On Saturday new commenter Constance left a heartbreaking comment on a post I wrote back in 2010:

My ex husband and I had a mutual divorce 5 years ago and I’m still not over it. It hurts every single day. There was no cheating, just a long period of separation and drifting apart. I suffer from depression, so that also contributed. Now, he has moved on, but I can’t and don’t know if I ever will. I still love and miss him. Always will. I deeply regret the divorce and I feel like I had amnesia and trying to find my life back. But, the wall is thick and tall. Feels like a living nightmare that is inescapable. I dream of trying to find him, but he can’t be reached. I can’t find any peace in my life. Drowning with sorrow and anger. Angry at my depression. Angry at the demise of a marriage to the only man I will ever love.

The title of the five year old post is Her husband was her best friend. The old post included multiple examples of wives who divorced or nearly divorced the best friend they ever had. One of the examples was from a now deleted blog (frivolousdivorce.wordpress.com). While the blog is gone, the Internet Archive has a copy of it and I captured some of the blog in my old post as well. In My husband was the best friend I ever had she wrote:

His faults were many: sleeping too much, clowning around too much, being too interested in sports, not knowing how to cook, not remembering the names of his childrens’ teachers, not getting home before 6 pm because of his 2-hour commute, not liking poetry and art, and other heinous offenses. All deserving of divorce, right? The truth is that he endured years and years of my contempt, grinding criticism, big mouth, and deep character defects and he loved me in spite of it. You see, he didn’t demand perfection like I did. He was just there for me through the good and the bad, doing what a real husband does. Too bad he didn’t have a real wife. I didn’t have the strength of character to make it through the demanding years of our childrens’ teenage and college years. If I had endured those tough years, I would now have a companion to come home to, to eat dinner with, to go to a movie, travel, and grow old with. I do all of those things alone now. Seven years after the divorce, I still miss him. Another woman has him as a husband and best friend now and he has forgotten me. Good for him.

Constance, the former blogger referenced above, and millions of other divorced women with similar heartbreaking stories show the absolute cruelty of those who either directly sell divorce or sell the benefit of threats of divorce to unhappy wives.

Back in June I wrote about Dr. Harley selling threats of divorce to wives in his post When to Call It Quits (Part 1)*

On the subject of neglect, I’ve chosen to feature a marriage that isn’t all that bad from most people’s perspective, but isn’t good either. L.R.’s husband hasn’t abandoned her physically, leaving her to fend for herself. Instead, he’s only abandoned her emotionally. They probably even have a friendship of sorts. It’s cases like these that leave a wife struggling to know what to do. As it turns out, most of these women divorce their husbands. In fact, research I’ve personally conducted in the archives of government statistics on the causes of divorce lead me to believe that as many as 80% of all divorces are caused by neglect. Women like L.R. suddenly call it quits with little warning, leaving her husband, family and friends scratching their heads wondering what’s wrong with her. In this Q&A column, I describe what spouses usually do when faced with neglect, and then I explain what spouses should do. My approach is radical, and very controversial. But keep in mind the point I’ve just made-80% of divorces are caused by neglect. There’s a much higher risk of divorce in marriages where spouses are not meeting each other’s emotional needs than there is in all the marriages that suffer from physical and verbal abuse, chemical dependency, unemployment, and all other causes combined.

The secular Dr Harley’s approach to wives who have lost the tingle for their good husbands is you will note nearly identical to the modern Christian approach advocated by Dr. Clarke and Focus on the Family in the same situation (see here and here). If you put the writing of Dr’s Bank and Harley side by side (omitting Dr. Clarke’s biblical rationalizations for rebellion) it would be very difficult to tell the two apart. But either way, whether these evil whispers are spoken by secular or “Christian” counselors, or by the secular or modern Christian media, the end result of selling this sin to already tempted women is a massive trail of destruction. While the destruction is theoretically aimed at the husband, in practice innocent children and the foolish wives themselves end up paying terribly for this as well.

Related:

*Here is an archive of the link.