Such bullshit.

So, my mom is an avid reader of the gossip magazines: People, Star, Us, you name it. She has a few subscriptions and when she's done reading them, she passes them on to me. And I put them in the bathroom, of course, for some serious reading material. I feel a sick mixture of joy and shame that my kids can carry on a conversation about whether or not Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes may indeed be pregnant with their second baby or if Brangelina is still together.

Anyhoo. So today I was reading an article in People magazine, an article about Leann Rimes. She had an affair with that Eddie guy from Lifetime movies and CSI Miami. He was married, with two little kids, she was married with no kids. They "fell in love" on the set of some show, and ended up divorcing their respective spouses. Happens every day, right?

Leann was all "I'm tired of being called a homewrecker, Eddie and I are soulmates, we didn't want to hurt either one of our spouses" and "Both of our marriages had issues."

Bullshit.

That's the same crap that I heard from Big Daddy. "Our marriage was awful" "I love you, but I'm not in love with you". Is there a script for unfaithful spouses out there, some dog-eared, battered paperback or pamphlet that gets passed around like a worn out copy of Forever by Judy Blume? Because this sounds like a tired old song and dance. You'd think people who are clever enough to figure out how to bang someone on the sly could dream up some new excuses.

The bad marriage one is my least favorite. It's like finding out that you have cancer and then deciding to not treat it because "I might die anyway." Will you die? Maybe, but don't you want to try everything you can to avoid doing so? Most marriages get sick at some point (sometimes cancer, sometimes just the sniffles). Those that survive are the ones where the illness is acknowledged and treated before it spreads beyond control. (My apologies to anyone who has dealt with actual cancer, I don't mean to belittle your experiences.)

Conversely, one could also say, "You know why your marriage is bad? BECAUSE YOU'RE HUMPING SOMEONE ELSE, EINSTEIN."

Was my marriage awful? We had issues, you bet. More issues than Reader's Digest. But I can tell you this...they weren't beyond repair until the whole "oops my penis fell into a secretary" debacle. Because once you drag someone else into your own private tar pit, things get complicated. And complicated turns ugly, fast.

A marriage dies when one person decides it's dead. The other person can try everything humanly possible to make things all better, but this is one scenario where it truly takes two to tango. The one who leaves, who strays...if they would just be honest and admit that they gave up, that they ditched, it would be nice. Don't blame issues, real or imagined, in a marriage for making you sneak around. No one is ever forced to cheat.

If you have big enough balls to start a relationship with someone new while you're still married, and worse yet, while the person you're still married to has no idea that you've checked out, then you should own up to it. Cut one of them loose, before you do any more damage. It's the decent thing to do. Probably the only decent thing that you'll have done in a long time.

I don't really have a point to this rant. I blame it on raging PMS, remorse over potato chips and a-holes who lie to make what they did look less shitty.