The D word is everywhere --- and I'm not even married.

Suffering through the death throes of an ill-fated, on-again, off-again relationship, I once made the mistake in college of turning to my friend Sam for advice. "You could always ask her to marry you," said Sam, a brilliant pre-medical student who had recently become engaged to his girlfriend of three months.

"It's a way of realling hooking someone in there," he continued, with a little clutching gesture, like someone who has just scored in tennis. "And if things don't work out, that's what divorce is for."

For various reasons, Sam and I did not stay friends much longer. Marriage proposals used as carrot / stick bargaining tools -- or hostage tools, more like it -- falls somewhere between incredibly tacky and mildly criminal in my eyes. That said, such crap is probably fairly common.

But what's just as, if not more, concerning to me is the D word. The Star Tribune is doing a depressing yet informative series on divorce and its many zany permutations. For instance, there's the divorce where the couple remain best of friends and still vacation together with the kids, otherwise known as the "And why did we bother getting divorced?" divorce.

Then there's this trend of wife-initiated divorces. Now 66 percent of all divorces involving women over age 40 are apparently her idea, with boredom being a top reason giving up on couplehood. Hope you're better entertained flying solo...(supposedly, many women say they are!)

None of this sounds like much fun, from my self-serving male perspective. Sure, it's nice to know that if I ever get married, and things turn out as rocky as my last five relationships (I average a new one every two years, since college), there's an "eject button."

Scratch that last thought. It isn't nice knowing that, not at all. It's scary. Because odds are, with two people both stationed by the escape hatch, when traffic gets bumpy, someone will use it.

So what's the big deal? If everyone is getting divorced (except my parents, almost 40 years and still going strong!) and there's no longer a taboo associated with a failed union, why fear the marriage reaper?

Perhaps that's precisely what scares me most. It isn't taboo any longer to simply give up and walk away. And that speaks loads about how self-interested we've become as a society, our uniquely American brand of individualism par excellence.

What's ironic here is that as our willingness to put up with our mate's body odor or stale sweat socks diminishes, our childcentric rhetoric only increases. Everything is "for the children."

An exasperated mom wrote an excellent piece for Time Magazine about how sick to death she is of her fellow suburban soccer moms and their germ-phobic helicoptering. (Tonight at 9: How safe is your playground? Could your child slip off the slide???)



It doesn't take a Sept. 11 to get us to look out for each other, to remember the other person is in the room. It takes a Sept. 11 to get us to like ourselves.