Letters: Love, old age and divorce

Re “A ‘gray divorce’ boom,” Opinion, March 31

Susan L. Brown picks up on the current spate of columns about the meaning of marriage in our Western societies. She writes, “Men and women who are 65 can expect to live 20 more years, a long time to spend with someone you may not like so much anymore.” It strikes me as most symptomatic of the brainless, emotionless, semi-stuporous society of babes bred in bottles in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

To those of this temperament, baby boomer marriages are lived through with someone you like or once liked, but “not so much anymore,” as though we choose to “like” or “not like” our mates by pressing a link on a computer screen. Easy come, easy go, even after decades shared intimately.

It seems none of the sociology, poll-reading pundits ever use the word “love.” And to love is not the same as to be “in” love.

Jascha Kessler

Santa Monica

When Brown writes that well-off adults may find divorce “empowering,” but that for “less-advantaged adults, a late-in-life divorce can be devastating,” she might as well have been speaking directly to me — and to every other divorced man or woman who gets stuck with the alimony bill.

Most people think that alimony went out with indentured servitude, but it did not. If, like me, you were the “working spouse” in a long-lasting marriage, you can be ordered to support the “non-working spouse” for many years to come. I’m in such a situation.

Not that I’m bitter, but how is this fair? We already have “no-fault” divorce; it’s high time we had “no-alimony” divorce too.

Robert Masello

Santa Monica

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