...that I am signing up for a one-way ticket to Mars.
That’s basically what Ken Sullivan has told his wife, Becky. Ken is in a group of a thousand or so finalists for the Mars One project that could send him to the red planet permanently in about 10 years. Ken and Becky have been married five years and have four children, and that has apparently pushed Ken to the limit. He has decided that life on a desolate planet (or perhaps in a space capsule) is preferable to the little slice of heaven he carved out for himself here on Earth.
Obviously, things are a little rocky in this relationship. But Ken is a man of his word who views his wedding vows as a verbal commitment to his partner. They are, in both moral and legal senses, a binding contract. So he is going to ride this rocky patch out and fulfill his commitment to his wife, albeit from a planet 140 million miles away.
His wife is not really on the same page. “The question is do we get divorced now or get divorced later,” Becky told The Salt Lake City Tribune. Way to bail on your marriage at the first sign of a rough patch, especially when she seems to feel like her husband being on Mars wouldn’t be that much different than normal. “He already works out of town, so we’re used to the long-distance thing, but it would be hard when he doesn’t come home after awhile. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t leave my kids, but I’ve spent every day with them, and he doesn’t, so I guess it’s different,” Becky told the Tribune, who Becky seems to think is her own personal marriage counselor.
This will give him the possibility to do something significant with his life. According to Ken, he sees this as a chance to explore, “and the opportunity to do something no one has ever done before, and making a name for myself would be nice to do.” Now you can start to see why Ken is so desperate to get out of Dodge. He has hooked his wagon to a shrill, petty harpy. He woke up one morning and realized he was Witness Protection-era Henry Hill… he gets to live the rest of his life as a schnook. But now he has found his escape.
Godspeed Ken Sullivan.
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