The thing about limits is that they tend to inspire creativity. Take a Romanian attorney, for example.

Romania's laws prohibit lawyers from advertising. Now, for the moment, let's set aside the discussion about how this is a great idea and we should do it here too. The guy needed a way to get the word out about his services. He apparently handles divorce cases, so he had a bunch of mini-sized business cards printed up and had them stuck onto the outside of condom wrappers. And the condoms were sitting in a bowl on the front desk at a hotel.

For another moment, let's set aside the discussion of condoms being available in plain sight in hotel lobbies, like maps of local attractions, although we'd support this idea too!

Anyway, the idea is that people come to the hotel to have illicit affairs, so it's the perfect place to make sure they know legal help is available once they're found out. If only he was allowed to advertise, I could see the TV commercial now: "If you're having an affair, you need a condom ... and a lawyer!"

All it takes is a little ingenuity. Lawyers ... these are smart people!

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I'm not certain if I reached the proverbial "end of the Internet" the other day, but I read an idiotic blog posting by a writer from London's The Business magazine. If it wasn't the end, here's hoping it was damn close, or else the Web has become a very dumb place.

He says the reason divorce rates are rising is because women are using the pill and it's screwing up our sense of smell.

Yeah, see, before I even try to explain it, you're already tuning out. The reasoning is that we pick prospective mates based on a sub-conscious sense of smell that attracts us to them. That much I can deal with. I know all about pheromones. But he says since the pill mimics pregnancy, it alters that whole chemical balance and leads us to be attracted to the wrong guys.

Not much scientific reasoning behind this one. Just a blogger needing to fill his space for the day, I think. And that means the Internet is turning out just like TV.

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It seems Japanese businessmen are getting serious about saving their marriages. CNN did an entertaining report on an organization called the National Chauvinistic Husbands Association, which, despite the way that name sounds, pushes men to be better husbands. There's probably a little something lost in translation with that name, but what they advocate seems pretty clear. Basically, they tell the guys to be more attentive and practice the "three golden rules of love." You're dying to know, so here they are:

• Say thank you without hesitation.
• Say I'm sorry without fear.
• Say I love you without embarrassment.

What's interesting is that there may be one particular factor motivating all of this good husbanding: pension money. Japan enacted a law this year that entitles a woman to claim half of her husband's pension in a divorce.

Let the courtesy and chivalry begin!

The number of divorce cases has risen in Japan, but it's still nowhere even close to what we have here in the U.S. I'd like to think that guys don't need a point-by-point lesson plan in what amounts to basic sensitivity. But that's wishful thinking, isn't it? We all know they do. And there are probably a lot of long-held cultural standards in Japan that keep the guys from having a sense of what to do. So we should all give a big thumb's up to the Chauvinistic Husbands Association!

Put that on the top of the list of things I never thought I'd hear myself say.

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Here's what you want from the judge in your divorce case: marital counseling. Sounds ridiculous, but apparently the idea is catching on in India, and it's sort of a different twist on mediation, which we've written about here before.

Still, it seems rather odd. Judges are essentially telling quarreling couples to go on dates — see a movie, go have dinner, spend some time together. And believe it or not, according to a report citing court statistics, about 60 percent of couples called off their plans to get separated after taking such advice from judges. It sounds like India's system has a judge sit in on mediation proceedings, and it's at that point in the process that this "go on a date" advice is being doled out.

It sounds crazy, because by the time you're sitting in a mediation session, it seems like you would be well past the point of saving your marriage. But that's the magic of mediation. It's a less adversarial process, and it can work in lots of ways that the traditional lawyer-vs.-lawyer model can't.

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According to these statistics, nearly 40 percent of Japanese married couples speak to each other less than 30 minutes a day. Slightly less disturbing, nearly half the women surveyed said they had contemplated divorce at some point.

Now, the numbers were collected by an insurance company. I'm not sure what motivation they'd have in showing that marriages are struggling. But the survey also found that the chief complaints women had about their husbands was that they smoked and drank too much. Maybe it's part of some healthy living initiative.

But let's not get bogged down in analyzing the numbers. I think the bottom line here is really very simple: A lot of married couples don't spent a heck of a lot of time talking to each other. I wonder what the results would be if you asked American couples how much time they spend every day talking to each other. Come to think of it, I take that back. I'm not sure I really want to know.

Somewhere, Lorena Bobbitt is smiling.

A court in Taiwan has granted a man a divorce because his wife has been threatening to cut off his penis.

