With the confidence of a captain of the girls' basketball team, Sarah Palin swished her way into the office of Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, took a jump shot at being Governor of Alaska, and then slam dunked the nomination for the Republican vice presidency.

Along the way, she’s accomplished a feat that often sidelines powerful women. Throughout her impressive career, she has never made her husband look diminished.

How she has dribbled her way around this challenging issue is a subject truly worthy of debate. After all, studies in Social Forces and The Journal of Marriage and Family say that women who are more successful than their husbands have higher divorce rates.

Many powerful women have come forward to admit that their careers have sent their relationships to the bench, including Pink and Reese Witherspoon. Amy Adams in this month’s "Vanity Fair" says she’s looking for a guy who won’t look at her success as his failure.

Sarah Palin, however, seems blissfully unvexed. Using her arsenal of charm like a lethal weapon, she is showing America that you can be powerful and sexy at the same time. And you can keep your studmuffin by your side, looking happy.

Hillary Clinton, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel — none of these women’s relationships with their husbands conveyed much marital heat in public. The husbands were more likely to get their wives into hot water, or have been so lukewarm, no one paid any attention to them.

Now we have Todd Palin, the hot political hubby.

At campaign stops, Todd Palin looks macho while doing nothing more than standing there holding their baby.

Of course it’s a gimmick, but it got our attention. If you’re divorced, and headed for marriage No. 2, you probably don’t want to go through the whole formal wedding deal a second time, nor do you want to pay for it.

Now comes “Elope for Obama.”

For all weddings in October, the Brooks Hill Historic Church in Portland, Oregon, will donate the entire rental fee to the Obama presidential campaign. In fact, you’re told to make a check out to Obama for Change.

You can have up to 50 guests. The nondenominational church is on a hillside 20 minutes from downtown Portland. You can choose from any wedding on their website, with rentals from $395 for an intimate two-hour wedding to $695 for a four-hour wedding. Use of the baby grand is included. Local ministers, usually $200 to $300, will pronounce the vows (religious or secular), also at no charge, in support of Barack Obama. Or you can bring your own minister. Everything, of course is subject to availability. And you need to be in Oregon four business days in advance to get your license. Other than that, party on!

What can we say... Portland is that liberal a place. Cindy Lou Banks, the owner of the church, feels that Obama, if elected, would bring a new beginning to the country, and said, “What better way is there for couples to support his election than eloping in October and forging their own new beginnings?"

How does Banks make money from this? Volume!

Oh, and if you reserve the chapel ($150 deposit) and don’t show up for the wedding, they keep your deposit.

We will now give equal time to any lawyer offering a free divorce in honor of John McCain.

Here's what happens when a divisive couple deals with a housing slump. A Cambodian couple resorted to a drastic solution to combat the country's notoriously corrupt and expensive court system by literally — and we mean literally — cutting their house in half.

According to the Khmer-language "Koh Santepheap" newspaper, Meuon Rima sought a divorce from his wife, Nhang, both 40, because she refused to nurse him during a recent illness. They decided to split their house, which was built on stilts, rather than deal with what they considered a diseased court system.

Rima sawed the house down the middle with "surgical precision," the newspaper reported. He was last seen driving away from the village in southeastern Prey Veng province hauling half of the home with him.

It was not known where he had gone with his very detached piece of marital assets, it said. And apparently Rima had not felt the same need to divvy up the couple's two teenage children, both of whom were left with Nhang.

One would argue that the heart of the home is the family, so in that sense he left the home mostly intact. 

FWW has reported on many solutions to deal with divorce and housing, including how to divide the family home and if you should keep the house, but we don’t recommend actually splitting the house. Granted that just last year a man in Germany, facing divorce, chain-sawed a house he shared with his wife in two, and then hauled “his half” away to his brother’s property on a forklift truck.

Usually when couples resort to what is called “The War of the Roses” solution, referring to the 1989 movie about a fractious divorce, they simply keep living there, each taking separate quarters and turning the kitchen into a demilitarized zone.

Here's another reason that life is full of possibility, and that if your first marriage didn’t work, perhaps the next one will. A recent survey in Parade magazine found that 88 percent of couples interviewed said they were — drum roll, please — happy or reasonably content in their marriages. Yippee.

Another hopeful nugget on the state of matrimony was that half of the couples used words like "joyful" or "loving" to portray their marraiges. Furthermore, 71 percent of these couples said they've stayed married because of deep love while 73 percent also cited the magic word — the desire for companionship.

