The only interesting part of this Rebecca Winters Keegan Time story about the Britney Spears-Kevin Federline divorce is the final-graph observation that Spears has now joined “a growing group of powerful celebrity women who have recently split from their less successful husbands, including Reese Witherspoon (from Ryan Phillippe) and Hilary Swank (from Chad Lowe).”
That’s the principal thing of it — the emotional-psychological inability of most wannabe alpha males to play second violin in a marriage, not to mention the corresponding discomfort often felt by their stronger, richer, better connected (and in many cases, more mature) wives. Marriages between alpha-female breadwinners and Mr. Mom house-husbands have obviously been a flourishing part of the domestic culture for the last 20 or 25 years, but the deep-seated need that most guys have to “be the man” in a relationship always seems to lead to problems.
That said, most marriages tend to fray a bit when (a) the natural myriad priorities of taking care of newly-arrived babies push aside and/or temporarily suffocate the romantic stuff (been there, seen it happen), and (b) when the wife evolves from a svelte pistol-hot babe into someone chubby or even borderline fat. Is there a gentle, sensitive way of saying that Spears has had the appearance of a cow for the last year, year and a half…? I’m searching for that phraseology as we speak.