A magnificent cry of rage from a wife who refuses to take betrayal lying down
HEAV’N has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d,’ wrote the playwright William Congreve almost four centuries ago. But those words proved themselves as relevant as ever when last week the actress Alice Evans – wife of Ioan Gruffudd – took to Twitter like a Greek Fury, howling with rage at the discovery of her spouse’s new girlfriend, Bianca Wallace.
‘So it turns out that my husband, after two years of telling me I’m a bad person and I’m not exciting and he no longer wants to have sex with me and he just wants to be on set abroad… has been in a relationship for three years behind all our backs,’ she wrote, adding: ‘Good luck, Bianca.’
The raw emotion of her outburst, combined with the fact that she chose to make her distress so public, has divided opinion.
Her timeline was full of people calling her a ‘bitter psycho’ and suggesting she should take herself off to a ‘nice spa’ to calm down. Many clearly felt she was making an unnecessary fuss and embarrassing herself. But if you ask me there was – is – something rather magnificent about this woman and her rage, about her utter refusal to take her betrayal lying down. To yield to her inevitable fate, to acquiesce to her husband’s desire for a younger, slimmer, saner model, pliant and alert to his needs (‘Thank you for making me smile again,’ he captioned a picture of them both on an Instagram post).
Evans is, of course, clearly menopausal. Or if not that, then peri-menopausal. She is, after all, 50. There’s no escaping it.
She may not realise it, she may not be taking HRT (although I would strongly recommend that she does) but if you’ve been through it, as I have, you recognise the signs.
And they’re not just physical – a thickening around the middle, a general puffiness, a sense of intense discomfort in your own skin. They’re also psychological.
You can tell from her own account of the whole saga in which she details the rollercoaster emotions of the past year.
‘I was once again crying, bawling on the bed, feeling I was worthless, that I was nothing, that he was definitely going to leave me soon because he could not stand any more,’ she writes. That’s the menopause in a nutshell, that mixture of self-loathing and self-pity, that utter sense of defeat, the feeling of everything you ever were or might ever be slipping away.
It’s terrifying. And not just for the person experiencing it. Some men can’t cope at all. They find the emotional and physical challenges of a menopausal partner too much.
For some, in this case Gruffudd, it’s easier to seek out a newer, less complicated model of womanhood, someone who doesn’t burst into tears inexplicably, or fly into rages, or forget where she parked her car. Someone who still looks hot in a bikini.
As he said himself, in her account: ‘Sometimes I can’t stand you. You’re so annoying.’ The menopause is a test of any marriage.
Apart from childbirth, the menopause is the only other really big test of a husband. And Gruffudd has failed quite spectacularly. Which is why, in the long run, she is better off without him. No one can force someone to love them.
She deserves a man who genuinely cares – and when all this is over I have no doubt she will find him. In the meantime, though, her pain is universal.
It is the pain of a woman who is not only dealing with the loss of her youth and her fertility, coming to terms with the fact that – in purely biological terms – there is no turning back; but also with the loss of her marriage, the person she had built her life around – and the future she thought they would have together.