EVE: What happened to the [your] first two marriages?
THORNHILL: My wives divorced me.
EVE: Why?
THORNHILL: I think they said I led too dull a life.
-North By Northwest (1959), shot 246
And she [my wife] said "Great, get the divorce," but it turns out, in New York State, they have a strange law that says you can't get a divorce unless you can prove adultery, and it's weird, because the Ten Commandments say "Thou shalt not commit adultery," but New York State says you have to.
-Woody Allen’s Stand Up Comic, recorded from 1964-68
Which all makes me wonder.
Thornhill and Woody lived in New York City at around the same time.
I guess New York must have permitted divorce in some situation other than infidelity. For example, I would imagine that abuse and infertility would have been reasons. And Eve and I realize that Thornhill's quip about being dull was just a joke (as the two of them were scaling Mount Rushmore when he said it). But what are she and I to think – that the real reasons for his divorces were infidelity, abuse or infertility? Or that the law permitted divorces in 1959 that it no longer permitted by 1968? Or (as Woody would say) what?