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Monday February 9, 2009

Dramatic dalliances

BUT THEN AGAIN WITH MARY SCHNEIDER


Hades has no fury like a husband scorned.

MY much younger husband is planning to divorce me. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m more than 20 years older than him. After all, why should a fresh-faced young man who has yet to experience his first grey hair want to dump a woman of wit and wisdom just because there’s a little bit of snow on the roof and a few wrinkles in the upholstery?

I can think of a number of spring/autumn relationships that were/are fairly successful. Relationships that didn’t flounder because of the woman’s greater age.

There was Joan Collins and just about every guy she dated; Cher and her well-known dalliances with younger, well-toned men; Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher (still together); and Ivana Trump and that young chap she married with the accent and the incredibly greasy-looking hair.

These women, and many others like them, broke down barriers. After years of seeing successful men dump their middle-aged partners in favour of a much-younger trophy wife, more and more mature women are now changing social norms by dating down.

Of course, the whispers of “gold digger” or “gigolo” or “cradle snatcher” can still be heard from less progressive people whenever an older woman appears in public with her young man.

Still, no matter how big or small the age difference between two people in a relationship, when it ends in divorce, no one really wins. Of course, some people may appear to win, simply because of their capacity to get what they can out of a failed relationship.

Take Ivana Trump, for example. While in the process of divorcing her first husband Donald, she is purported to have coined the phrase “Don’t get mad, get everything.”

That being the case, what can an older woman hope to gain from a man who is too young to have experienced even a moderate degree of financial success?

I mean to say, most men in their 20s/early 30s are still addicted to computer games, take part in burping contests with their friends and have yet to finish paying off their student loans.

In that regard, my husband is probably more mature than other men his age, but I still won’t get much out of the divorce.

In case you’re wondering, my husband doesn’t want to divorce me because of my creeping cellulite, or the unkind comments he has to put up with about our relationship, or my absolute disinterest in all things Manchester United. He wants to get rid of me because he found out I was having an affair with another man.

Like, how unreasonable is that? Doesn’t everyone have affairs these days? I mean to say, Brad Pitt had a dalliance with Angelina Jolie before he left Jennifer Aniston; Bill Clinton had his fling with Monica Lewinsky while Hilary was in the room next door, and my Uncle John began flirting with a woman in the town library while my aunt was playing afternoon bingo in the building across the road.

My aunt only became suspicious of her husband when he began changing his library books (three at a time) every single weekday. Hitherto, the man had never read anything beyond his daily tabloid newspaper.

However, just as Hilary forgave Bill (after he’d slept on the White House sofa for a suitable number of weeks), my aunt forgave my uncle his philandering ways. Or at least that’s what she tells everyone.

“I have forgiven him, but I will never forget what he has done to me,” she can often be heard saying to anyone who hasn’t heard her story before.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a woman who is hell bent on carrying a grudge. Surely, if she’d really forgiven my uncle, she would also eventually forget that he had hurt her deeply.

Still, I suspect she is more upset by the fact that my uncle had an affair with an extremely unattractive-looking woman than the affair per se.

Had the librarian been beautiful, blonde and curvy, my aunt could easily have written the affair off as the actions of a shallow @$$#ø£€. But an unattractive woman poses a much bigger threat, because there must have been a connection between the two that went beyond the physical.

But I digress.

If you would like to find out why I had an affair and with whom, all will be revealed on Feb 13 and 14 in Penang, and on the Feb 21 in Ipoh. You can even listen to my husband as he dissects our broken marriage in public.

  • Details of the play Calling it
  • Quits can be found at http://www.penangplayers.org/

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