In the process things got way out of control, specifically over who would get the house. It should have gone to Barbara because she was the one who slaved away at making it beautiful. Oliver disagreed; his reason was that he was the one who paid for everything in the house.
They both acted unethically when dealing with their lawyers. Barbara’s lawyer tried to make a note Oliver wrote seem like he was leaving everything to her. That was wrong because he wrote it when he thought he was dying, and he was in fact trying to say that he thanked her for helping him make his life successful. Oliver’s lawyer found a loophole in the law that would let Oliver live in the house during the divorce. That just wasn’t right because he was being inconsiderate to her needs. It put Barbara under a lot of stress.
The fact that he was living there made things worse. They set out on campaigns to ruin each other’s lives. Oliver ran over her cat, trashed her dinner party, urinated on the fish, threw her down the stairs and so on. Barbara was not any better. She ran over Oliver’s car with him in it, locked him in the sauna, and led him to believe that the pate he ate was made out of his dog.
Oliver and Barbara’s actions were not ethical at all. They were very unfair to each other and used tactics such as deceit and lying to try to get what they wanted. More importantly, they were unfair to the people around them. Their kids and the maid suffered. They had to put up with all the craziness that Barbara and Oliver was responsible for.
This story was a severe exaggeration, but it should teach us something. A lot of people only think of themselves. They use lies and what ever else it takes to achieve their selfish goals. They end up hurting the ones they love the most, and don’t realize it until it is too late. In the case of Oliver and Barbara, it was too late.
