Stand by Your Manhood (9 page)

Yet, by Tinsel Town standards, divorce is still a credible career move. Look at Goldie Hawn’s film
The First Wives Club.
Billed as a family comedy about rinsing your ex for all he’s worth, it’s actually just a group of women prostituting themselves with the backing of the law. The moral of the immoral story? Men are untapped resources to be extracted, like crude oil in Texas. Girls: dig in and strike rich.

But when women leave their husbands in films such as
The Hours
or
Thelma and Louise,
it’s all good. They’re heroines. Even when the men do nothing wrong.

OK, these are just movies – I get it. But it captures an ethos. A cultural trend. A way of thinking around men, their industriousness and their money.

Look at former Arsenal footballer Ray Parlour. When he married girlfriend Karen in 1998, it all started out rosy, as it always does. But, by the time it fell apart in 2004, the former optician’s nurse didn’t just get two mortgage-free houses, £38,500 in annual support for their three children and a £250,000 tax-free lump sum. Oh no, she also got personal maintenance of £406,500 from his
future
earnings too. This, she argued, is because she ‘encouraged’ him to be a good midfielder.

He shoots, she scores, you might say.

Which is precisely why WAG culture now rages through our country like an aggressive venereal disease. Girls of sixteen aspire to be glamorous girlfriends because it’s an easy life, not because they love the game – or even the men playing it. Young women who wear so much make-up they have to tip their heads back to get their eyes open are encouraged to hunt in packs until they snag a rich footballer, who’ll play, play, play to pay, pay, pay. Why? Because it beats getting up at 7 a.m., doing the daily commute and actually thinking about something
other than themselves. When Pot Noodle summed this up in one of their adverts, the tag line was: ‘Why try harder?’ Indeed.

There’s even a technical term for it: hypergamy. The act of ‘marrying up’ by securing a rich man. It might not be PC, but it’s still real. Just ask James Taranto from the
Wall Street Journal.
According to him, it’s steeped in nature. ‘Any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that female hypergamy – more broadly defined as the drive to mate with dominant males – is an animal instinct,’ he tells me.

But what would happen if Ray Parlour – or, let’s be honest here, you – got married and divorced four times? Would he, or you, have to give all his money away to four different exes who were each capable of earning their own salary? I put this theory to Camilla Baldwin, divorce lawyer extraordinaire, who’s based in Mayfair. Her no-bullshit approach has seen her hired by celebrities, sportsmen and bankers on countless multi-million-pound bloodbaths. Thankfully, she didn’t charge me her standard £450 per hour rate. Further proof, in case you needed it, that marriage and divorce are financial enemas.

‘The judge in Ray’s case basically disliked him,’ she says.

Hmm. Constance Briscoe, anyone?

Camilla’s eponymous firm, rated one of our country’s best by the
Financial Times,
has only one male lawyer in a team of fifteen because ‘there aren’t many men in family law’, yet the bulk of her customers are husbands and fathers.

The Law Commission agrees. They recently released a paper which advised limiting spousal maintenance to
three years, like they do in Scotland. But don’t start celebrating just yet: it’s still a long way from being implemented. And, in the meantime, it’s a costly nightmare.

‘I’ve spent so much time with clients who are absolutely bonkers,’ she adds.

I quickly take a moment to bang my head against a brick wall, then resume the conversation. So, let me ask the impossible here: are we saying women sometimes marry for money?

‘Absolutely! AB-SO-LUTELY,’ she bellows down the phone.

When I ask her what she – as a hard-working woman – thinks of it all, she pauses before responding.

To be fair, it’s not just women. It’s bigger than that. It’s a wider habit of stinging men (take him to the cleaners!
etc.) for simply being male, even if everyone is supposed to be equal and self-sufficient.

Only last year I reported on the story of a man who was trying to reach a settlement with his civil partner. As part of my research I spoke with the ex’s lawyer, who – in all seriousness – said that his client deserved 50 per cent of his partner’s fortune because ‘he’d helped decorate the apartment they shared for eighteen months’, despite not actually paying any of the mortgage. No kidding. At that point I was so aghast I wanted to bite through the phone wire with my teeth with frustration, but, thankfully, I was calling from my mobile.

So, what’s a guy to do? ‘If a man’s determined to get married then he must get a pre-nup, otherwise it’s simply too expensive,’ Camilla insists. ‘More and more people are doing it. In fact, people are even getting post-nups now, but men must be insistent – otherwise steer clear altogether. Be in a relationship by all means, even live together, but don’t get married. Especially if you have any prospect of making money.’

