According to solicitors, couples have rushed in droves to divorce ahead of the cuts to the £2 billion legal aid budget that came in this month.
May – when the wedding season traditionally gets going – is around the corner, but this year we seem to have fewer weddings and a funeral on Wednesday – and a lot of accelerated divorces.
Meanwhile, Tom Cruise reportedly told German TV last week that he never expected to be divorced at 50 (a comment he later denied making). But I can’t worry about Cruise. He’s a fun-sized movie star and, like many men, he can arise phoenix-like from the ashes of his marriage.
Phoenix: Cruise does not have to worry about being divorced as he can rise from the ashes and get back on the marketThe ones I worry about are the ex-wives, who often can’t.
For where I live, there must be five available, attractive and lively divorced women to each available – if ever so slightly dull – divorced man. It wouldn’t matter if he was a wife-beater, serial killer or had sex at Premier Inns with strangers he met online: the male of the species is still a trophy guest and the woman, generally, isn’t.
As my husband jests, if we ever split up, I would join the ranks of predatory females in their forties, flicking my blow dry in desperation as I trolled the internet for a mate, whereas he, handsome and with all his own hair, would be a total catch at sixty.
Indeed, he would never have to cook a meal again, he reckons, so swamped would he be by competing invitations. All he would need to do is coast majestically through the remaining ocean of his life, like a large whale, opening his jaws for female plankton only when he felt like it.
This problem is endemic. There is even a column in a national newspaper called The Plankton, ‘written by a divorcee at the bottom of the sexual food chain’, which tells you all you need to know about the different value society places on single men and single women.
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Now, for some reason (divorce), a few more male singletons have suddenly been released on to the market, which is causing great excitement among local hostesses. One – nice, normal, ie not Tom Cruise – came to ‘kitchen supper’ last week so I had an opportunity to test out my husband’s theory.
‘Frank,’ I asked (not his real name. He started sweating with panic during our exchange that I would use it). ‘What’s it like, you know, OUT THERE?’
‘Vibrant,’ Frank said, glugging his red wine. ‘Go on,’ I said, pouring him more.
‘Well, what happens is, you meet someone and you jump into bed with them immediately, and then, if you like them . . . um . . . you try to find intimacy afterwards.’
This may be too much information for you but it wasn’t enough for me. ‘You mean you have sex with people you’ve only just met?’ I shrieked. I am old-fashioned that way.
‘Yes,’ Frank said.
At this point a student listening said: ‘The middle-aged dating scene sounds exactly like the first year at Edinburgh.’
But this doesn’t work both ways. As I’ve observed, if you’re a newly-single man, you’re a prime cut of Fresh Meat. But if you’re a newly-single woman, of the same vintage, you’re ‘not wanted on voyage’. But back to Frank’s sex life.
‘Do you do it a lot?’ I asked.
‘I could do it every night if I wanted to,’ he said.
Why is this? Well, all the obvious things. A man who is reasonably presentable, and not actively psychopathic, has his pick of women of any age. Women generally have a more limited range to choose from (their age and older). As poor Ms Plankton has written, ‘all I want is a companionable, kind, age-appropriate person who can string two words together, is largely heterosexual and preferably doesn’t live in Auckland.’
But the real rub is, divorced women aren’t just short of social capital, but actual capital, too. According to the LSE’s Professor Stephen Jenkins, who’s conducted a major study on the financial impact of divorce, men on average get richer after splitting up and women get poorer. The ex-husband’s income goes up by around one third, while the ex-wife’s drops to one fifth of its previous level. The women who survive divorce best, he says, are those who are either in paid work or who find a new partner.
This must explain, then, why many divorced women are still so keen on what Mrs T called the ‘weaker sex,’ and why men are so sought after. It’s a case of supply, demand, and dosh too.
‘So, what sort of women do you meet?’ I asked Frank over pudding. “Divorced women my age. Younger women, singles . . . but they’re even more frightening,’ he added. ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because they want to get married,’ he replied, with a little shiver.
It does seem to appear that my husband has a point, which is annoying.
Come on Liz! Can't you do anything wrong?Liz Hurley cheated on Hugh Grant, as we discover from the kiss’n’ tell book written by an actor she had on the side.
According to this panting luvvie, their affair started when Miss Hurley cooked a gourmet supper in her hotel, performed a scorching striptease on a table-top, and then put on a display of sizzling event sex.
Hurley did not comment on his ungentlemanly revelations. She merely tweeted a picture of her tanned self, clad in one of her own tiny white bikinis. I am appalled. Honestly, Liz! Can’t you think of the rest of us for once? You are setting the bar high – far too high – for all our comfort.
The two secret pillars that held up the Iron Lady Supported: Margaret ThatcherIf behind every great man there’s a woman rolling her eyes, who’s behind every great woman? In Mrs T’s case, it was two older men.
She had the austere grocer, Alderman Roberts, from whom she ‘learnt everything’, and from whom she took her cue.
‘He brought me up to believe all the things I do believe and they are the values on which I fought the election,’ she said in 1982.
Then she had Denis, the ‘golden thread’ running through her life.
The influence of these men explains to me why she did not feel it necessary to promote other women.
She was so motivated by one and loved by the other that she couldn’t understand how other, less fortunate, well-educated, supported or confident women might need further favours.
Still, she paid her dues to the true blue who stood by her. ‘Without Denis I would have never reached the starting blocks,’ she admitted.
I agree with columnist Sandra Parsons about the identity of the killer in ITV’s Broadchurch. We both think it’s Ellie’s partner.
He is a smiley, younger house-husband who spends ages at the swings with the kids. Our shared suspicion is proof that hardened working mothers find no type quite so threatening as the contented, patient, domesticated dad in casualwear.
