They say it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Better still — by our estimation, anyway — is to have loved, lost, and then loved again.

That's what happened to a charming couple from a small suburb of Sydney, Australia, called Blacktown.

Mervyn and Barbara Cronan, both 68, first tied the knot in 1957, and then divorced eight years later. Then, a chance meeting in 2005 brought the two together again. The old passion reignited, and the Cronans remarried on May 13, 2006 — the anniversary of their original wedding.

To celebrate the occasion, their four children — Teena, Debbie, John, and Vicki — recently joined them and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren at a family barbecue.

"It was fantastic, having all the four kids together for the first time," Mervyn Cronan tells the Blacktown Sun.

And the two have much to celebrate. All told, the Cronan's now have a whopping 15 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren.

Added Mervyn: "You can't buy these feelings."

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"Usually men go through crises in mid-life," said Kristin Georgi, a 23-year-old manicurist who recently ended a three-month marriage with Hardy. "Not Joe," she tells the Mirror. "In his 80s, you think he would be settling down, but no..."

Once Georgi walked, Hardy filed for divorce at Fayette County Common Pleas Court in Pennsylvania citing, of all things, "irreconcilable differences."

"You think there are some differences there?" joked Georgi. "You think? There is only a 61-year gap."

The divorce has yet to be finalized, but word is that Hardy isn't wasting any of his precious time, having already found a new mate in a 22-year-old named Danielle.

Georgi, for her part, doesn't seem overly distraught by the loss. Along with her youth, she managed to get a number of expensive gifts out of the relationship, not least of which was a Porsche.

Take the case of an Israeli couple who, according to The Times of India, have set the record for the world's shortest marriage.

After a grand total of four days, the two landed in Rabbinical court with the husband complaining about the wife's refusal to live in his parents house, while the wife said she had been promised an apartment of their own. Also, not only was the wife upset about the share of wedding gifts she received, but with the husband's family's taste in gifts.

Still, it can be useful to see how goes the state of marriage in other cultures around the globe.

According to new data from the Rabbinical courts, 5 percent of the marriages last only a year in Israel. Last year, 10,000 couples filed for divorce there, which amounted to an rise of 4 percent over 2005 statistics. Even more striking, Jerusalem, which boasts a large religious population, witnessed a 10.4 percent increase in its divorce rate.

With our eyes wide open to the realities of marriage, we can safely say no culture has a monopoly on healthy relationships.

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Now, according to Israel's YNetNews, the husband has resurfaced in an Israeli jail and says he's willing to free his wife from her nightmarish situation.

The wife and her family say they made every effort to find the husband over years. To everyone's surprise, it appears as if the husband spent the whole time living right under their nose, traveling between Israel and Europe.

For her newfound freedom, the woman has to thank Israel Prison Service's chief rabbi, Yehuda Yekutiel Vizner, who both managed to locate the husband and then eventually convinced him to give his estranged wife a divorce.

After the man finally saw the light, rabbinical judges had him sign divorce papers in prison, thus freeing his wife from what was looking like a lifetime of official bondage.

Really, though, we think the woman was asking for trouble when she married this guy. Not only did he initially leave over financial woes, but in Israel, he's served six complete jail terms, and is now serving his seventh related to property and violent offenses.

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Drew, 53 and a police sergeant in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook, just resigned after being named a suspect in the disappearance of Stacy, his fourth wife. Stacy, 23, was last seen October 28, and authorities are now calling the case a potential homicide.

Peterson says he believes his wife has left him for another man, and so has no plans to look for her. "Why would I look for somebody who I don't believe is missing?" he told NBC's "Today" this week. "She's just gone. She's where she wants to be."

Also, Drew said Stacy had asked him for a divorce, but he wrote it off as a case of female hormones in overdrive. "I'm not trying to be funny, but Stacy would ask me for divorce after her sister died [of cancer] on a regular basis," Peterson said. "It was based on her menstrual cycle."

Speaking of asking for a divorce, the interview aired a day after the body of Peterson's third wife, Kathleen Savio, was exhumed in Illinois as authorities look for clues about how she died.

Savio was found dead of a head wound in her bathtub in 2004, just before the couple's divorce settlement was finalized. The death was ruled an accidental drowning, but investigators now say evidence suggests foul play was involved.

On "Today," Drew had a message for Stacy: "Come home," he said. "Tell people where you are." We've got a message for Drew: Good luck.

