Perspective a la Starbucks

I have to admit that I love eavesdropping. Like a lot. Its an activity that goes hand in hand with people watching. I consider myself to be fairly observant and a pretty good investigator and I generally am able to find things out about people pretty quickly without even realizing it. Sometimes its actually an embarrassing and creepy thing to admit... especially when meeting people that I have already stalked extensively on facebook or otherwise. Playing dumb usually does the trick, so inside I can secretly give myself a high-5 for correctly conjecturing their sexual orientation, favorite color, preferred mode of travel, etc.

So... this evening I was in Starbucks with a chai and my portugues workbook (which I have recently become self-conscious about because someone commented that it looks like a child's coloring book), and I happen to sit near two women having a very animated conversation. Fortunately, they were not talking about their children or their children's teacher/coach/babysitter, but they were talking about the financial mess that they had to deal with during and after their divorces. One woman seemed to be a college professor of some sort whose ex-husband was a writer. As far as I could tell, they were engaged in 1999, married soon thereafter, and opened a joint checking-savings account. Between the two of them, they were making over $150k a year, but little did she know that her husband was secretly siphoning off large parts of her salary and depositing them into a regional bank account in Illinois that was in both his and her name (I think they were living in Boston at the time). They were married for about 5 years when she began finding out about the different bank accounts and some other things... I won't go into all the gory details but I believe there was a mistress for a short period of time and also some freelance writing that he published in her name for some reason...

In any case, the conversation concluded with one of the most depressing interactions I have ever heard (in real life):

Woman #1-- "... It's just so disappointing because when we met I thought he was the greatest guy in the world, that I was lucky to have him. He was my best friend and I really thought we were in it for the long haul... I thought we were soul mates."

Woman #2 (who happens to be Russian)-- *nodding enthusiastically in agreement* "Yes exactly! We call it (some word in Russian)... I don't know how to translate it."

Woman #1-- "Oh right, (derivative of Russian word), to be meant for each other... exactly."

Ok thats not verbatim, but its close. The scariest thing is that they talked about their divorces and extreme financial troubles so matter-of-factly. Like its something that is inevitable, that happens to everyone. Clearly they are both highly intelligent and independent women (the Russian lady was talking about being court mandated to split the royalties from her book with her ex), yet they were unable to avoid these catastrophic events. For awhile I've been thinking that marriage sounds like more trouble than its worth, and now I've come to see that joint bank accounts spell d-i-s-a-s-t-e-r too. Great.

One more reason to die a virgin. I'll post the full list one day, don't worry.