OK, let’s park the cost of bankrolling an ex for the moment. Instead, let’s look at the average price of an actual wedding. Some swift research shows they don’t call it the ‘big day’ for nothing. Here’s why: the latest stats say you’ll need around £18,000 for the average ’do. This includes: the venue, the wedding dress, the rings,
the photographer, the flowers, the catering, the entertainment, your outfit, the bridesmaids’ dresses and the honeymoon.

And, even then, it might still be a shit day.

A quick counting-on-fingers calculation proves that, for the same amount, you can get: an amazing holiday with first-class flights around the world, a flash car, a deposit on an apartment, a wardrobe of suits from Savile Row or a debilitating sex addiction with high-class hookers. You could even replicate Stevie Nicks’s alleged penchant for hiring somebody to anally insert your cocaine stash to avoid doing what’s become known as ‘a Danniella Westbrook’. Whatever your preference, it has to be better than a doomed marriage if you actually
enjoy
spunking your hard-earned money up the wall.

Sadly, there’s even more bad news. The quantity – and quality – of sex also dwindles after marriage. A recent vox pop of 3,000 couples found that those who had had sex four times a week before their wedding did it just once a week afterwards. Meanwhile, the majority of singletons reported being sexually satisfied almost all the time. Which makes me wonder: is marriage even a natural state for human beings? Aren’t we all just animals? Surely a visit to any branch of Tiger Tiger would confirm this.

Even France’s former First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy admits she’s ‘easily bored by monogamy’ whilst Cameron
Diaz has said relationships would ideally only last ‘two, five or twenty years’ – not forever. So why, even when we know it probably won’t have the fairy-tale ending, do we go for it anyway? Are we all just hopeless romantics – or lemmings walking off a cliff?

My next port of call is renegade anthropological researcher Christopher Ryan, who co-wrote the controversial
New York Times
bestseller
Sex at Dawn.

‘If you’re asking if long-term sexual monogamy is a natural state for human beings, the answer is clearly no – at least, for most human beings,’ he asserts. ‘We’re as attracted to novelty and variety in our sexual appetites as we are in diet, art, music, travel etc. An appetite for this is intrinsic to our intelligence and social nature.’

According to him, the body itself proves this.

As he talks, I realise that perhaps what marriage really needs is a makeover. Less Jo Brand, more rebrand.
Something to make it more appealing, especially for men. So I approach Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies. They famously ushered Margaret Thatcher into power in 1979 with their memorable poster campaign for the Conservative Party, which showed a dole queue snaking out of an employment office and disappearing into the skyline. The tag line read: ‘Labour isn’t working’.

So, let’s stretch our imagination and pretend the government has offered a limitless budget to make marriage man-friendly. What tactics would they use?

‘There are many commitments in life but few are for life in quite the same way as marriage,’ says Richard Huntington, the company’s chief strategy officer.

Sounds like the treatment for the De Beers ad, right? That’s because it is. Commercials are formulaic because they follow a formula. Advertising agencies are paid millions to manipulate the human emotions that drive us – especially fear. The fear of missing the boat. The fear of missing out. The fear of growing old and dying alone.

But – brilliantly – courage, the opposite of fear, which men have in spades, allows us to accept the reality that, no matter how much we love somebody, no matter how good our intentions are, the success of a marriage isn’t just down to us. It takes two. And the overwhelming majority of divorces are filed by women. The Office of National Statistics put the rates at 66 per cent for 2011, whilst it was 72 per cent in the early 1990s.

OK, given the aforementioned jackpot settlements, this is hardly surprising. But a study sponsored by Yorkshire Building Society, which questioned 3,515 divorced adults, found that men suffer the most when it goes sour. Apparently, it makes us feel ‘devastated, confused, betrayed and even suicidal; whilst women are more likely to feel relieved, liberated and happy’.

Divorced men are also more prone than women to finding solace in drinking; going back to an old toxic flame (you stopped seeing her for a reason!); and self-medicating with risky, casual sex. Adding insult to injury, they also say we worry more about finding a new partner and throw ourselves into work as a distraction.

‘We’re bred as children to be needy and to think we need another person to complete us. It’s driven into us from an early age,’ says Guy Blews, a relationship expert in Los Angeles.