I have a friend who blogged about Elin Nordegren and her divorce from Tiger Woods with a great deal of logic and grace and empathy. The empathy is easy to understand because my friend is going through something similar. Chelsea Handler made many of the same points, although perhaps less elegantly, on her talk show. The reasoning is that Elin got a fair amount because of the heartbreak she endured in such a public setting. Her family was irreparably broken, and no amount of money makes up for that, but it does buy her the ability to rebuild her life and to create as much consistency for her children as possible.
I understand all of that and agree with it, but there's a part of me that's not sympathetic. That's the cynical part that read in an article of Elin and Tiger's fairy tale romance that she came to the US specifically to meet a professional golfer. She was living her life in Sweden, when a friend of hers married a pro golfer. Elin came to the US ostensibly to work as her friend's nanny but the article made it clear that Elin quit school and took the nanny job because the friend made it clear that Elin could marry someone rich on the tour.
I don't doubt at all that she genuinely loved Tiger, and I don't doubt that her heart was actually broken, and I really don't doubt that she experienced incomprehensible levels of public humiliation. But I also don't doubt that Elin joined the PGA tour with a plan, and one way or another, that plan came to fruition. And it's the existence of that plan that makes it hard for me to have much sympathy for her.
