I really wanted Demi to be the winner, by which I mean I wanted her marriage to her much younger spouse to be a keeper. My reasoning was politically incorrect: he wasn’t so much older than her daughters and so, actually, ick; if the situation had turned the other way—older man, much younger woman, teenage daughters—I’d feel differently, as in straight-out ick. But I loved the subversion of the obvious power paradigm, the way that wielding this power she challenged our sensibility about the “usual” pecking order. I don’t think this was about rebellion for rebellion’s sake, though, my mini-Team Demi preoccupation. It was that the “norm” doesn’t have to be the inevitable. Go, Demi, shaking up May and December.
Add to this the pal-ishiousness between ex-hubby and current one to make a post-modern divorce fantasy (with Idaho, yoga or martial arts trainers, and the like). I convinced myself there was something in the affable young man and the daughters with interesting names and the mom who rose from trailer park beginnings to root for.
**
Most women cannot replicate the situation. And unlike most women, Demi has celluloid attractiveness, extreme celebrity wealth, and commensurate fame in the back pocket of her skinny jeans. Add all this up, she’s tucks a bunch of power in that impossibly small pocket, too.
And despite their hitting the skids seeming so utterly predictable—age difference, 16 years. She is 49; he is 33. Dollars between them, about a gazillion and rumors of the couple’s flashpoints ranged from her insecurity to his wanderlust to the question of babies. When she was interviewed in Harper’s Bazaar sounding insecure, I just didn’t want to hear it. I wanted the action hero badass to prevail over the fragile, needy girl.
I saw her beating the women-must-date-older odds as some hopeful, magical thinking harbinger for my divorced female friends, whose dating prospects are… to be forced older, almost inevitably. Because their divorcing now ex-spouses seem to dip into the dating pool and sit on a beach towel beside a woman a decade or more younger.
This feels unfair is the truth.
I’m five-and-a-half years older than my dear husband. Way back then—when he was 21 and I was 27—I seemed, to his friends, my friends and at times to both of us—a whole lot older. I was completely smitten and so was he. A younger boyfriend, at that stage, didn’t particularly seem like a prize, though; his life was a tiny bit out of step to mine. I’d accrued some twentysomething, post-college experience he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to live—and, well, so it went. I was older when we first met than he would turn out to be both on our wedding day and when he became a father.
Five years isn’t 16 and a writer and antiquarian bookseller isn’t a Hollywood power couple. But there you go; I wanted a little Demi option for my pals, minus all those trappings or at least for them to date their peers. And besides, I like the young man’s politics more than the Republican ex, so there’s that.
**
This week, of course, pushing all those awful snarky jokes aside, the real story emerged, or at least it seems to have emerged: Demi’s drug addiction has caught up with her and put her into the hospital.
“I remember she had a substance abuse problem. That was in the ‘80’s. But she was beautiful and charming and ragingly ambitious,” said her former publicist, Michael Levine.
She had to pull out of a film in which she was to play Gloria Steinem (I’d have loved seeing that, to be honest). But despite all the stories we might weave, sometimes, the bottom line is very clear. As someone who never really meant to cheer her on, exactly, I’m cheering, now: I hope she gets the help she needs.
