Honey, It's Not You—It's the Mortgage

Over the past several months, it has become painfully clear that the housing crisis is not just about housing. Rising defaults have led to turmoil in the credit markets. Banks have tightened their standards for lending to consumers, who are already snapping their wallets shut as the economy slows.

But more recently, the turmoil has spread to areas that would appear to have little, if any, connection to housing. We've even seen the crisis blamed—justly, I would argue—for fewer Botox treatments.

And now this. From divorce360.com, via Housingpanic:

"These days, escalating mortgage payments are exacerbating the divorce problem," Nicholas Retsinas, director of Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, said.

The logic is easy enough to grasp—the housing crisis creates additional financial burdens, putting more stress on a relationship, which eventually ruins the marriage entirely. But there are no real data to back up this connection, making it tenuous, at best.

Still, it got me to thinking....

I could never really understand why I'm not considered much of a dancer or why it takes me so long to fill out taxi cab receipts. Come to think of it, I wasn't very popular in high school, was I? And I always knew there had to be a good reason that I'm not playing power forward for the Houston Rockets—I swear I could have hit that shot in 2004.

Sure, the data aren't in yet, but I'm going to go ahead and put down the housing crisis as being responsible for these—and the many other—great disappointments in my life.

What a relief. It's just good to finally know.