http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article5280408.ece
On the day the first reports of Gordon Ramsay’s extramarital activities broke, the man himself was at Babington House, recovering from a friend’s birthday party the night before. Staff quietly removed every copy of the offending paper, so that Ramsay and his pals were protected from the awkward modern inconvenience of a kiss-and-tell exposé.
Many families go through Ramsayesque domestic nightmares and survive. They may not have a business empire at stake, but there is still the family brand to protect, and women are prepared to put up with terrible behaviour to safeguard it. Tana joins Princess Diana, Victoria Beckham, Hillary Clinton and Mary Archer — women who have all stood at the garden gate in front of the press.
“Ramsay is such a force of nature. I guess his wife thinks it comes with the territory. He is publicly very faithful to Tana,” says Style’s agony aunt, Sally Brampton. “Relationships are agreements, and just because you break the rules of society, it does not mean you are breaking the terms of that unique agreement.”
One successful businessman I know, a serial cheater, says drily: “Playing away is not good for the balance and harmony at home, so I keep it quiet, although men do talk about it among themselves.” (Yes - there is Terb lol)
The businessman continues: “Most relationships start with passionate love or lust. Neither of these last, but the relationships often do. Many people need bursts of passion or lust. If their spouse accepts this, they may continue to be happy; if not, they might be driven apart and the cycle is repeated. If the mistress is tolerated or kept secret, what I would call the ‘sub-relationship’ can be long-lasting and to the benefit of all concerned.”
Another man describes how his occasional straying “can have a therapeutic effect on the relationship. It often makes you realise you are better off where you are — the grass is not greener — and reinforces your commitment to the relationship”.
Many wives are pragmatic about this state of affairs. As the wife of two unfaithful men, Annabel Goldsmith said in 1987: “I can never understand the wives who really mind, the wives who set such store by fidelity. How extraordinary and how mad they are. Because, surely, if the man goes out and he comes back, it’s not actually doing any harm.” Goldsmith was the late Jimmy Goldsmith’s mistress before she was his wife. It was he, of course, who uttered the memorable truism: “If you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy.”
Alpha males, like rock stars, MPs, princes and tycoons, with their incredible egos and rampant, childlike need for attention, wealth and opportunity, are particularly prone to such behaviour. The wives of these men develop blind spots and coping mechanisms to sustain the the family. The divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd Platt says: “Three-quarters of the powerful men in this country are having affairs in some form or another. Some of those affairs last 10 years without the wife, apparently, knowing. Women come to us to find out what their husbands are up to, and if it transpires he is having an affair, it’s not a given they will divorce him. Often they’ll say the reason they’re not leaving is, ‘He’s such a character, I will never meet someone like that again.’ It can be fine for years, and then the men actually fall in love, usually with a younger version of the wife. That’s when trouble starts, and when I meet them, they are very angry.”
The extramarital affair is more common than divorce, though independent working women are more likely to leave unfaithful husbands as they have less fear of coping with life alone. “Infidelity is not always a sackable offence,” says Rowan Pelling, former editor of the The Erotic Review. “In all the uproar and scandal, people forget marriage is an alliance. Men are like egotistical little boys — ambitious and driven ones even more so. They need constant attention, and when you have kids, some women will think, ‘Oh god, let someone else take up that slack.’ ”
I spoke to one person in the Ramsay camp who said Gordon was like a child in a sweetshop, with adoring women making silly eyes at him. “You’d need to be a very strong man to resist that kind of attention and opportunity. I’m not sure I could.”
For a certain type of wife, however, a mistress can be a blessing. “I didn’t want to have sex,” says one Hampshire mother of two. “So I told him, ‘The ideal situation is for you to go and get a mistress. I don’t care who she is, just as long as she is kept out of our lives.’ There was nothing sexual left in our marriage; it was something I had to force myself to do every few months. I thought we would struggle on if he was getting regular sex and attention from another woman, and then we could just get on with being friends and having a family. I think, as a society, we’re morally squeamish about the practicalities of farming out sex to another woman, but I have a couple of girlfriends who say, ‘I don’t care if he’s getting it elsewhere. I just don’t want to know about it.’ ”
If you talk to the hairdressers and beauty-parlour confidantes of some of the richest wives in London, you’ll hear the same story again and again. “It’s different for those women,” says one. “They don’t marry for love — the families push them together or the woman marries the man for his money. A lot of wives turn a blind eye, but they lay out ground rules: the other woman can’t be a scrubber, in case she goes to the press or gets pregnant, and she can’t be too beautiful or he’ll leave the wife for her.”
One £200-an-hour beauty professional pointed out that if all other wives in a social group are putting up with it, you will too. Infidelity becomes socially acceptable.
