Lose the Balance, Lose the Wife
Neither men nor women handle female success very well
A woman who has had a very successful career in both media and politics explains how she lost her husband, an erstwhile Alpha Male.
John was incredibly successful as the showbiz editor of the Sydney Sun newspaper. In the early 1980s, I’d just landed a job working for the provincial Perth Daily News as their Sydney bureau chief. A grand title which amounted to me and a tickertape machine in a tiny office in the bowels of the building.
We met on a Friday night in the journalists’ pub near our offices. At 6ft 2in, he was dark, brooding and more handsome than any man has a right to be; clever, too, and funny… I couldn’t believe a fabulous guy like him would want to be with a girl like me. But he did.
We arrived in the UK with only £150, intending to stay for as long as it took us to earn the cost of the flights home. Then the plan was to buy a home in Sydney and have a family – five kids, to be precise. My dream was to be a stay-at-home mum.
Almost immediately, though, John got a great job in London while I took casual shifts on newspapers like the Observer and the Sunday Express (I later went on to become the editor of the latter).
We shared a minuscule flat in Islington, north London, with another Aussie couple and loved our new life. Still young, getting around to having kids didn’t seem a pressing concern at that point. I was offered a junior job on Today, the first fully digital colour newspaper, and my life changed for ever. Within a year, aged 28, I’d been promoted to deputy editor.
Soon newspapers were writing about this glamorous, powerful Aussie from nowhere; a TV show, unkindly named Killer Bimbos Of Fleet Street, was even made about me and other successful newspaper women. Meanwhile John wasn’t finding much joy in his work. Though initially supportive and proud of me, I soon noticed that while I’d be working until midnight, he’d be in the pub by 6pm.
The sad truth for any career woman is that an alpha male becomes less attractive, both emotionally and perhaps more importantly sexually, once he’s lost his drive… when you’re greeted at the end of a long day by him lying on the sofa demanding, ‘What’s for dinner?’
I knew we were drifting apart but didn’t for the life of me know how to fix us. Then, just four years into our marriage, the bombshell landed. A colleague gleefully told me in front of an office full of people that my husband was having an affair…
To be honest, I’d never once considered how he felt about our change in dynamic. The fact that the girl he had married was eclipsing him – this formerly proud man. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that I might have inadvertently made him feel worthless, while his mistress made him feel so invincible she couldn’t get through a day without him.
Naively, I thought he’d be proud of my success. I never considered how my working so hard and so late made me a part-time wife.
Yet I’m certainly not the only woman to have married a ‘prince’ only for him to turn back into a frog when the power balance of the relationship shifted in ways they hadn’t predicted. Many of my girlfriends found their marriages failed once their careers took off.
The woman is now 66 years old. Never remarried, no kids. She’s certainly got money and influence, but based on how she portrays herself as a cautionary tale, she would appear to have regrets about the path she inadvertently chose.
But it’s not just a cautionary tale for women. It’s also a lesson for men to be careful about how they support their wives as well as the need to maintain the same sort of balance in the relationship that they had from the start. A man cannot expect to relax and start coasting and still remain as attractive to his wife as he was when he was a hard-charging Young Turk climbing up the corporate ladder.
This is the key phrase: “An alpha male becomes less attractive, both emotionally and perhaps more importantly sexually, once he’s lost his drive.”
From which we can also derive the implication that men who don’t have that drive in the first place are intrinsically less attractive. So, perhaps that’s a point for the Deltas, both married and unmarried, to consider. Find your drive, and perhaps you’ll also find that women are starting to see you in a more attractive light.
Of course, the primary cautionary tale here is for women: just because you’ve lost interest in your husband very much doesn’t mean that he has ceased to be of interest to women in general. If a woman stops making her husband a priority, the probabilities are high that he will eventually find someone else who is happy to do so.
UPDATE: This is how she was described in the Saturday Profile in The Independent at the peak of her career in 1999. Ouch…
Vital statistics: Once married to the journalist John Chenery. No children. Two cats
The phrase, "I was a part-time wife" is absolutely golden, and seems to be the only flash of real honesty in the whole article. She should be a warning lesson for all young women.
On a similar note, I've discovered that career women get really angry when you use the phrase, "part-time mother".
The modern society encouraging women to become a successful boss bitch is so destructive.
It's like seeing a dog in a fenced in yard. Within those confinds they have shelter, food, protection, purpose, & love. The fence isn't a prison to keep them in & oppressed, but a border to keep the world out. Encouraging the dog to break containment, or tearing down the fence to let the dog run free & wild makes it ferral & lands it in the dog pound or worse.
Encouragong women to have thier own successful career is tearing down that border that keeps them safe. "Boss bitch" culture is destructive.