That's the home of Wang Hong and Zhang Hai, a couple who were having trouble ending a four-year marriage because of their difficulty communicating with each other and the local judge. Both Hong and Hai are deaf and mute, making communication understandably difficult.

"In the end we found using mobile phone text messages was an effective way of communicating," said Judge Xue Lixin, who made an earnest effort save the marriage herself.

"I made some phone calls and met with Wang's relatives and friends and asked them to change her mind, but they failed. She came to court four times and confirmed in writing she was determined to divorce."

Turns out it took 200 texts to finally bring an end to the marriage. So that means the first recorded divorce by text wasn't impractical, impulsive or without effort — three things we're pretty sure will factor into the first big city text divorce. Any day now.

"Back in 1990, if you had divorce or separation in your background, you weren't allowed to speak [in churches]," says Michelle was married to Joe in 1982. Despite their faith, the two insist that religion alone is not enough to sustain marriage.

"We were told that as long as we were both going to church and both praying and both Christians, that our marriage would be saved," Michelle says. "But that's not true. It takes much more to save a marriage."

The problem, says Joe, was that "our focus was on each other instead of God."

For Michelle, "I would say the major issue was that I didn't know how to communicate my frustrations to Joe. I would tend to stuff things, and Joe did, too."

"The biggest thing I want people to know is that even if their spouse is unwilling to work on the marriage, they can take the tools we use and totally change their marriage, because it changes the dynamics in the home," Michelle says.

Added Joe, "The people we work with usually have the issue I call ‘she-he'. She does this and he does that. The husbands work and provide and then divide because their focus is their wife — they want their wife to be happy, and they don't focus on God. If they focus on God, the happiness will be a byproduct."

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Welcome to the National Teishu-Kampaku Association — or the Chauvinistic Husbands Association — where buttoned-up Japanese businessmen are making these culturally uncharacteristic vows in an effort to save their faltering marriages.

Shuichi Amano, a magazine editor by trade, started the group back in 1999 after attempting his own last ditch effort to save a marriage of more than 20 years.

Along the way he stumbled upon a social phenomenon in which a growing number of Japanese women have begun suing their husbands for divorce once the men retire. The aim of the women, apparently, is to bring an end to longstanding marital problems caused by the
indifference of their husbands.

"Many husbands are making a living managing risks at their businesses, but they neglect the ones at home," Amano, 55.

"The old ways don't work anymore and we husbands have to get out of our little fantasy of having ultimate power over our wives. We have to show our ability to change ourselves for the sake of our marriage," he
said.

Through his own experience and interviews with women, Amano discovered that, with women, everything boils down to their desire to hear their husbands repeatedly say "three magic phrases:" "Thank you," "Sorry," and "I love you."

Amano describes his technique — while is presently being used by over 4,000 Japanese men — as "smileage," or husbands fostering the goodwill of their wives.

Smileage. That's our new favorite word.

But why are we telling you about it? Firstly, because the same people who host Daddy Divorce Camps are in the process of putting together a Mommy Divorce Camp. And second, because while these getaways are intended specifically to help daddies, mommies and the rest of the family are supposed to benefit as well.

For about $600, attendees receive crash courses in a range of divorce-related issues — from legal and financial, to family and child matters — along with anger management and stress reduction techniques. Workshops take place to rebuild confidence and assist in the healing and closure process. Campers can also indulge in some extracurricular activities like sports, a comedy show, and poker.

The poker skills aside, it would seem enormously beneficial for at least one member of a splitting couple, if not both, to get better acquainted with the above issues — and take an anger management course or three. Also, as long as Daddy's new confidence doesn't turn into bullying, we'd much rather be dealing with a man in the process of finding himself, than one lost in a sea of fear, anger, and self-pity.

"In military-speak it's about surveillance and reconnaissance," King says of keeping track of documents, old check statements, and credit card account balances. "It is war. Do not share lawyers. Remember it's war and that's the way to address it."

Thinking strategically like a general leading troops is essential. Discussing impulsive retribution, King explains: "Whatever pops into your head, don't act on it. It could end up hurting you later in court with your settlement, with custody issues."

In King's army, however, emotions are standard issue. "There was nothing out there that says it's OK if you're feeling terrible — only dry lecture books," King says of her experience when she went through her own divorce. "You need a friend to hold your hand through the painful moments. There's so much you don't know."

But like any general, King had to make her share of tough decisions. Her first order of business was to put her ex's family off-limits. As for friends, there were three camps: hers, his and theirs.

"Oh, let him have them," said O'Connell. "She had plenty of players in her army."