On the day the first reports of Gordon Ramsay’s extramarital activities broke, the man himself was at Babington House, recovering from a friend’s birthday party the night before. Staff quietly removed every copy of the offending paper, so that Ramsay and his pals were protected from the awkward modern inconvenience of a kiss-and-tell exposé.
Many families go through Ramsayesque domestic nightmares and survive. They may not have a business empire at stake, but there is still the family brand to protect, and women are prepared to put up with terrible behaviour to safeguard it. Tana joins Princess Diana, Victoria Beckham, Hillary Clinton and Mary Archer — women who have all stood at the garden gate in front of the press.
“Ramsay is such a force of nature. I guess his wife thinks it comes with the territory. He is publicly very faithful to Tana,” says Style’s agony aunt, Sally Brampton. “Relationships are agreements, and just because you break the rules of society, it does not mean you are breaking the terms of that unique agreement.”
One successful businessman I know, a serial cheater, says drily: “Playing away is not good for the balance and harmony at home, so I keep it quiet, although men do talk about it among themselves.” (Yes - there is Terb lol)
The businessman continues: “Most relationships start with passionate love or lust. Neither of these last, but the relationships often do. Many people need bursts of passion or lust. If their spouse accepts this, they may continue to be happy; if not, they might be driven apart and the cycle is repeated. If the mistress is tolerated or kept secret, what I would call the ‘sub-relationship’ can be long-lasting and to the benefit of all concerned.”
Another man describes how his occasional straying “can have a therapeutic effect on the relationship. It often makes you realise you are better off where you are — the grass is not greener — and reinforces your commitment to the relationship”.
Many wives are pragmatic about this state of affairs. As the wife of two unfaithful men, Annabel Goldsmith said in 1987: “I can never understand the wives who really mind, the wives who set such store by fidelity. How extraordinary and how mad they are. Because, surely, if the man goes out and he comes back, it’s not actually doing any harm.” Goldsmith was the late Jimmy Goldsmith’s mistress before she was his wife. It was he, of course, who uttered the memorable truism: “If you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy.”
Alpha males, like rock stars, MPs, princes and tycoons, with their incredible egos and rampant, childlike need for attention, wealth and opportunity, are particularly prone to such behaviour. The wives of these men develop blind spots and coping mechanisms to sustain the the family. The divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd Platt says: “Three-quarters of the powerful men in this country are having affairs in some form or another. Some of those affairs last 10 years without the wife, apparently, knowing. Women come to us to find out what their husbands are up to, and if it transpires he is having an affair, it’s not a given they will divorce him. Often they’ll say the reason they’re not leaving is, ‘He’s such a character, I will never meet someone like that again.’ It can be fine for years, and then the men actually fall in love, usually with a younger version of the wife. That’s when trouble starts, and when I meet them, they are very angry.”
The extramarital affair is more common than divorce, though independent working women are more likely to leave unfaithful husbands as they have less fear of coping with life alone. “Infidelity is not always a sackable offence,” says Rowan Pelling, former editor of the The Erotic Review. “In all the uproar and scandal, people forget marriage is an alliance. Men are like egotistical little boys — ambitious and driven ones even more so. They need constant attention, and when you have kids, some women will think, ‘Oh god, let someone else take up that slack.’ ”
I spoke to one person in the Ramsay camp who said Gordon was like a child in a sweetshop, with adoring women making silly eyes at him. “You’d need to be a very strong man to resist that kind of attention and opportunity. I’m not sure I could.”
For a certain type of wife, however, a mistress can be a blessing. “I didn’t want to have sex,” says one Hampshire mother of two. “So I told him, ‘The ideal situation is for you to go and get a mistress. I don’t care who she is, just as long as she is kept out of our lives.’ There was nothing sexual left in our marriage; it was something I had to force myself to do every few months. I thought we would struggle on if he was getting regular sex and attention from another woman, and then we could just get on with being friends and having a family. I think, as a society, we’re morally squeamish about the practicalities of farming out sex to another woman, but I have a couple of girlfriends who say, ‘I don’t care if he’s getting it elsewhere. I just don’t want to know about it.’ ”
If you talk to the hairdressers and beauty-parlour confidantes of some of the richest wives in London, you’ll hear the same story again and again. “It’s different for those women,” says one. “They don’t marry for love — the families push them together or the woman marries the man for his money. A lot of wives turn a blind eye, but they lay out ground rules: the other woman can’t be a scrubber, in case she goes to the press or gets pregnant, and she can’t be too beautiful or he’ll leave the wife for her.”
One £200-an-hour beauty professional pointed out that if all other wives in a social group are putting up with it, you will too. Infidelity becomes socially acceptable.
