Ant and the hell of being wed to a star when you’re not famous
Amid the wreckage of another celebrity marriage, dumped wife Lisa Armstrong has flown halfway around the world to get over her heartbreak. in the past few days she has been seen on the streets of Los Angeles, looking just one tiny burst blood vessel away from total meltdown, furiously puffing on cigarette after cigarette. At night she tweets her rage about her husband — TV star Ant mcPartlin — and his new romance with their former PA, Anne-marie Corbett.
After all, she is a woman Lisa hired and brought into the family home. A woman who was once her friend. This relationship breaks the ‘girl code’, Lisa claimed, after finding out about it in newspaper reports.
Yet her husband had been gone for months by the time this romance came to light. There are no codes after a couple have split, especially in celebrity-land. This is painful for Lisa, but she has to face the truth.
marriage is hard enough, but marriage to a star when you are not one yourself? Well, that is a nightmare, especially when good love goes bad. For the perils of what you might call a Plus One relationship (where you are always the ‘plus one’ on a star’s invitation) mean you are forever in their shadow, the afterthought, the overlooked.
The scales of power are tipped, but never in your favour. Lisa knew and loved Ant long before he was one of the highest-paid and most popular television stars in the UK.
The pair of them were grounded, they grew together — but fame changes people. They become more demanding, more self-centred, used to the attention.
At work they are always no1; deferred to, pampered, their slightest whims endlessly indulged. Only those with very strong characters can survive the onslaught of coddling that warps the celebrity soul.
THAT is why they often turn for comfort to those on the payroll, the submissive people around them willing to carry the master-slave relationship from the workplace into the home.
Look at actor ethan Hawke, married to Uma Thurman when he began romancing the nanny of their two children. He blamed Uma’s more successful career for his infidelity, poor diddums. Jude Law slept with the nanny of his children while engaged to sienna miller.
Arnold schwarzenegger secretly had a son with the housekeeper while married to maria shriver, mother of his four children. And politicians sleeping with their PAs is not news.
Although the new romance in Ant’s life apparently started after he and Lisa split at the start of this year and miss Corbett helped him through his drink-drive court case, Lisa perhaps feels doubly cheated, twice spurned. After 11 years of marriage and more than 20 years as a couple, she now says she is going to take him to the cleaners, divorce-wise. Across the ocean and the obliging conduit of social media, her anger fizzes; she is the very modern model of a perfect scorned wife.
Her puffy face shows the misery of nights of tears. How infuriating that post-rehab her ex is a freshly scrubbed Peter Pan, while she bears the scars of the psychologically beaten.
There she is in Hollywood, with no best friends to tell her to get off Twitter and stop making her distress and anger so public. no new boyfriend to console her. And no family, who are thousands of miles away as her heartbreak goes on.
But she has me. And i am going to tell Lisa what she needs to know. Firstly, it is time to move on — physically and mentally. To get herself sorted out — mentally and physically.
Her husband has long gone. she is no longer a part of his life. she has to accept this — and also somehow forget about seeking some form of vengeance to assuage her hurt.
Otherwise she won’t just lose her husband, she will lose sight of herself, too. is Anne-marie the first knot in a string of women, or a new soulmate? Who cares? The best revenge is living well, not in the past.
Lisa says she wants to start over, but that is particularly hard when she is confronted on a daily basis with the agony of seeing her husband happy with his new woman —a friend and employee whom she feels betrayed her at the deepest level. That is a special part of the Plus One agony — his celebrity means there is no escape. And if some terrible tragedy happens, like a drunken car accident on a city street that is entirely his fault, note that he will always come out of it OK, but you will not.
He will be redeemed by the public, forgiven by friends and television bosses — but you will not. in fact, you might even be blamed, in insidious ways.
To make matters even worse, according to reports, Lisa has been excised from their mutual circle of friends, including declan donnelly and his wife.
That is what happens with Plus Ones — they have no power, they are struck off the guest list for ever, cast out into the ‘civilian’ wilderness.
something for all those little Cinderellas to remember, as they plot and dream of marrying a rich and famous Prince Charming. When it is over, everything is over.
One day 41-year-old Lisa will realise that leaving Ant was the best thing that ever happened to her, because one day she will be in a relationship of equals once more.
maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.