@K4D: when I truly think about it, I am not sure there is another woman out there that can really bring me happiness. I think the only woman that can really make me happy is the one that I married.

K4D: I haven't posted to your thread before, because you're getting a container ship's worth of input from people infinitely smarter than I, and because there has been a fair amount of faith-centered musing by and to you, and on questions of faith I am the Least-Qualified Man Standing.

This statement of yours, however, simply screams self-loathing and an obstinate refusal to be honest with yourself. Let's look at it backwards and forwards.

Think about how utterly random, how spectacularly unlikely, your coupling was. "Just one person" -- on a planet of 6.7 billion people, that would be pretty unlikely, don't you think? Why assume, for example, that The One is in your city or state or even country? What if that The One you're "supposed" to be with in the karmic sense of the term is in Bangladesh or Belgium or Belarus? If it were the case that there's only The One, it must be case that hundreds of millions of people are married to the wrong person.

So that randomness of event would certainly seem to suggest an equal probability of a similarly random event -- "falling in love" -- with someone else, whether you believe it or not; after all, there was a Day Before you met and fell in love with Mrs. K4D. Did you have no happiness before that moment?

Take me -- I met WAW in September 1987. She was new in the city, new in the office, and supposed to get a departmental orientation from a colleague of mine. He missed his bus and was late. Rather than have her sitting around gaping at people, I volunteered to do the orientation. A week later we dated; a week after that we steamed up the windows of her car; a week after that we "did it;" a week after that we were a couple -- and were, until February 2009. That's a Chaos Theoretician's dream string. How many variables could have taken a different value and rendered the entire Saga of Smiley's Person one of an infinity of Stories Not Told?

Some might say -- indeed, Tennis Partner and Good Christian Man Friend IRL has done so -- that this is evidence of God's Plan for me. No such sequence could possibly have been random, says GCMF. Angels on the head of a pin, etc.

Now I'm a Man of Strict Godlessness (a hell-bound status for which GCMF is remarkably tolerant, bless him) so the argument from Christly authority doesn't do much for me, but I'm perfectly willing to entertain it as a theoretical possibility. And when one does so, one reaches the inescapable conclusion that you, Mr. K4D, are wrong.

Let's say that the seemingly random meeting of K4D and Mrs., (or of me and Ex), was in fact God's Plan, and so in that sense you have happiness not simply because you are fulfilling God's Plan but because it is Mrs. K4D specifically that is enabling that Fulfilling Of.

My understanding of the whole "God's Plan" thing is that we fallible, finite humans can't comprehend it. One can believe in it, as a matter of faith, and in that sense "understand" that there is a plan and trust in God that the events of one's life are proceeding according to plan, but the details themselves? No -- mysterious ways and all that -- Isaiah 55:8-9, yes?

So, I ask GCMF at the precise moment he is about to unleash one of his killer alley serves, if it is possible that my seemingly random meeting with the then-future-ex-Mrs. SP is evidence of my life proceeding according to Plan, then isn't it also possible that it continues to proceed according to Plan, now that she's left me?

No, certainly not, divorce being an abomination, per Corinthians, Deuteronomy, Malachi, and the lot, says GCMF, busting out his New International.

But it's also the case, I say to GCMF, that you tell me your God will give me no burden I cannot carry. If that's true, doesn't that mean that I can carry this burden which must mean, in some sense, that I will prevail over it? And what does it mean to carry unhappiness and prevail if not to stop being unhappy? And since your God wants me to be happy, wouldn't that logically imply that, having been happy once -- according to Plan -- I will be so again?

(And what of happiness? Doesn't this chap Gary Thomas promote the notion that the Christian God doesn't even want you to be happy in marriage? This I personally find preposterous, but perhaps you don't....)

At this point GCMF shuts me up by running my sorry butt from one side of the court to the other, from baseline to net and back again, before smiting me a mighty Roger Federer-like blow, and I stop jabbering long enough to wheeze my way out of a looming heart-attack.

So to you, K4D, I pose the following proposition: Isn't it at least within the realm of possibility that you could be as happy -- or even more happy -- with another woman? That, in fact, there is a silver lining in your dark cloud, as there is in all of our dark clouds? And that by refusing to acknowledge this -- as willful an act of refusal and self-abnegation as one is likely to encounter hereabouts -- you're simply perpetuating your own misery because you want to perpetuate it, because you take Pride in your denial of possibility? That this sadness is, in some sense, a monstrous demonstration of Ego, of Self, of Hubris? And so by denying the possibility of happiness-after, you're thumbing your nose at what might be The Plan?

And even if you don't want to go all the way down that metaphysical road, isn't possible that by indulging your sadness to the point of self-denial of hope that you're really just showing off? I will never be happy, so there! Believe me, dude -- I was there.

News flash -- WAW doesn't care. She's gone, Jack! So who are you demonstrating this for? If it's your God, presumably He knows you're unhappy; if it's you, then you're really just engaging in a massive act of emotional masturbation, spilling the Tears of Onan if you will.