Don't have a type and other rules for the Incurable Romantics club
This week, we learnt that Rupert Murdoch is getting married again. Again as in for the fifth time, at the age of 92, to a woman called Ann Lesley Smith. A lot of people’s automatic reaction might be: why? Why bother actually getting married when you could live as a couple and save yourself a lot of faffing about?
Not us. Murdoch is clearly the all-or-nothing type. He doesn’t want to save himself the trouble, because that’s the way he rolls: when he falls in love, he knows that pretty soon he’ll feel compelled to propose, and everything just follows on from that.
To cohabit with Ann Lesley Smith would be the pragmatic, easy, even sensible thing to do in 2023, but it wouldn’t be the romantic choice, and all the signs point to Murdoch being an incurable romantic (IR). It’s the only explanation.
Even so, it’s important to know the difference between a serial bolter/marriage risk and someone who is choosing hope over experience. There are rules that must be followed if you want to be firmly in the Incurable Romantic camp rather than the plain old serial-marrier’s.
The rules of the Incurable Romantics club
As a general rule, we don’t start counting until number three, so you’re not officially in the IR club until you move on from marriage three to four. Paul McCartney, for example, we barely think of as a man who has been married three times, but we might if there were more in the future.
Have one marriage that observers put down to post-traumatic blindness, and therefore we don’t really count it (see Paul).
Ideally, you will have said some Incurably Romantic things, or written Silly Love Songs, or both.
Get married to the same person twice. This is obviously bad news for any future wives and husbands – boomerang marriages make new partners jumpy – but it is quite romantic, especially in an era when there always seems to be a better, younger upgrade waiting out there. Pamela Anderson and Rick Salom on gave it two goes, though it must be said that each one only lasted six months. Eminem remarried his wife, but for less than a year. We’re saying 10 years for one of the marriages keeps it feeling IR and not just messy. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were married for 10 years the first time around, and that’s the gold standard.
Don’t have a type and keep marrying a younger version of that type. Unless you’re Rod Stewart, in which case why not?
Don’t have the sort of relationship with your exes that prevents you from, say, attending the Oscars if one of them is present. Not all members of the IR multiple-marriage club have fabulous friendships with their exes, but no relationship at all with any of them should set alarm bells ringing. Several very angry exes is what gives the frequently married a bad name.
Be getting on a bit. It isn’t really fair, but exiting marriages and then entering new ones in your youth looks a bit like bolting, especially where there are young children involved, whereas later on it looks like gravitating towards your soulmate.
If you want to really cheer us up and make us feel like multiple marriages are just accidents standing in the way of finding your one true love, then end up with your best mate or someone we always pictured you with. Mick Jagger could marry Marianne Faithfull, for example, although pigs might fly. As it happens, Mick has only been married twice, to Bianca and Jerry Hall. He is the opposite of an IR. You feel guilty for judging IRs when you dwell on Mick’s romantic history.
Make the latest one someone less attractive than you. Better still, leave someone very attractive for someone not very attractive. It just gives it the stamp of legitimacy in a way that hopping from one hottie to the next doesn’t.
Turn the tables. Joan Collins has been married five times, but with Percy Gibson – her significantly younger husband – she has rewritten the old rules and, 21 years later, become a kind of relationship sage.
Have a gap. Meet someone single when you yourself are single and have been for a while.
Don’t marry everyone you go out with. It feels a bit like Pamela Anderson forgot that you can just date, and Patsy Kensit – married four times – thinks there’s something in that: “ I married all my boyfriends,” she has said, “so that was something that I’ve learnt I needn’t do.”
Be honest about the downsides. Kensit’s one-year marriage to DJ Jeremy Healy (number four) left her feeling “foolish and ashamed ”. “I don’t think I will ever get married again,” she said afterwards. “I think I’ve ruined the sanctity of it. ” She has announced she’s engaged again, naturally.
Be someone who is attracted to creative, hard-living types such as rock stars. You have our sympathy.
Be disillusioned with marriage and “dread” falling in love, like Murdoch, but also an Incurable Romantic.
