It may also be that with so many American marriages ending in divorce, and most of those surely involving a mate in the wrong bed, an unspoken self-identification with this kind of marital misery has restrained people from losing all sympathy for their leader, disappointed as they might be in his behavior.

Still, I knew that the cold logic would eventually give way to more basic feelings such as heartache, pain, betrayal, jealousy, and other standard marital miseries.

Broadway 'ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR' An uninspired revival of Alan Ayckbourn's classic farce of marital misery and Christmas cheerlessness, directed by John Tillinger.

As directed by John Tillinger in a Manhattan Theater Club production, Mr. Ayckbourn's classic farce of marital misery and Christmas cheerlessness, a hit on Broadway in the mid-1970's, doesn't exactly make the heart beat faster.

And though the boy "did the right thing," after 38 years of marital misery, the pathological philanderer left her for a younger woman.

With calm self-assurance deriving from decades of marital misery, she says, "Mean and surly."

To Pascoe, too, falls the task of finding the author of several heartbreaking suicide threats, a suspenseful subplot that is worked with fine craftsmanship into the novel's broader theme of the marital misery of unloved men and women.

By enshrining Francesca's sacrifice in pseudo-literary pieties beyond the reach of pulpier romance novels, Waller elevates her pointless marital misery to high-toned martyrdom.

When the Princess of Wales acknowledged in her November television interview that she had committed adultery as solace from her marital misery, she was besieged by letters from a sympathetic public.