IF I may I would like to remove myself from the subset "women" and move into the subset "killjoy".
It seems "women" the country across are devastated by the engagement of something called a Benedict Cumberbatch, to one Sophie Hunter.
"We're stabbing at the keyboard randomly as the mascara cascades down our faces," says a staffer at Heat Magazine.
The Daily Telegraph declares women are "devastated". It also has the skies filled with agonised wailing, millions of dreams destroyed.
Time magazine suggests women will be rioting in the streets. The Daily Mail said the hearts of millions of women have been broken. The Metro has a 10-step guide to coping with the pain.
The papers are asking, "Who is Sophie Hunter?" with indignant outrage. The woman emerges Oxford-educated, bilingual and very successful. She is also, praise be, rather attractive and so is finding herself on front pages the length of the land.
STOP PRESS - Man Declares Plan to Sign Legal Document.
Cumberbatch. He's that one who believes posh people are unfairly stigmatised. He's also an actual human and not just an effigy onto which the cliched hopes of a thousand middle-Englanders can be pinned. It's George Clooney all over again.
There is something either sweetly naive or wilfully self-deceptive about the national outpouring of mock-grief when a celebrity declares their intentions. Is everyone still pretending that marriage means something? Like there' aren't enormous odds that he's going to be divorced and back on the market again before our collective tears are dry? Like it's the death of something, as though any one of us might have actually stood a chance had not that grasping Sophie Hunter come along and ruined it for everyone.
As though marriage is not just a sensible financial option for when you plan on having children with someone you don't entirely trust.
But clear-eyed pragmatism doesn't make for decent headlines. It's much easier to cast adults as girl-women, desperate for a prince to save them, and men as heartbreakers, taking and discarding from the pick of the crop as they see fit.
If "women" are supposed to be hankering after some bloke off the telly and devastated when he marries elsewhere then I think, if it's all the same, I'll hand back my membership card.
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