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 combination of her raw emotion, and the fact she chose to make her distress public, has caused disagreement.
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.
Alice Evans (pictured with husband) Ioan Gruffudd took to Twitter like a Greek Fury, howling with rage at the discovery of her spouse’s new girlfriend, Bianca Wallace
Many felt that she was making an excessive fuss and embarrassing her self. 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, naturally, clearly menopausal. Or, if not, then perimenopausal. She is 50 after all. 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.
Ms Evans wished Ms Wallace (pictured) ‘good luck’ as she also said: ‘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’
It is evident from her personal account of the entire story, in which she describes the rollercoaster emotions of this 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. It’s not just for the person experiencing it. Some men can’t cope at all. Some men find the emotional and physical challenges presented by a menopausal spouse too difficult.
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 great 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.
Menopause is the biggest test of a husband, aside from childbirth. Gruffudd has stumbled spectacularly.
She is happier without him in the end. You can’t force someone to love you.
She deserves a man who genuinely cares – and when all this is over I have no doubt she will find him. Her pain is universal, however, for now.
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.
Angela Rayner has apologised for calling Tories ‘a bunch of scum: homophobic, racist, misogynistic, vile’
Academics are looking at renaming an early hominid species because its name is too closely linked to colonialism. Fossils of Homo rhodesiensis fossils were discovered in Rhodesia. The country was named after Cecil Rhodes. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that an entire species has fallen prey to the woke cops. Next stop? Rhododendrons are next.
My uncle, who’s 87, was given the combined Covid booster and flu jab a few weeks ago. Within hours he’d developed a violent reaction, and he remains in intensive care. I asked a doctor friend about this, and he said he had heard of similar cases – yet the advice is still to administer both jabs wherever possible.
But is it really wise for an older person to be subject to such a double-whammy to their immune system?
My uncle was perfectly well before the double jab; now he’s seriously ill in hospital where, quite apart from everything else, his chances of getting out without catching Covid are virtually nil.
UNI activists only promote bullying and bile
Trans activists at Sussex University whose vicious campaign of bullying finally forced philosophy professor Kathleen Stock to leave her job celebrated by posting ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead’ online. Professor Stock’s ‘crime’ was to question the wisdom of allowing male-bodied people access to women-only spaces in vulnerable environments such as prisons.
The fact that she can’t express such a view without risking her life tells you everything.
We fought for our rights too hard to have them taken away from us by a bunch o misogynists, who not only want our rights removed but also want to take our identities.
Rishi Sunak’s height of 5ft 6in has been often commented on. Some have claimed it’s a problem in becoming PM.
It was Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls who famously said: ‘Halloween is the one night a year where girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.’
She wasn’t wrong. If the number of ‘sexy’ zombies and ghouls in various stages of undress I’ve seen these past few days is anything to go by, the afterlife is definitely more Spearmint Rhino than Dante’s Inferno.
Perhaps if Nicola Sturgeon spent more time doing her job and less time posing for Vogue (she cuts a dash in tasteful shades of fawn in the December issue), Glasgow wouldn’t be overrun with rats and rubbish on the eve of COP26.
Only someone as delusional as Sturgeon could blame a woman who’s been dead for almost a decade, namely Margaret Thatcher, for something she is wholly responsible for, namely the parlous state of the Scottish economy.
Lindsay Lohan (left), Amanda Seyfried, and Lacey Chabert in Mean Girls (2004)
I want to believe Angela Rayner’s apology for calling Tories ‘a bunch of scum: homophobic, racist, misogynistic, vile’. In truth, she was forced by Sir David Amess’s murder and a nasty taste of her own medicine. I’m sorry she had to go through it, but it will take more than a few words to persuade me she’s turned over a new leaf.
People keep saying Rishi Sunak’s Macron-esque stature (he is a bijou 5ft 6in) is an obstacle to becoming PM. Nonsensical.
His choice of footwear is far more problematic. Sliders Rishi? Are you serious? And with socks?