One of the big developments of the 20th century in family law was the no fault divorce. It represents a major shift in the thinking of the courts about the promise of marriage. That shift is this: if one person wants a divorce, then the courts will grant a divorce without any need for a further reason.
This can be counter-intuitive because the popular notion about divorce is that someone is to blame. Normally the adulterer. What about a gay adulterer? Is it an easier betrayal to realize that the reason your wife was unfaithful is that she didn’t like your gender? I don’t know. Nobody can know because intensity of feeling is subjective. Anyhow, neither TGT nor the adulterty factored into the legal proceedings because it was a no-fault divorce done under the collaborative divorce rules. Our divorce happened mostly through preparing for a series of conference-table discussions. Although I was heartbroken and angry, none of this was reflected in the proceeding, the papers, or the outcome. Basically my feelings were my problem, not the courts. If you just said to yourself “as it should be” then you’ve been swept away in the contemporary jurisprudence on family law. Your corresponding self from 30, 50, and 100 years ago might not have agreed. Your corresponding self might have said something about getting justice against the party who broke the sacred marriage vows. And if you said something more like the 2nd thing, then it shows that the sweep of history is incremental.
Anyhow, this isn’t about legal theory. This is about whether TGT somehow made my divorce easier. Was it a comfort to know that there wasn’t some scuzzy guy she liked better? I don’t know. Is some scuzzy gal that she met on the internet really an improvement? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I was shocked and heartbroken. I was never surprised.
I will say this, however. When my ex-wife moved out, she was rejecting everything about the perfect life that she had built for herself with the adoring, faithful, white-collar husband; the shiny new house in the suburb; and the two cherubic kids. Her reasons on the last are unclear and a bit inconsistent, like the woman herself. But the fact is, I am glad to have custody of my kids, I am a loving and devoted father, she remains involved in the kids lives, and we have transitioned from spouses to amicable co-partents at arms length in a manner which has been a whole lot better than my own parents or many other divorced parents that I knew.
There are various groups set up for straight spouses, the most prominent being the Straight Spouse Network and there is even a celebrity pop-psychologist champion with three names (Amity Pierce Buxton) and a rival (has a new book out, but can’t remember the name). And I joined them for a while but quickly lost interest. The reason why is because these groups all deal with the strangeness of discovering that your ex is gay. At some level, its because the most straight ex-spouses think that its strange it be gay. Its an uncommon reason to get divorced, statisically speaking. But it’s not a strange reason. Take TGT out of the equation and my divorce is simply a case of a wife waking up one day to realize that she’d made a terrible mistake in her life about what she thought she wanted once the things she thought she wanted started to happen. So first she got passive aggressive about undoing her own project, then she just bolted. That’s a familiar enough story.
The (so far) good outcome is a little more strange. In part I attribute this to doing a collaborative divorce. In part, I attribute this to being a liberal and therefore morally superior to you conservative haters (suck it! … this is a joke, why don’t you relax?). But in part, I think its about TGT. She wanted a different life. Were she not gay, I’d wonder “why cant we both change together?” and I’d also be critical of her desires. And, in fact, outside of TGT, she’s made other life choices since living on her own, that I am critical of. I’ve noticed though, that because she’s not my spouse and its not my problem, these choices piss me off a whole lot less.
ok, now some relevant tmbg lyrics:
URNX
URNX, NI, IMNX
ICTV
ICTV
ICTV, NICU
ICU, ICU, NUROK
...All my darkest hours talking like this... 
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