Here’s a sweet New York Times story about Gotham’s storied marriage bureau (locus of Matt Damon’s lowest-of-keys wedding to Sarah Silverman Luciana Bozan).

As the Times reports, the office itself may be heading for an extreme makeover — but it’s still a nice reminder that not all nuptials are extreme weddingpaloozas.

A woman in Ireland who got caught shoplifting blamed the theft on a bad breakup — which, she claimed, had suddenly left her in dire financial straits and in debt to other people. (Judging by what she clipped, she owed someone a pair of $170 flip-flops.)

I’ve had some bad breakups, which have left me crying on my kitchen tiles or quicksanding into my couch for a My So-Called Life-athon while working my way through a metric ton of Chubby Hubby. So I’m impressed. I mean hey, this lass managed to at least leave the house.

And really — though she did have a string of prior convictions — maybe her actions are not, at least at their core, so out-there after all. This article notes, and it’s by no means the first, that “when unmarried couples who have been living together part company, women are substantially worse off economically than men, according to a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family.”

But if she’d lived in China, apparently, it’s possible that she could at least have asked her flip-flopping boyfriend for “a ‘parting fee,’ or fenshou fei, upon the termination of a long-term relationship, or ’emotional compensation,’ ganqing peichang,'” according to this recent report on Forbes.com. “These ‘parting fees’ are not a legal matter, given the casual nature of dating. Call it an informal economic system for affairs of the heart — with all the attendant moral questions that arise when love and money mix.” Indeed! Interesting piece; check it out. And if you’re gonna steal anything, make it someone’s heart. (Awww!)

Thanks (or maybe, no thanks?) to Ziggs.com, you can now get an email alert every time someone Googles your name. For $4.95 per month, you’ll learn how many times your name was searched, the keywords used to scope you out, and the location (city and state) of the searcher. Sound enticing?  Don’t you remember what can happen when you know too much about someone before even meeting them?   If you’re part of the morethanIneedtoknow squad, find like company with The Frisky:

Anyone who has a blog and checks his or her stats regularly knows that feeling when an ex’s work place ISP pops up in the list of recent visitors. There’s a visceral reaction that, depending on circumstances, can open old wounds, create false hope, and stir up old romantic feelings that probably ought to stay dormant. Aren’t relationships and dating complicated enough already? Hasn’t modern technology and the new avenues of communication and connecting shaken our mental stability enough already?  Do we really need one more thing to analyze in determining whether someone may or may not be interested us?

I say, long live mystery! What’s left of it, anyway. What say you?

Let’s say I, all 34 unwed years of me, was Bristol Palin’s older sister. I wonder how our mom (first name: Hockey) would introduce us to constituents and rallygoers. Would she moon over Bristol’s courage and convictions for surrendering to a for-show, shotgun wedding to a gutter-mouthed hunk of man-child, then mention me with a half-joking, “And here’s our choosy one.” Or worse: “And she’s single, guys!”

Signs point to yes, if (if!) the McCain-Palin ticket falls into lockstep with the Bush adminstration’s marriage propaganda programs. And if this analysis of the pro-family photo ops that ran throughout both conventions holds water. Not only would I be shunted to the kids’ table come Thanksgiving (the sort of holiday embarrassment I’ve fretted about before), but I bet Bristol — half my age! — would be promoted to the adult table by virtue of her less-than-virtuous insemination.

If marriage must be mandatory for an invite to A White House Family Christmas, at least let it defy the Republican party’s seeming “do as I say, not as I do” pedagogy and stiff-limbed public appearances. Whether you’re single, married or somewhere in between, there’s little denying that the Barack-Michelle union’s got zum zizzle, baby — evidently enough to carry them through awkward spouse-gaffes with humor and aplomb. And that many think their mere presence together on a world stage could do more in defense of marriage than any “fatherhood grant.”

And so is next week, and the week after …

In other words: sorry we missed it! (Again!) But now that folks who are “anything but married” (actually, it’s now called the National Unmarried and Single Americans Week) comprise the majority of households, hey, it’s your year.

(Now somebody tell the folks in charge.  From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“There’s a very heavy focus on marriage as a public-policy matter,”  said Nancy Polikoff, a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. “You have it in the Bush administration’s policies that spend three-quarters of a billion dollars to promote marriage, and a really widespread campaign to convince the country that the decline of lifelong heterosexual marriage is responsible for all our social problems.”

She says  there’s a need to define family in a more expansive way, so that close family-like relationships are also defined by affinity or blood, not just by marriage. Such a change would allow people to take family or medical leave or paid sick days to care for family members “however they define them,” she says.

Nicky Grist, executive director of the decade-old New York nonprofit Alternatives to Marriage, says a broader definition of family than “the floor” currently used by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act “would make for a more just system, not a more abused system.”

Unmarried.org, as her group appears on the Web, is most concerned with health insurance access. The United States is “the only country that relies on marital status for access to health care,” says Grist.)

Again I say: Those poor kids.

From the Times of London, via TPM:

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby.

“It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

First, the “Accidental Cougar” — now, the on-purpose ones.

Single gals! Vote early and often. 

All the kids are coming out!

We know that getting teens to use birth control is about more than providing guidance counselors, or hockey moms, with fishbowls full of condoms. We know that there are a great deal of complicating factors, such as the fact that some teen girls feel they want to get pregnant. But what few people may realize is this: some teen boys not only want their girlfriends to get pregnant but, in some cases, are doing what they can to force them to.

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