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From the Sydney Morning Herald, interviewing Orlando Bloom on his divorce from Miranda Kerr –

The 37-year-old actor told the magazine that his split from Kerr was “amicable”. He says his ex is “a very supportive and understanding woman”, but their relationship ended because they want different things “from our lives, our work”.

Whatever else one might infer from this, and assuming that there is some truth in the way he describes their decision, it appears that the things they wanted from their lives and work were more important to them than remaining faithful to their marriage vows. They made a choice, based on what they felt they preferred.

No doubt this is consistent with the way many, perhaps most, people today think about marriage. It is a way to be happy. If another way to be happy should appear that seems better, then the first may be discarded for the second.

I think this is much more than an opinion about marriage. It is a way of defining what marriage is. And it is not a concept of marriage that I have any interest in.

It’s also interesting in the context of the ‘gay marriage’ debate. So many people are so determined that gays should be able to ‘marry’. Yet this is a debate that largely ignores any more fundamental examination of what marriage really is. As important as the question of ‘gay marriage’ is to one’s view about what marriage is, I would suggest that there are other fault lines in contemporary thinking on marriage that are far less obvious, yet perhaps even more important.

Charlotte Dawson was a media personality in Australia and New Zealand who died last week in Sydney at the age of 47. Though no one seems willing to say so explicitly, all the media reports seem to imply that her death was by suicide following a long battle with depression.

Not having lived in Australasia for a long time (and not being particularly a consumer of the kind of media she was involved in) I don’t know a great deal about her, but anyone’s death at such a young age is certainly incredibly sad. Of course there are probably lessons that might be drawn from her death about the inability of beauty and fame to satisfy the real needs of the human heart, but that’s not what I want to comment on here. Rather I was struck by this snippet from the Sydney Morning Herald’s latest item on this subject –

Another [friend] said Dawson was on her own trajectory and she had the will of an ox: ”You could try to steer her in one direction but she operated on her own agenda and she was such a strong-willed woman.”

According to one friend, Dawson was fixated on an anti-anxiety drug that she thought would help her quit drinking.

I just find it interesting and ironic that people thought she was such a strong-willed person, and yet her strength of will was simply not enough to stop her from drinking, even though she clearly felt she needed to and deeply wanted to. Was she an alcoholic? I have no idea. But I do think it gives us some insight into the human condition to see how inadequate the human will is to address the real challenges of our lives.

Lying in bed this morning, reading the Washington Post sideways on my computer next to the me – as you do – I thought this was an interesting comment by Ruth Marcus in the context of the President’s recent remarks about California Attorney General Kamala Harris –

A female politician is, inevitably, going to devote more attention to her appearance than is her male counterpart. Inevitably, because voters — female and male — are going to pay more attention to her clothes, or whether she’s gained (or lost) a few pounds

I’m sure this is true. But what I wonder about is why it is true. What does it tell us about women, about men and about society? Does it reflect something fundamental about differences between the sexes? And if it does, on what basis would someone who has a purely materialist worldview reasonably make ethical judgments about differences in the opportunities, experiences and challenges that men and women each face?