Alpha Mail: Letter to a Wayward Woman

A gentleman who is friends with a couple on the verge of splitting up addresses the wife, who is abandoning her Delta husband in her mid-forties. It's longer than this, but the only part I thought was potentially relevant was the part that deals with her future prospects:

Dear Wayward Wife,

Let’s take a moment to honestly look at your future as a divorcee.  It is both stark and bleak.  You are going to be chronically poor. Statistically, in spite of your hopes and dreams of new and better love, you are unlikely to remarry.  Even if you do, the man you marry will be of a lower quality than the man you’re leaving and will likely to be much older; ten or more years your senior is common.  But the more likely case is even worse: statistically your future will be increasingly hopeless as you age. You'll engage in a long series of sexual encounters with increasingly lower quality men gaining sexual access through feigned desires for a long-term relationship when, in truth, you merely serve as life support for your vagina. But this is only until your attractiveness wanes, when you’ll find it near-impossible to get even a one-night stand.  This is borne out by the facts and buttressed by my anecdotal experience.  Every single woman with whom I’ve dealt in such matters has become sexually active before the ink is even dry on the divorce papers and usually before they're even signed.  Every. Single. One.  After rationalizing an unbiblical divorce, it must be easy to rationalize adultery, even serial adultery.

You’ve embarked down a path that reliably ends in abject loneliness, estrangement from your children (usually caused by a new boyfriend who has no interest in the needs of your children), predictably ending in lonely old age with pets as your sole companions.  Even if you turn out to be the one woman in a thousand who finds fleeting felicity down this wayward path, it will not be with God’s blessing.  This is no path to either long-term happiness or eternal bliss.

In today’s sick and confused culture this decision is yours and yours alone to make but, if you do move forward and remove yourself from your husband’s protection, you will do so disabused of any ability to seek sympathy through honest claims of ignorance in future conversations or prayers.  To the contrary, you now divorce with the full knowledge that your and your children’s lives and circumstances will suffer in ways you will later come to severely regret.  The consequences are simply baked into the decision.

My strong advice is to work to restore your marriage and seek its betterment.  That’s your best path and God can and does work miracles when hearts are changed and when forgiveness is both sought and given.  The alternative now stands in stark relief: “This is the way of an adulteress: She eats and wipes her mouth and says, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’”

I don't know if this will even slow the woman down or cause her to at least think twice. I tend to doubt it; rational analysis has never been a female strength. But providing such a warning is the decent thing to do, to ease one's own conscience if nothing else.

Personally, I've never favored the notion of trying to convince a woman to stick around, there being no shortage of girls on the girl tree. Sure, there are factors such as kids, houses, and finances to take into account, but at the end of the day, why would you want to spend five minutes, let alone the rest of your life, with someone who simply doesn't want to be around you?

One cannot control the behavior of others, least of all those caught up in self-destruction. In such cases, the chief objective ought to be mitigating the damage to innocent others.