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The All Powerful Word, “Like.”

by | May 10, 2016 | Divorce

Maybe I am channeling my inner Andy Rooney, but I remember a time when the word “like” was about as vanilla of a verb as it comes. You probably really only “liked” your junior high girlfriend, even if you carved the word “love” in that old oak tree with both of your initials. When you were a child, you may have “liked” the color green, but your favorite color was red. You might “like” frozen yogurt, but you “love” ice cream. To some extent, “liking” something wasn’t a far cry from “I don’t hate that”.

And along came Facebook and thrust the word “like” into the stratosphere of emotional verbs. Now, “liking” something carries brand new connotations with pretty important effects.

Take the case of a cheating husband. Husband and Wife are getting a divorce. Wife is largely financially dependent on Husband, but Husband refuses to agree to paying one dime of alimony. Wife has thought for months that Husband has been having an affair. Wife and her attorney start looking at what evidence can be found to substantiate these suspicions.

How does one prove an affair in court? Very rarely is the adulterous behavior itself captured on film. As my Evidence professor liked to say “a brick is not a wall.” Often times, proving an affair in court takes lots of circumstantial evidence. Or, if you will, lots of bricks to build that wall.

Hotel receipts, text messages, emails, letters, and bank and credit card statements are all bricks that can be used by the Wife and her attorney. Husband’s own testimony can be a pretty good brick to use as well, particularly when those same hotel receipts and bank statement bricks are used to show he’s lying to the court and thus covering something up. And yes, the fact that he has “liked” every single “selfie” that the paramour has ever posted of herself on Facebook is another great brick. Because in today’s world, those “likes”, particularly all 30 of them, mean much more than “I don’t hate that”…

Like, like, like, like, like, like,

like, like, like, like, like, like,

like, like, like, like, like, like,

like, like, like, like, like, like,

like, like, like, like, like, like!

Yeah. That’s some wall!

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