It looks like Jim and Dina McGreevey are back in court this morning dealing with alimony. Yes, again. Talks have broken down again and they have to go in and have the judge sort out their mess to figure out who owes what to whom. Raise your hand if you're surprised. It's OK, I'll wait.

Perhaps I am the only person on the planet who is infinitely sympathetic to Jim McGreevey. Britney Spears, too. Oh, and let's not forget the ever pleasant Heather Mills?

I love these fine, upstanding citizens because they keep being moronic and I keep getting paid to write about it. If they could get it together to act like civilized human beings I'd be looking for a job right now.

Last week they finally agreed on custody arrangements for their daughter. Lawyers are hanging out behind closed doors and the estranged couple meet this morning at 10 a.m. to try and hammer out the financial details of the divorce and generally make a spectacle of themselves.

I hope it takes a long time — my youngest needs new glasses and my oldest is looking into summer camps.

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Although it's only May of 2008, Mr. Kent Gramm is having a bad year. After 30 years of marriage and more than 20 years of teaching, Mr. Gramm is getting divorced and leaving his teaching post at the same time.

Mr. Gramm currently teaches at Wheaton College, a well known conservative Evangelical Christian school, which requires all of its employees to display behavior acceptable to the school's religious teaching.

All employees sign a "statement of faith and community covenant," which spells out exactly the kind of behavior the school will accept.

Drinking, smoking, and gambling are not on the list, and dancing was only allowed four years ago after being banned during the Civil War.

While the school acknowledges that divorce can happen, they need to know all of the details of the divorce to determine if the employee has broken his signed statement by exhibiting unacceptable behavior.

Mr. Gramm acknowledges that he signed the statement but does not believe he should have to disclose the details of his divorce. As he is aware that not disclosing the details will get him fired, he has agreed to resign and will stay only until the end of the school term.

"I think it's wrong to have to accuse your spouse and to discuss with your employer your personal life and marital situation," Gramm said. "But I don't feel badly treated. There has been an attitude of compassion here."

As the school is concerned about how the behavior of one of its teachers will affect the student body, Mr. Gramm decided to discuss his resignation and the reasons behind it with his students. "I want them to know that divorce happens," Gramm said. "That you aren't deserted by God because your life doesn't turn out the way you expect. I hope this helps them acquire a broader understanding of what Christianity is and what faithfulness means."

Women's rights activists are up in arms about a contentious divorce case in Tennessee that may result in the local marital property laws to be changed. According to an article in Tennessean.com, "a wage-earning husband gets to keep $1.7 million in stock. His homemaker wife gets nothing."

Okay, I admit, when we're talking about the rights of the stay-at-home spouse — and let's face it, while many husbands including my own are starting to stay home, it's generally the wife — and there are a few million dollars in play, I can see why people are getting concerned. Some are suggesting that if this settlement goes through as is, it could be precedent setting and go against state laws.

But, and there's a really big but, I don't think that this case has anything to do with the wife being a homemaker. The court says that the husband is being allowed to keep the stock and not share it because all he did was hold it after receiving it as a gift from his father. Her employment status is irrelevant.

In my opinion — and I know this is going to make me the bad guy — when you decide not to work, you take a risk. A gift given to one individual is just that — a gift with only one intended recipient. If Daddy had given him a cheese knife, is she entitled to half of that, too?

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It looks like, once again, people are in an uproar about the divorce process becoming more automated. We talked about this a while back when one Florida county made it possible for spouses to fill out their divorce applications online. Now Australia's in on it, and they're complaining too.

"It's an unfortunate reflection of the times in which we live that these things could be so extraordinarily convenient as to perhaps make people rush to that kind of action," says Mark Holzworth of the Australian Family Association Queensland. "I think sometimes the cold hard document in front of us...causes us to reflect a little more, think a little deeper."

Sorry, Mark, but I'm going to have to disagree on this one. Divorce is never easy, and making the red-tape a little simpler to navigate doesn't make it so.

This kind of thing makes me crazy. The "family association" types act like we're all waltzing around in perfectly happy marriages until we read in the paper that we can break up our entire family online. Then we're tripping over our index fingers to click, "divorce."

No. That's not how it goes and it's not how it ever has gone and it's not how it ever will go. Normal people do not get divorced this way. If someone wants to get divorced because of this, nobody wanted to be married to them anyway.

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When you have a Google News alert for the term "divorce," you get some crazy stuff in your inbox. Most of it gets immediately thrown into the virtual round file, but this recent piece in the Korean Times stopped me in my tracks.

"There may be many factors driving couples to a divorce, but what makes them run out of patience the quickest?" Hmm. Good question.

According to a statistics from the Korea Wedding Culture Research Center, when there's cheating involved, couples tend to hit the courts between seven and eight years post "I do." Family troubles bring the split after 3.7 years and money drama comes in at around 5.9. Drug addiction — drug addiction! Did that really make the list? — causes a split after around 6.6 years, and physical illness comes in at 5.3 years.

Interesting stuff, but what does it mean?

What I took away from it is the fact that people will stay with a crack addict or an adulterer longer than they will stay with someone who has a pain in the ass mother. Crazy stuff, and it makes me realize my mother wasn't so archaic when she told me I wasn't marrying the man, I was marrying his family.

Also noteworthy are the answers from the couples who didn't necessarily get divorced. Apparently, Korean couples lose sexual chemistry with their spouses after three or four years, causing researchers to suggest that Koreans get a three-year-itch to coincide with our seven-year-itch. Who knew?

