Making a clean start (bad pun)
Apr 6th, 2009 by admin
This story is being reported by Reuters in its “Oddly Enough” section with the headline “Woman divorces husband for cleaning too much.” 
It’s a short story, so let me paste it here:
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German woman has divorced her husband because she was fed up with him cleaning all the time.
German media reported the wife got through 15 years of marriage putting up with the man’s penchant for doing household chores, tidying up and rearranging the furniture.
But she ran out of patience when he knocked down and rebuilt a wall at their home when it got dirty, Christian Kropp, court judge in the central town of Sondershausen, said on Thursday.
“I’d never had anyone seek a divorce for this,” he said.
(Reporting by Franziska Scheven; editing by Myra MacDonald)
While the story headline is bizarre, and the problem quite uncommon, my spider sense tells me that it thinking the headline is the whole story is a mistake. To call it a “penchant”, with a simple connotation of “liking” to do something, strikes me as failing to recognize something more serious going on with the woman’s husband and/or their relationship. It’s easy to see the woman’s divorce as making a clean start (yes, it is a bad pun), I just hope that both parties are able to move forward with a deeper appreciation of their own needs and idiosyncracies.