Why does this not surprise me? For starters, I am a happily re-married woman who adores her husband after 15 years of being together. Although the study didn't break down whether many of these participants were in second marriages, I would bet that many were.

Here's a little secret rarely reported: We learn from our mistakes. Sometimes you can have two good people who just aren't good for each other. That was certainly the case in my first marriage. I learned who I was and who I wasn't. (Also learned who he was and wasn't...and then said good-bye).

Because I was younger, I didn't know myself as well. Qualities like being cute and adoring went high up on the husband-to-be resumé. Didn't really focus on such important factors as whether we shared common values, heritage, or ways to spend Sunday afternoons. Also, you grow more tolerant over time, realizing that sometimes it really is ok to agree to disagree.

So the Parade survey wasn’t too surprising. Plus we like happy endings and new beginnings at FWW.

A PhD student in psychology at the University of Montreal believes she has proven that a certain personality type is prone to infidelity. A husband with “avoidant attachment” style, she found, is likely to have multiple sexual partners and to cheat as a way of distancing himself from any relationship. And adultery is the No. 1 reason behind divorce.

Her work expands on the theory that a person who seeks attachment feels
• Secure that the relationship gives him or her a base
• That the relationship provides a safe haven
• That it is important to maintain proximity
• That separation leads to distress

Someone with an avoidant attachment style, on the other hand, is uncomfortable with intimacy. He or she probably did not have a close relationship with parents. As adults he or she may be unwilling to share thoughts and feelings. And he or she invests little emotion in social or romantic relationships. Incidentally, there appear to be just as many women as men with avoidant attachment style.

In her four studies, Geneviève Beaulieu-Pelletier, looked first at 145 young adults and than at another 270 adults, finding in both cases that those who avoided attachment were much more likely to cheat or think about cheating. When she followed up with two more studies to ask the cheaters their motivations, she found the No. 1 reason was the will to distance themselves from commitment and from their partner.

In other words, it’s not that the partner’s behavior drove them to cheat; it’s that their own makeup makes them push away from being in a couple.

“The act of cheating helps them avoid commitment phobia, distances them from their partner, and helps them keep their space and freedom,” she said.

Research by a marketing company in England shows that nine out of ten women “cheat” in some way to look better. Cheat? That’s a bad word around here, but this is what the Telegraph newspaper in London meant: here’s what women do when weight loss (women in Great Britain are losing weight, while men are gaining), facials, and makeup aren’t helping.

• Some 50 percent of the 1,300 women interviewed wear push up bras and 10 percent used “chicken fillets” to help elevate their attributes.

• Women deploy “shapewear,” like Jennifer Lopez, right, in what the English call “Magic Pants.”

• They put Vaseline on their eyelids to look more chipper, and use hemorrhoid cream to relieve puffiness and circles under the eyes.

• Another 40 percent wear oversize pants to hide bumps and bulges.

• When in doubt, one third of the women seek dark corners or dim the lights.

The survey was carried out at the giant Lakeside shopping center just east of greater London, a shopping destination with offerings ranging from Costco to Mercedes Benz. The survey also listed the women’s pet peeves: visible panty lines, the need to deal with hairy legs, streaky fake tans, lipstick on the teeth, and runny mascara.

So, once these women have donned their pushup bras, squeezed into shapewear, and used under-eye cream that is meant for somewhere else, what do they think they should wear in order to attract men?

The women suggested a classic black dress or tight jeans.

Men, who were also interviewed, had a different perspective. They wanted to see women in short skirts and low-cut tops... stiletto heels optional, we assume, for the full Barbie look.

It’s a case of “She Said, He Said.” Last week, Meg Ryan dished about the reasons for her divorce from Dennis Quaid while she was promoting her film The Women, in which she plays a scorned wife.

This week, Quaid returns fire. And this is, mind you, about a divorce that happened eight years ago.

In promoting The Women, Ryan told In Style magazine and ABC News that the reason for her divorce was not her affair with Russell Crowe but because Quaid had been unfaithful first and for a long time.

“I find it unbelievable that Meg continues publicly to rehash and rewrite the story of our relationship,” Quaid told Rush & Molloy. “Also, I find it regrettable that our son, Jack, has to be reminded in a public way of the turmoil and pain that every child feels in a divorce."