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Today I read about a man who really, really wants to stay married to his wife. Well, it's either that or he really, really doesn't want to divorce her.

The Supreme Rabbinical Court in Israel set a precedent this week, ordering a man to divorce his wife or spend half a decade in solitary confinement. The man was ordered to divorce his wife and pay her alimony several years ago, and consistently refused. After ignoring several arrest warrants, he was finally found in a Jerusalem yeshiva, or religious seminary — after a search that lasted for years.

He was jailed for one year, on the condition that he divorce his wife by the time he got out. When he indicated that he still wouldn't agree, the Supreme Rabbinical Court — who don't tend to get involved in this sort of thing — sentenced him to a further four years. Not content with sticking the guy in a regular Israeli jail, they've done something they've never done before. They've sentenced him to solitary confinement for the whole time.

Solitary confinement is reserved for the most dangerous of dangerous criminals, or ones who would be in mortal danger if let loose on the rest of the prison population. Solitary means no visitors, no letters, no personal possessions — just a guy and his cell.

So the prisoner knows what he's getting himself into, the judge also sentenced him to a week in solitary in his current incarceration. He has until the middle of April to grant his wife the divorce, or he has the next 1460 days to sit around and think about how much he loves that woman. And damn, he must love her a lot.

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Like everywhere else in the world, divorce rates are rising in Egypt. It's not too surprising, really — we've written before about the rising statistics of divorce in basically every country where it's legal. According to an article I recently read, though, the rate of divorce in Egypt isn't just up. It's way up.

It seems that almost 50 percent of couples are getting divorced. That's comparable to most of the Western world, but rare for an Islamic country. Here's the interesting part, though — these couples are getting divorced within the first four years of marriage, and one of the two leading causes is sexual frustration.

Islamic and sociological scholars are blaming the harsh rules on sexuality outside of marriage. Apparently, even kissing outside of marriage is condemned. While I'm sure that keeps their teen pregnancy rates down, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why the Egyptian people are frustrated.

In the Western world, we experienced similar troubles until the advent of birth control and the womens' lib movement. The difference was that in our society prior to that, divorce was still largely stigmatized and woman couldn't really work. Apply the same sexual rules to economically free couples who are able to get divorced whenever they want to, and you've got yourself a one-way ticket to splitsville.

Let's face it, if you tell a bunch of adolescents and young adults that they can't get past first base without getting married, you're going to see a lot of ill-advised weddings. What did they think was going to happen?

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When I was a little girl, my father used to call me his "petit chou," apparently a French term of endearment that translates to "little cabbage." I thought he was being offensive. He thought I was being provincial. Sadly, folks, it gets far worse than cabbage in Syria.

An Islamic man just divorced his wife at their wedding reception because she called him her little donkey. Let that sink in for a minute.

The wife had selected an Arabic song that includes the line, "I love you, my little donkey" as their first dance. She apparently kept singing and singing, and in so doing, called her groom a donkey over and over.

Hubby didn't like it, and demanded the DJ change the song. The DJ refused, as this was the song the wife had chosen, and left the record playing. The enraged husband grabbed the microphone and yelled "Talaq! Talaq! Talaq!" ("I divorce you! I divorce you! I divorce you!") to the amazement of the crowd.

According to Islamic law, if a man says this three times, he's divorced. Done. Over. Just like that. In January, I wrote about a man who did this over the public address system in the supermarket, and men are starting to do it by text message. Why can't my divorce can't be this easy?

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It seems like judges outside of the West are starting to understand the value of joint custody, in India at least. I read an article over the weekend stating joint custody rulings are becoming a growing trend in India, and I have to say, I'm impressed.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the rising divorce rate in India. With a rising divorce rate comes the need for more enlightened views on divorce rulings — when it's the rule, rather than the exception, better standards need to be put in place. Thankfully, it looks like judges are starting to pay attention to that in their custody decisions. While there is no law in place demanding joint custody in cases where there is no history of problematic parenting, lawyers are calling for one.

"Most of the couples who come to seek divorce are good people but the problem is that they may not be compatible and hence unable to live with each other. But the child needs to grow in a healthy environment with the involvement of both the parents," says Mrunalini Deshmukh, a family law attorney.

Finally, people are starting to understand that just because Mom and Dad can't get along does not mean one of them is a crappy parent. It's not the kids' fault they can't work it out.

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It turns out flirting on Facebook can not only lead to a divorce, but be used as evidence in one.

I've talked before about the rising statistics of people using electronic evidence in divorce proceedings as proof of adultery, but according to divorce attorneys, it's also being used as evidence of unreasonable behaviour.

So even if you're just flirting and not cheating, your spouse can use it against you in a court of law.

Really, this shouldn't be too surprising. Flirting with friends, strangers, and old flames is pretty unreasonable within the context of marriage. It's a whole lot more unreasonable when you do it in a way that they can not only see, but print out and prove.

According to Antonia Love, head of family law at a British law firm, "People who use social networking websites to send flirtatious emails to people who are not their partners are often lulled into a false sense of security that they are doing nothing wrong because correspondence is electronic and therefore isn't real life."

Here's an idea. Take what you're doing, and then pretend your spouse is doing the same thing. You're staying up late, sending Facebook messages full of winking smileys to your ex.

Would you high-five your spouse for doing it? Would you give them your blessing? Would you deem it to be reasonable married behavior? If not, cease and desist, or they'll see you in court.

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