a Substack post in the style of an editorial from The Onion.

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Jeff,you are so excellent...this is a god tier piece.

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Never did these things, but once put a bayonet through my husband’s pillow (before he came to bed).

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Y’all, it’s satire. A man still angry at his ex wife a full decade later, over something super trivial, that happened as a result of her cleaning up after him and doing more than her share. The prolonged butthurt tirade. The flickers that let the reader know, oh, this guy’s a total asshole, over the story growing into total absurdity. It’s like Oblivion by David Foster Wallace, about the husband who insists he doesn’t snore bc he never actually loses awareness when he sleeps and he would know if he snores. It’s just not vey well executed

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You could’ve dropped that last sentence. But for your own sake rather than the author’s.

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Aww, hit dog hollerin’!

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She dusted the nightstand?!! Ahaha but seriously, I too know the feeling when you finally put two and two together. I had a friend who would borrow money on my behalf from her grandfather. I literally had her mother tell me to stop borrowing money from him but since it was in a screaming fit and I have PTSD all I could think was she was a crazy bitch. Which was sad because she killed herself not long after and had really never been anything but kind to me. One time this girl took me with her to visit her grandfather and he burst out of the house yelling NO! NO! NO! But still I didn't work it out till about ten years later. The realisation is new but no-one cares. Congratulations! The funny thing about realising you've been stupid is it's still a relief to put those loose ends to bed. Your ego will say different but you know how you feel.

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This was very good. Ignore the haters.

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