marriage

Divorced woman sends wedding ring into orbit

When relationships end, there isn't just one guilty party. Unless there is.

It might well be that your ex was a lovable person whom you treated like an errant musketeer. Or it might be that, one fine day, you discovered your ex's words were merely the arbitrary squeakings of a pygmy.

Rebecca Gibbs clearly became disenamored of her husband, Stephen Page. Where once their wedding proudly adorned YouTube, more recently the site reverberated with the whooshing sound of their marriage going up in smoke.

Or into space, to be more precise.

For Gibbs decided to take their wedding … Read more

Amazon's Bezos donates $2.5M in support of same-sex marriage

Amazon is the latest tech company to come out in support of same-sex marriage. And judging from the size of founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' whopping $2.5 million donation to defend same-sex marriage in Washington State, there's no mistaking how the e-commerce magnate feels about the cause. This is the largest-ever publicly reported donation to a marriage campaign, according to the Associated Press.

Bezos announced Friday that he was making the donation with his wife MacKenzie to Washington United for Marriage, a group working to uphold the state's same-sex marriage law. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told the … Read more

Did Chick-fil-A really pretend to be a teenage girl on Facebook?

Never having sampled the product, I am not sure which of one's A's Chick-fil-A is supposed to fill.

However, the company is currently being accused of Class A filling of a slightly misleading sort by those who believe the fast-food chain is pretending to be a teenage girl on Facebook.

The general kerfuffle began when Chick-fil-A's president, Dan Cathy, declared that he supported "the biblical definition of the family unit."

He then went on a radio show and reportedly offered: "I think we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake … Read more

Electronic Arts comes out against Defense of Marriage Act

Electronic Arts has joined a coalition of American businesses opposing the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The game publisher said in a statement Wednesday that it was joining dozens of business in signing an amicus brief that urges the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to find the 1996 law unconstitutional. In part, the statement reads:

DOMA presents a number of problems for businesses like EA, as it creates regulatory, tax, and discrimination complications for employers, and that's why we're standing against it. … Read more

Google to governments: Legalize gay love

Please note the correction at the end of this post.

When even corporations can see that a piece of social legislation makes sense, you'd think that the politicians who ultimately work for those corporations would listen. Especially in America.

And yet the path of gay marriage has not been smooth.

Yesterday, though, Google -- which has repeated expressed support for gay marriage, for example in this year's Valentine's video (embedded) -- decided to confront politicians publicly by launching a global campaign called "Legalize Love."

As Dot429 reports, Google announced its intention yesterday at a Global … Read more

Science-y love blooms into 250-tulip proposal

John Gottula is a patient man. His proposal to girlfriend Kelly Voll took more than six months. No, this wasn't the slowest knee-lowering in history. It was a carefully hatched horticultural plot.

When it comes to geek love, we've come across proposals involving Super Mario, iPhone apps, "Back to the Future," and Twitter. Gottula, a graduate research assistant in plant pathology and plant-microbe biology at Cornell University, turned to his science background in horticulture for inspiration.

"I've heard of men proposing by hiring a pilot and popping the question with a banner. That's expensive; plus I don't have a flair for aeronautics," Gottula tells Crave. "Planting flowers to spell out a proposal seemed more like a horticultural way of doing it." … Read more

How Zuckerberg's wedding reveals Facebook's problem

Who could not be moved by the fact that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finished his bountiful week by getting married?

The churlish might have whined that his fooling his friends into thinking that this was merely a graduation party for his fiancee was not exactly open and connected. Indeed, it surely showed a peculiar yearning for privacy.

However, I wanted to go to his Facebook page and see what his fans had written. Honestly, it was quite dull. Reams and reams of congratulations, with nary an unkind word.

Suddenly, I looked to the right to see that, even on this … Read more

Wife nixes hubby who didn't alter Facebook status to 'married'

"All the news that's fit to be known."

This, surely, should be Facebook's tagline as it rockets toward an uncertain future. For, let's face it, if it's not on Facebook, does it really matter?

Such logic is being put to the test in India, where a woman is reportedly divorcing her husband because he committed the cardinal 21st century crime: he didn't change his Facebook status when they got married.

Quite reasonably, she feels betrayed. How can a woman trust a man who doesn't whip out his cell phone the minute the … Read more

Man allegedly kills wife's flirty Facebook friend

Social networks don't cause trouble. It's just that they sometimes make it so that trouble escalates more easily.

This seems to be true in the case of Chou You-huang, a 34-year-old Taiwanese man who allegedly discovered his wife had a Facebook friend who was male and a little flirty.

As Agence France-Press tells it, Chou managed to contact the Facebook friend, Chuang Shih-chang. He asked Chuang, a 40-year-old gift shop owner, for a meeting, which allegedly took place at 2 a.m. last Saturday.

Chou reportedly didn't appear alone. He allegedly had two friends with him who … Read more

Women should marry a woman, says Facebook's Sandberg

When he looks for lovers, my great engineer friend George relies on data. They need to have blue eyes, blond hair, an appreciation for fine dining and an IQ (and height) just two points below his.

Oh, and the lover must be a woman. Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, however, has declared that women should not marry George, except in exceptional circumstances.

For she is adamant that women should marry women. The reason is very simple: the data says so.

In an interview for the PBS/AOL "Makers" series, Sandberg didn't quote the source of her data … Read more