What a perfectly lovely story this is.

The couple has been married for 10 years. Two years ago, the wife began to suspect that her husband was cheating. And that's when she started making threats against his manhood. She would wake him up in the middle of the night to interrogate him and let him know that bad things might be happening to that sensitive part of the anatomy.

You think that’s sick, try this: She started sharpening a knife and leaving it next to the bed. Think about how brave this guy must have been to get into bed every night with a woman like that.

So, given all this information, the court decided there was no way this couple could continue living together and granted the divorce.

See what you started, Lorena?

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Sounds horrendous doesn't it? Like the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a soap opera. But under the circumstances, it is the right thing to do.

The man's wife has an incurable condition and will be in a coma for the rest of her life. He has agreed to arrange for her care. But he also has an ailing mother to take care of, so the court has permitted his divorce. There are no easy decisions here, for either the court or the man involved.

A story in the China Post briefly says that the comatose woman can't "fulfill her role as a wife." I was just about to suggest that rulings like this show that maybe Chinese authorities are beginning to demonstrate a more progressive approach. But this is still a very patriarchal society. I can't help but wonder what the court's ruling might have been if things were reversed, and it was the husband in the coma.

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I wrote the other day about a story that said the number of unmarried 20-somethings is on the rise. Well, it turns out that statistic was one of many that were released by the Census Bureau this week. There are a lot of interesting numbers about divorce now available.

One of the others that caught my eye was that the divorce rate has mostly stabilized in recent decades. Yet, experts say that the threat of divorce remains a constant throughout a marriage. In other words, you’re not less likely to get divorced just because your marriage reaches a certain number of years.

The idea of the “seven-year itch” appears to be a myth more than anything else, with one expert quoted in a USA Today story adding that you’re marriage isn’t “divorce-proof” if it reaches 10 years.

Obviously, numbers are valuable. But they’re just numbers. They don’t take into account the circumstances that lead to a divorce, nor can they. So it’s tough to know what to make of them. But this “threat of divorce” idea is interesting when you contrast it with the facts about 20-somethings holding off on marriage. I’m no social scientist, but it seems clear to me that there’s some correlation here.

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According to statistics cited in the story, the number of 20-somethings who have never been married rose sharply between 2000 and 2006. Among both men and women, the number of people in their 20s who had never been married increased nine percent over that span.

But it's the actual percentages that are particularly interesting: 73 percent of men and 63 percent of women weren't married before age 30.

There are a lot of reasons why this is happening. Obviously fear of divorce has something to do with it. The USA Today piece mentions one possible reason is that it's becoming more and more difficult for 20-somethings to achieve financial independence. And with the housing market the way it is, that's only likely to continue.

But it also seems pretty clear that attitudes about marriage are shifting among young adults. Think about it: How many people do you know who haven't done the "live together" thing? A lot of young couples see that as a necessary step before deciding to get married.

Of course, as I've mentioned before, you can go round and round eight ways to Sunday with statistics. Let's say you live with someone for a couple of years and then the relationship ends. To me, that's just like going through a divorce, at least from an emotional standpoint.

But, of course, that doesn't count as a divorce. Someday I'd like to see the stats on people who have lived with someone out of wedlock and split up, because I consider them divorced too.

Divorce among 20-somethings continues to rise. And it'll be interesting to know whether there will be fewer divorces among people who wait until their 30s to get married.

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The writer who brought us “The Starter Wife” is developing a comedy-drama series about divorce for NBC.

Novelist Gigi Levangie Grazer’s “The Starter Wife” was adapted into a mini-series that aired on USA Network earlier this year. A Reuters report on Levangie Grazer’s deal with NBC didn’t mention when the new show would air or what its title would be. But based on its premise, the show sounds like it’ll be worth watching.

It’ll tell the story of a 30-something couple with two kids that’s getting a divorce, but still living together. Levangie Grazer knows the subject well. She’s in the process of her second divorce, splitting up with Hollywood producer Brian Grazer. The show will deal with a lot of the issues we write about here at FWW, namely how to divorce in peace and how to co-parent through a divorce. As Levangie Grazer said in the Reuters story, acrimonious divorces are "so 1990s."

I’m interested to give this one a shot. Here’s hoping NBC doesn’t give it a quick hook and pull the plug on it before it finds its footing. A show like this could give a lot of people a little sense of comfort. Sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of a reminder that there are lots of people out there dealing with the same things you are.

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