When things fall apart

"Love, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest." This was one of the observations of Helen Rowland, an American humorist and journalist, whose 'Reflections Of A Bachelor Girl' also contained quips like, "When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they 'don't understand' one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to." Helen died in 1950, so she was spared the weirdness that followed.

There is a story that a man and his wife filed for divorce on the grounds of "mutual incompatibility". He had squandered his income and she had lost her patability. But, as we say in Trinidad, "Dat is joke."

In April 2009, a German woman divorced her husband because she was "fed up" with him cleaning everything all the time. For 15 years, the wife had to put up with the man's obsession with cleaning - doing household chores, tidying up and rearranging the furniture, keeping the dishes constantly washed, but she ran out of patience when he knocked down and rebuilt a wall at their home when it got dirty. They got the divorce and made a clean break. I mentioned this to one of the ladies in my office and she responded immediately, "Send him by me."

In China, a woman who lied about her age was dumped by her husband after 10 years of marriage. The woman, who was 30 when husband-to-be asked her to marry him, told him she was just 24. In 2007, the man filed for divorce after realising he had been duped and the court granted his wish. It is claimed that the woman's defence was that the marriage was so bad she had aged 16 years in the 10 years of marriage.

Also in China, a woman launched divorce proceedings against her husband after the family's pet mynah bird let the cat out of the bag.

Reports say that the woman first suspected something was wrong when she returned from a monthlong visit to her parents and heard the bird repeating words apparently picked up from her husband's telephone calls to his lover. The bird said words he had never said before, like "divorce", "I love you", and "be patient".

The husband kept hoping that the cat that was let out of the bag would eat the bird. The court refused to grant the divorce on the basis that the bird's evidence was inadmissible. What the woman should have done was to charge her husband for corrupting a mynah.

In Germany, an 83-year-old German woman divorced her 81-year-old husband after 60 years of marriage because he was caught having sex with his mistress at work.The affair, among other things, was exposed when they forgot to pull the curtains while having a quickie in his office. Love might be blinds, but not his wife. It was curtains for the husband.

His wife threw him out of their home and he moved in with his younger lover, who lives just two doors down the road. It is said that some other older ladies immediately moved into the nearby apartments. On the other hand - if that is the appropriate organ for this particular comparison - a 47-year-old Russian man was divorced by his wife after his penis extension broke off during sex. Doctors in Voronezh, southern Russia, had fitted the special prosthetic when Grigory Toporov told them he was unable to "measure up" to his wife's expectations in the bedroom.

However, something in her snapped when the extension broke off during a wild sex session. Despite his promises to his wife that he would get a new device, his wife could take no more and, leaving him to his own devices, she dumped him.

However, the one that takes the cake, condiments, barfi and every other Indian sweet-meat is a man who was granted a divorce because his wife was insatiable in bed and wanted too much sex. The man told the family court in Mumbai that his wife had harassed him for sex non-stop since they married in April 2012. According to the Times of India, the husband alleged that his sex-crazy spouse would force him into having unnatural sex.

He said that whenever he tried to resist her advances, she would abuse him, so he would always end up succumbing to her persistent demands. The man went as far as to allege that his sex-crazy spouse gave him medication and forced him to drink alcohol in a fruitless effort to boost his sexual appetite. He told the court that he worked three shifts, leaving him exhausted, but his wife would still put unbearable pressure on him to fulfil her lust.

Things came to a head in October 2013 when the man was operated on for appendicitis and his wife still insisted that they have sexual relations, even as he struggled to recover. Despite begging her to visit a psychiatrist, the man said his spouse simply refused to take action and threatened him against revealing their marital issues. The man insisted it was intolerable for him to bear any more atrocities and that he was afraid for his health should the marriage continue.

The man got his divorce. Commenting on the judgment, one of my friends with whom I had shared the story remarked, "When things came to a head, he should have left them there."

n Tony Deyal was last seen saying that when a Russian woman told her husband she was divorcing him for gambling her away in a card game, his angry reaction was, "Have a heart." Fortunately, she did not have a club or a spade.