Keep comments simple in divorce cases

Dear Miss Manners: Two of my colleagues have divorced their spouses and are now dating one another. While speculation has circulated about them dating for the past year or so, one divorce just became final while the other one is still being completed.

While they have told a few people around the department, they have not told me personally, and while we’ve seen them together on our city’s subway, they have not come out as an official couple. I am very confused on how to act around them.

Obviously, it’s not polite to ask how their spouses are doing, but is it polite to ask how they are doing, or how the children are doing? Or simply leave it to how the weather is today?

At what point do the divorces become common knowledge and I should be expected to know about it?

Gentle Reader: The number of conventional inquiries one can make without running into land mines lessens every day, Miss Manners has observed. “How are the children?” seems innocuous enough, but what if the children are siding with the deserted spouses and have stopped speaking to these?

“How are you?” is quite enough. Fortunately, you are not required to comment on the situation unless they bring it up, in which case you can get by with, “I wish you both well.”

Dear Miss Manners: In the days of dance cards, how did the men keep track of whom to dance with next?

Gentle Reader: They had cards, too. They tucked them away, where the cads pretended to have lost them if they met ladies they liked better than the ones they had previously engaged. Miss Manners suspects this may be why the custom fell into disuse.