Divorce

DEAR ABBY: My divorce from "Vince" will be final in a few weeks. We have two sons together, and we communicate well. Since our breakup, my parents have continued their relationship with him. They have confirmed that he will be invited to all holiday events. I am so upset about it that I now want nothing to do with them. Vince has his own family who have removed me from their lives. Are my feelings normal? - Lost My Parents in the Divorce DEAR LOST: As the father of your children, Vince will always be a part of your life, so my advice is to accept it graciously.

Adapted from an online discussion. Question: I've been married for five years. My husband can be a big bully, going so far as to throw things around and be really hurtful and insulting. I've been in therapy basically since we got married, and left him shortly after our wedding after a particularly scary fight. We reconciled, he worked on his anger management, and I continued therapy. We are both marijuana addicts. After a few relapses over the last couple of years, I've been clean for four months.

By Harold I. Gullan As Henry Kissinger once observed, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Hence l'affaire Petraeus, which, since no state secrets were apparently compromised, seems to have devolved from dangerous liaison to farce after costing the careers of two generals. Those cynical Continentals have long regarded universal weaknesses of the flesh as no impediment to serving one's country at the highest levels. At the 1996 funeral of French President Francois Mitterand, for example, both his wife and his long-term mistress stood side by side, along with their respective offspring.

DANICA PATRICK and her husband are divorcing after 7 years of marriage. Patrick announced the split with Paul Hospenthal on her Facebook page Tuesday. "I am sad to inform my fans that after seven years, Paul and I have decided amicably end our marriage," she wrote. "This isn't easy for either of us, but mutually it has come to this. He has been an important person and friend in my life and that's how we will remain moving forward. " Hospenthal is a physical therapist who met Patrick while treating her for a non-racing injury.

THE MATTER is set to be decided on Wednesday at trial in Texas. Our hearts died a little bit when we heard that Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman were splitting after 30 years of marriage. Not many details were released when the divorce was announced earlier this month, so we hoped with all of our broken hearts that a reconcilliation might be on the way, but RadarOnline.com has dashed them once more. The couple, who met on the set of "Taxi," simply couldn't sustain DeVito's wandering eye. "He may not appear to be a ladies' man, but Danny certainly gets a lot of female attention," a source told Radar.

Question: My wife and I have/had been married 24 years; however, the past four years were in separate rooms and sticking it out until last kid was in college. Last March we signed legal separation papers and, using a mediator, the divorce was friendly and going very smoothly. We continued to live together until July, then both moved to separate living places. Shortly after moving out, I discovered she joined a dating website the month after we signed separation papers, while still living under the same roof.

The former Huntingdon Valley wedding guest who died Sunday was not involved in the melee at a Philadelphia hotel, but rather in the process of shepherding his grown children to safety. A former neighbor, Patricia Strange, said the family of Vincent Sannuti called Sunday to tell her that Sannuti "knew what to do" and was in the process of leaving the wedding with his children when he collapsed. "They called at seven o'clock yesterday to let me know (the scenario), that's how close we were," Strange said today.

DEAR ABBY: My husband had an affair with the woman next door. We were close friends. I found out three months ago. We spent a lot of time with her. He swears the affair is over and wants us to become a close threesome again. She's divorcing her husband, who knows nothing about the affair. The three of us have hung out again, just like old times. My husband is thrilled; I am miserable. I am not convinced the affair is over. He says I'm being unreasonable and keeping him on a "short leash.

DEAR ABBY: I have been dating a divorced woman for four years, and we are now engaged to be married. She said in the beginning of our relationship that she had very little sexual experience because her former husband "had problems. " She then decided after the divorce that she would find out what she was missing. She hasn't discussed this in detail, but once in a while she lets out little snippets of information that lead me to believe she was active. Do I have a right, now that we're engaged, to know how many partners she had since the divorce?

Betty A. Thompson, 88, who became one of the most prominent family-law attorneys in Virginia and who was instrumental in modernizing the commonwealth's divorce statutes, died Monday at George Washington University Hospital in Washington. She had suffered a stroke, said Laura Dove, a lawyer at Ms. Thompson's Arlington County-based firm. After graduating from George Washington University's law school in 1948, Ms. Thompson became one of the first female lawyers in Arlington, Va. She made a short-lived bid for the General Assembly in 1957 as a pro-segregationist candidate but in later decades reversed herself as "very open-minded" on equal rights.