“Marriage Comes and Goes, But Divorce is Forever”?

The day after Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported on one of The Huffington Post’s latest sections: Divorce News.

Conceived over coffee, friends Arianna Huffington and Nora Ephron agreed, “people love it when anyone is willing to be vulnerable about their own life.”  Both women have been candid about their own experience with divorce; Huffington has spoken about her parents’, while Ephron has written books about her own.

The section aims not only to highlight high-profile divorce but to shine a light on situations, good, bad and ugly, for people who are involved in one.  Personalized accounts of divorce laws, custody battles, prenuptial agreements, and so on, are a great resource for subjective readers to gain some objectivity, or camaraderie.

Ephron mused, “Who knows? Maybe just reading all about [divorce] will scare people away.”

The divorce section, like the wedding section in most conventional news sources, simply makes divorce more public.  Divorce is a private matter, but publicizing in a forum that waives the standard “pretense of perfection,” as Huffington put it, may have surprisingly positive side-effects.