Rafael Menton brings us the 2025 edition of "Why?", as he asks:

"Is marriage, in common with life itself, just a tragedy in waiting?"

Why is it that some partnerships result mostly in joy, and others in nothing more sinister than Shaw's banal description of matrimony and what follows as, at best, simulated achievement?

No matter. Right or wrong the answer doesn't invalidate the possibility of heartbreak and calamity deciding to make landfall on our intended happy ever afters.

Such was the case for Grace and John, partners and parents in a union that's the envy of family and friends alike. Until the wife finds herself at a car-wash and those two harbingers of imminent misery arrive in the form of a vague acquaintance from her gym. A Latino fitness-instructor who is nowhere near as physically attractive or as personable as the father of her two girls.

But...

A tragic and all too believable divorce...

And worse!

Rafael Menton is a Professor of English Literature with a retro passion for the early to mid-twentieth-century fiction of mystery, crime, suspense, and romance, along with horror with erotic undertones; ranging from Doyle and Blackwood and on to Rohmer. As well as ? such as in this instance - sometimes indulging in a more contemporary take of his own on the "Human drama".