Quaid has a point. It is a no-no to badmouth your ex in public, because the child, who wants to get along with both parents, feels helpless and conflicted. It also reopens their own wounds, which seriously affects a child, even one Jack’s age, 16.

When an affair has occurred, it rocks a kid's sense of trust.

A deep betrayal has murdered the child’s image of his family. He now has to reconsider his perception of his father and mother and wonder if they might betray his trust too.

Luckily, time does heal those wounds as the parents prove that their love for him is unchanged.

Sometimes kids also see that, with new partners, their parents are truly in love. Luckily for Quaid, he is now happily married to real estate agent Kimberly Buffington and they had twins last November. By all reports, their marriage is solid and loving.

Warren Buffett, the world's richest man, admits he made a poor choice. No, not that he didn't invest more in Google than Microsoft, but that he didn't work harder on his relationship with his late wife, Susie, the mother of his three children.

"The biggest mistake I ever made was letting her walk out the door," he says.

As with many separations, Susie was driven to it.

Buffett, 78, who spent hours and hours talking with the author Alice Schroeder for the book The Snowball, regrets that he gave Susie so many reasons to leave, say Rush & Molloy in The Daily News.

One was Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, and Newsweek. Buffett was 46 when Graham, then a 59-year-old widow, became smitten with him. They spent time at her Martha’s Vineyard home and traveled widely.

What is surprising is that Graham's own marriage was ruined by her husband’s infidelity. And who knew before this book that Katharine Graham was one of the early cougars? (While we at FWW approve of dating someone who's fabulously younger and cute, it is verboten to date a married man no matter what his age.)

Graham, it turns out, was pretty open about the affair with Buffett, and was seen tossing her house key to Buffet at parties. Schroeder writes that Susie "made it plain to several friends that she was furious and humiliated," but reports that she sent Graham a letter granting her permission to date her husband.

"Kay showed the letter to people as though it let her off the hook," Schroeder says.

Naturally the humiliation at home marinated into resentment.

Was Chris Kattan just being polite? Or did his wife’s filing for divorce surprise him as much as John McCain cancelling the debate surprised Barack Obama? His soon-to-be ex, Sunshine Tutt, rushed divorce papers into the court system just a matter of weeks after the two announced their separation but said they had no plans to divorce.

Granted, there aren’t many divorce papers filed in California that show “Statistical Facts,” part C, as date from marriage to separation: 0 years 2 months.

The rest of the paperwork was pretty much as expected. Respondent (Tutt) requested dissolution of marriage based on (1) irreconcilable differences (although “unsound mind” and “incurable insanity” might have looked tempting, considering Kattan prances around in tights and sticks his crotch in people’s faces as Mango the monkey boy on SNL — probably not the person you want to relax with on a Sunday morning).

Page two declares that there are no community or quasi community assets or debts to be disposed of.

What about those wedding presents, huh?

But there is a check mark in front of “property rights to be determined,” and “spousal support and equalization if the parties do not reach a settlement.”

You know what that means: prenup.

It’s hard to imagine what kind of drama happened in the marriage’s two short months, but Kattan can be sure that a courtroom will hear about it if the terms of the prenup are not upheld.

As we remind lovebirds over and over, discuss finances, put it in writing, and commit to a prenup before getting married. You never know, when things are going well, how quickly they can go wrong.

Jenna Fischer's character on The Office, Pam, is artfully played by the actress: She is the girl next door; the relatable, dependable best friend. If she's not quite you, she's certainly someone you know. Pam may be on the verge of marriage on the award-winning show, but Fischer (photo right) has made it to the other side of marital woes and a divorce from her Hollywood filmmaker husband, James Gunn, says contactmusic.com.

The two divorced after a seven-year marriage in September 2007. Ready to move on — but smart enough to abstain from playing the rebound game — Fischer officially introduced her new man, writer Lee Kirk, at last Sunday's Emmy awards.

While Fischer is moving beyond divorce, her equivalent on the British Office might not be faring so well. Lucy Davis (photo left) played Dawn, on the equally, if not more, popular BBC production (in addition to a smaller part on the short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, RIP).

Photogs caught the actress looking forlorn, a bit heavier than we're used to seeing her, and minus her wedding ring. The tabs' verdict? Must be marital turmoil, says The Daily Mail.

It's unfortunate that anyone's weight gains are pointed out so unabashedly, and conclusions are drawn so quickly, but it stings even more when that person is a likable, seemingly genuine individual. Or maybe we're just projecting Pam/Dawn on Lucy?