The Style section of the Sunday New York Times usually has two pages of thumbnail wedding announcements (complete with tiny, charming photos), and one larger box entitled “Vows,” in which one lucky couple’s union is featured.  This past Sunday, the Vows column created a firestorm.   The featured couple – Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla – proudly described how their romance began when they were both married to other people, and how they met in a pre-kindergarten classroom at the school attended by their children (each has two children from a first marriage).  Although they assert that they kept it platonic for a long while, they eventually declared their love for each other, divorced their first spouses, and celebrated their marriage in the recent ceremony featured in the Times.  They described their life together as full of love, although they concede that they have hurt their former spouses and children, and they profess regret for having done so.

Certainly Riddell and Partilla aren’t the first unfaithful spouses to end up together, and they won’t be the last.  What is surprising is the frenzy of overwhelmingly negative reader comments to the Times.  “Why does the Times glorify home-wrecking?” queried David from NY.  A commenter identifying himself as Dr. Dubs from NYC was outraged: “So you’re telling me, as long as I’m happy, who cares what happens to my legally wedded spouse and kids?” he stormed.  “This story reeks of selfishness.”  Funny valentine from New Jersey commented that the Vows column “was absolutely the saddest story in the NYT, save the obits.”

Why the uproar in this era of no-fault divorce, not to mention in a society with a divorce rate of around 50 percent?

An article in The New York Times last week reported on a recent study done on the effects of child abuse investigations.    The study looked at interview data with 595 children who lived in families known to be at risk for child maltreatment.  The children were interviewed at age 4 and again at age 8; and 164 of the 595 subjects were in families investigated by CPS (Child Protective Services) for possible child maltreatment during that time period.  The researchers looked for differences between the investigated and uninvestigated subjects in seven known risk factors for child maltreatment:  poverty, family functioning, social support, maternal depressive symptoms, maternal education, child anxious or depressive behavior and child aggressive behavior.  They found no significant differences in these factors between those families that had been investigated during the four year period and those families that had not been investigated during that time.  The sole exception was maternal depression: mothers in investigated families had more depressive symptoms than mothers whose families were not investigated.  To put it plainly, these children were at high risk of being maltreated when the study began, and they remained at high risk four years later, whether or not they had experienced CPS investigation.

The authors comment that the results are not surprising, given that many of the risk factors that were studied are not usually addressed by the interventions that follow child protective services investigations.