Let’s say you’re finally through with the jerk. You’ve had enough of his oh-so-sincere lies, his hairsplitting excuses, his worthless, blubbering promises that it’ll never happen again. Enough of putting on a smile and pretending not to notice while the whole world wonders why you’re sticking with him. It’s done. You’ve made a decision. You want a divorce.
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“If you’re living around here, you’ll need to find grounds,” says Evanston attorney David Carlson, who’s presenting a divorce workshop for women Tuesday at the YWCA Evanston/North Shore. When a marriage breaks up, the state of Illinois wants to blame someone. That means you might have to put it on record that the spouse to be shed is a cheater, abuser, habitual drunk, drug addict, or has forgotten to come home for a couple of years. The only near-faultless option in Illinois is something called “irreconcilable differences,” which allows you to claim there’s been a breakdown in the marriage without having to explain that it happened while your husband was having his pecker licked by an intern.
If he’s already gone on TV and confessed to an “inappropriate relationship,” why not file on grounds of adultery? This, it seems, gets us into one of those gray areas of the law. Open and notorious adultery is actually illegal in Illinois, Carlson says. If, say, the slimeball went to a popular nightspot where he’d be sure to be recognized and posed for a picture with someone on his knee who is definitely not you (but looks a lot like the bouffant Barbie), that could be proof of adultery and also (yes!) a crime against the state. But the law has more tolerance for slimeballs who understand the virtue of sneaking around. In a case where everything seems to have been done in the privacy of his office, and he never even stopped taking phone calls, we’d have to take a careful look at what he’s fessed up to. We could make a case for mental cruelty, for sure, and heterosexual genital intercourse would be a shoo-in. But beyond that, who’s to say where a friendly gesture ends and carnal knowledge begins? Extramarital oral sex may or may not constitute adultery under Illinois law. “My opinion would be that it does,” says Carlson (we didn’t give him time to research it), “but I think it’s an open issue that the courts would have to decide.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): David Carlson photo by J.B. Spector.
