Like Iolan, I'm glad that Chad has realized that Lois is miserable, and that he has decided to bring the subject up.
The question is what the solution for Lois and Chad is going to be. You have already told us that you are not going to kill Chad, and I'm very glad to hear it. Why should some people have to be killed just so that his or her spouse can remarry? Somebody's actual, physical death becomes a better thing than the same person's divorce. I shudder at the cruelty and implacability of this.
Let me tell you about what may be the most talked-about crime case in Sweden ever, something that happened inside a weird religious sect in a small town in 2004. A young woman, the wife of the second most important leader of this sect, was found shot to death in her bed, and in the neighbours' house the young husband was found shot and severely injured, but alive. The next day another young woman, the nanny of the murder victim's stepchildren, was arrested for one case of murder and one case of attempted murder.
Ah, but there's more. The police quickly realized that the murder victim's husband, pastor Helge Fossmo, had lost his first wife in a strange accident only three years earlier. The pastor's first wife, a woman of twenty-seven and the mother of the pastor's three young children, the youngest one only one year old at the time of his mother's death, had slipped in the family bath tub and hit her head and died. The police quickly dismissed the case as an accident and did an extremely shoddy and perfunctory investigation, because how can any sort of foul play go on within a pastor's home?
But after the murder of the pastor's second wife, the police quickly found that by the time of the first wife's death, the pastor was already having an affair with another member of the sect, Sara Svensson. After the death of the pastor's wife, Sara Svensson moved in with the pastor, officially to be the nanny of his motherless children. Some time afterwards the pastor remarried. He married the younger sister of the most important leader of the sect, a woman who called herself the Bride of Christ(!).
Soon after the pastor's remarriage, The Bride of Christ declared that Sara Svensson, the pastor's mistress and nanny of his children, was unclean, and could not have any meetings or dealings with any other members of the sect. However, Sara Svensson was not allowed to leave and move out, because the pastor still needed her! So she was basically locked inside the pastor's house so that he could have sex with her at night, even though he was now married to another woman!
That is not all. Some time later, the pastor took himself another lover, a young married woman who lived next door. So for a while the pastor had sex with two women every night, first with the married neighbour and then, when the neighbour decided it was time to go home, with Sara Svensson. The only one who did not get to have sex with the pastor was his wife.
But now the pastor was really getting tired of his second wife and decided it was time to get rid of her. So he started sending Sara Svensson cryptic anonymous text messages to her cell phone. When Sara Svensson came to him and showed him the strange messages and asked him what they meant, he told her that God had given her a mission of some kind. The pastor kept sending more text messages and kept 'interpreting' them to Sara. Eventually the pastor had convinced Sara that God had ordered her to kill the pastor's second wife and the husband of the pastor's lover. And Sara Svensson did her best to obey the will of God. (The police were later able to recreate those text messages and prove that they had been sent from the pastor's cell phone.)
The reason why I told you this whole long rambling story is because the pastor's two dead wives would have been alive today if the pastor had felt able to divorce them when he grew tired of them. He couldn't do that, however, because that would have made him lose status in the sect. He couldn't remain the second-in-command if he had divorced his wife, let alone if he had divorced two wives. But killing two wives was okay. No, really, it wasn't, becasue when the members of the sect finally became convinced that their pastor had commissioned the murder of his second wife, they expelled him from their sect. But it is still true that if the pastor could have divorced his wives without losing face before the members of his sect, two young women who had to die so that their husband could move on would have been alive today. And that is why I will never say that divorce is always wrong.
I also don't agree with Tank that a woman can divorce her husband only if he has been unfaithful to her. If two people love each other, but can't share lives that are beneficial to both of them, then maybe they should eventually agree, with deep regrets, to divorce. They should do so as kindly and respectfully as they possibly can, and they should try their utmost to remain friends. Because they have no reason to be enemies, or even to lose their friendship.
Breaking up is hard to do, indeed. But if Lois and Chad are caring, responsible adults, then maybe they will be able to do just that and remain friends, so that Chad can find a happy life for himself as a doctor in Smallville, and Lois can be happy as a reporter for the Daily Planet in Metropolis.
I hope that Lois and Chad will be able to do just that - to divorce and move their separate ways, but to remain friends. And then eventually Chad and Rachel should be able to marry, and also Lois and Clark.
Ann
