Lindsey, what are you thinking?
The news that the World Cup alpine-ski racer Lindsey Vonn is in a relationship with Tiger Woods is just depressing. If this beautiful, successful and, to all outward appearances, nice woman has to settle for a serial cheater, what does it mean for the rest of us?
OK, Tiger is, well, Tiger — handsome and famous and worth some $600 million (though notably less since his divorce settlement). But he’s also the guy whose romantic overtures include texts like, “I will wear you out soon.” And, “When was the last time you got laid?”
Come on, ladies, we can do better than this.
Fine, it’s not as bad as Rihanna getting back together with Chris Brown after he had beaten her, but this doesn’t show a lot of self-respect on Vonn’s part either.
Does she think Woods has shaped up? Statistics aren’t on her side. As Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project tells me, “Old habits are hard to break. . . We know where this is going to end, and it’s not going to end well.”
Even if Tiger hadn’t already been unfaithful to his wife, his record would be bad news for Lindsey. According to research published in 2000 in the Journal of Marriage and Family, “Each additional sex partner between age 18 and the first union increased the net odds of infidelity.” Do the math.
Vonn isn’t the first woman to go for a man who cheats, thinking that she won’t herself be the victim. Angelina Jolie, for instance, got together with Brad Pitt while he was still married to Jennifer Aniston. What’s the thinking there? Sure, he’d cheat on Jennifer but I’m so much hotter that he’d never cheat on me . . .
It’s not just silly movie stars who think like this. Silda Wall Spitzer stood by her man and even reportedly blamed herself for the ex-governor’s misdeeds. “The wife is supposed to take care of the sex. This is my failing; I wasn’t adequate,” she told Peter Elkind for his book “Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.”
Maybe she just wanted to hold things together for the kids?
On the other hand, women like Hillary Clinton put up with having the world know that their husband’s been intimate with God knows how many other women, so how can we hold Lindsey Vonn to a higher standard? She’s not even engaged to Woods.
What these women have in common is that none of them needs the man in her life. They’re all financially independent and would get by just fine in life — OK, much better than fine — without these lotharios dragging them down.
Feminism (and no-fault divorce laws) were supposed to rescue women who were trapped in marriages to men who didn’t respect them. Now women have the financial and the legal wherewithal to stand on their own two feet when men cheat on and abuse them — yet they instead keep going back.
Someone has to set an example. Maybe, says Wilcox, “celebrity relationships are just fodder for water-cooler conversation.” But, “given the amount of time people devote to watching TV, surfing the Internet and reading celebrity mags, these relationships may be of some consequence.”
“If that’s the case,” he adds, “heaven help us.”
Naomi Schaefer Riley’s new book, “’Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America,” is out April 2.