Demi and Ashton Divorce – Are you kidding me?

It appears from media reports that the marriage of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher is over.

It’s Hollywood – marriages fail all the time. While I’m sad for them both – particularly Demi, what has really surprised me is the reaction of people and the media.

“She should have expected it.”

“He was bound to cheat with a younger woman.”

“Of course it was going to happen.”

I find this rather harsh. He was a consenting adult when he married her, and as such, knows that fidelity and loyalty and monogamy come with marriage. So why do people think it’s almost permissible of him to do the dirty on her?

When marriages between people who married young end because of infidelity, people don’t say the same: “Well, you married too young, it was inevitable.” “He was only 26 when he married you – of course he was going to cheat!”

Marriage is marriage. He was plenty old enough to know what comes with marriage, and the notion that somehow it’s to be expected because she is older is what really jars with me. Why? Does it give him some kind of get-out clause to behave badly? Does society really believe that just because a woman is older, her guy has carte blanche to behave as he pleases and she has to somehow accept this as ‘inevitable’? What does that say about how people perceive women in older/younger marriages? The young man does the dirty, and is somehow excused from blame because his older wife should have expected it?

Do we really think so little of women of a certain age? Are they really not accorded the same ideals and expectations of the rest of the world? Do they have to devalue themselves and take responsibility for their younger partner’s inability to keep it in his pants?

It’s a sad indictment of how society likes to punish women who choose a different path. They celebrate with you at the time, but behind your back, are waiting for the axe to fall, and to be able to say: “I told you so,” and smugly tell themselves it’s your own fault for crossing that line.

Demi has every right to feel bitter – not just at her idiot husband for behaving so irresponsibly – but at the rest of the world for lacking the heart to treat her with the same respect and kindness that would be shown to anyone in a same-age relationship where infidelity was at play.

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Tagged as: age gap relationships, marriage with a younger man, older women in the news, Relationship matters