Ellen Tien: Wife of the Year!

Okay, I've had a number of readers email me and commenter papabear linked to this article originating in the Oprah magazine and now brought to you by CNN.com entitled, "She's happily married, dreaming of divorce." Wife of the year Ellen Tien writes:

I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn't quite pieced out that I'm not viable before 10 a.m.

It puts two hands on my forehead and mercilessly presses when he blurts out the exact wrong thing ("Are you excited for your surprise party next Tuesday?"); when he lies to avoid the fight ("What do you mean I left our apartment door open? I never even knew our apartment had a door!"); when he buttons his shirt and jacket into the wrong buttonholes, collars and seams unaligned like a vertical game of dominoes, with possibly a scrap of shirttail zippered into his fly....

Don't misunderstand: I would not, could not disparage my marriage (not on a train, not in the rain, not in a house, not with a mouse). After 192 months, Will and I remain if not happily married, then steadily so. Our marital state is Indiana, say, or Connecticut -- some red areas, more blue. Less than bliss, better than disaster. We are arguably, to my wide-ish range of reference, Everycouple.

Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man, the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home's traffic so that one day I'll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he'll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.

Tien's husband may not be Very Bad Man but Tien is a Very Bad Woman or Wife. She says she would not disparage her husband for anything, but she has aired her dirty laundry in front of everyone and disparages her husband in every word she writes. She has called him bad, messy, oblivious and worst of all, announced to the world that she wants to divorce him everyday. Does he know this? Does he care? Does she give a damn about his feelings?

I hope one day that Will is strong enough to file for divorce from a woman who does not love him, for if she did, she would not write this narcissistic diatribe against him and his gender. If I were him, I would take a copy of this article to divorce court as proof of her lack of loyalty and her dishonest feelings toward him. His only crime seems to be smiling too much, being a bit clumsy, and poor choices in women. I would fight for custody of their son and hope that I could have this woman put out of the home, for she is not worthy to be there.