By RACHEL JOHNSON FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 00:32 GMT, 25 September 2016
The break-up of the Jolie Pitts has turned into a total Hollywood starmageddon, so far sucking actors George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston, Marion Cotillard, Jon Voight and Billy Bob Thornton into the black hole of a couple’s death spiral, but in all this there is one thing that I can’t get past.
As the daughter of divorced parents, and someone who is married to a divorcé, this much I know: never slag off your partner in public, and never, ever slag off your ex in front of the kids.
My parents were married for 17 years, and have been divorced for 37, and in that time I have never heard my father say one unkind word about my mother. My husband, who had a brief starter marriage in his 20s, would not dream of letting the side down either.
It’s bad manners. It’s unpleasant. Some things are very much not better out than in.
After all, I’m sure many of us, settled in a long-term relationship, have at some point secretly daydreamed about being the brave, bereaved relict in widow’s weeds, weeping at the funeral, after one’s beloved other half has somehow met his maker.
This fleeting fantasy (or so I am assured by a couples’ counsellor!) is completely normal, natural – even common, as life is short but marriage can seem very, very long.
According to figures out last week from the Office of National Statistics, more than a million people are miserable with their spouse or partner: there are 15.7million married and cohabiting couples in Britain, and of these, one in 20 – five per cent – declare themselves ‘extremely unhappy’ in their relationships.
A further 3.5 per cent were ‘fairly unhappy’,’ with only 5.9 per cent declaring their relationship ‘perfect’.
And this, too, is normal. ‘Happiness goes up and down, and just because you feel unhappy one year, it is not a reason to throw away a relationship,’ says Harry Benson, of the Marriage Foundation. And yet, or so we are led to believe, Mrs Jolie Pitt didn’t hang on for the either happily or unhappily ever after, nor did she put her best foot forward for the sake of the kids.
No, she pulled the plug after an alleged fracas on a private jet, while Brad was, again allegedly, loaded on weed and booze. She filed for divorce, and the papers seeking the dissolution of the marriage of Angelina Jolie Pitt and William Bradley Pitt after of only two years and one month are up online for all to see.
Unforgivably, in my book, Angelina also claimed this was for the ‘health of the family’.
In four brutal words, she told the world that Brad was a Bad Dad, a possible addict and abuser, and as a result of her course of action, the entire eight-strong J P clan is in complete meltdown, surrounded by the paparazzi and in the middle of the biggest media firestorm since the parting of the Waleses.
Now all this slightly, to my mind, suggests that Angelina does NOT have the best interests of her family at heart.
If that was the case, she should have done what Madame Tussauds did, when it just moved the wax figures of Brad and Angelina apart.
She could have spoken to her husband, instead of leaving him to find out they were getting a divorce.
Ideally, they should have spoken together to their hundreds of children, and after that they could have consciously uncoupled or whatever you do in LA, and then marked the triste occasion by toasting each other with vials of blood or whatever their current poison is. They could have moved apart.
‘He was appealing to her to do this quietly – not to save the marriage but to consider the well-being of the children – and it was ignored,’ a friend of Brad told the US magazine People.
Angelina could have done it his way. But she did it her way. She took their relationship from Mr And Mrs Smith to Kramer v Kramer – and as Brad, formerly one half of Brangelina, said, ‘unleashed hell’.
Having got that off my chest, I still hope he never says a word against her.
not mine.credit and source: DAILYMAIL
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