Awards banquet

Tonight we attended a banquet for my business. At some mind-wandering moment in the evening, I noticed how nice my wife was looking, and the idea occurred to me that if I didn't know her, among the couple hundred women in that room, I might have checked her out.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad one.

Today, my boss (who, as I've mentioned, is a bishop in a high-rent Salt Lake County zip code) shared with me his process of having dialed the 801-240-1000 Bat Phone to get direction as to whether he could counsel a chronically-abused woman in his ward to seek divorce. He showed me an interesting James Faust talk that includes the following:

“What, then, might be ‘just cause’ for breaking the covenants of marriage? Over a lifetime of dealing with human problems, I have struggled to understand what might be considered ‘just cause’ for breaking of covenants. I confess I do not claim the wisdom or authority to definitively state what is ‘just cause.’ Only the parties to the marriage can determine this. They must bear the responsibility for the train of consequences which inevitably follows if these covenants are not honored. In my opinion, ‘just cause’ should be nothing less serious than a prolonged and apparently irredeemable relationship which is destructive of a person’s dignity as a human being."

Tonight after the event, my wife said that her sister, who just gave birth to her second child, has openly said that she wishes she hadn't married her husband, that she had the new baby just to give the first one a sibling, and hasn't left her husband because she thinks it would "devastate" him. Maybe so. But I imagine she's scared as well, maybe terrified, of becoming something like the movie mom, but probably with worse prospects than movie mom, for a variety of reasons I won't detail here.

Damn complicated, all of it.