French presidential candidate Macron is 39, his wife 64: Why is all this hype in the media?

www.mangaloretoday.com

New Delhi, April 30, 2017: The personal life of 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, the French presidential candidate, has been dissected and debated in the media of all kinds as if  he indulges in sex  orgies every evening after his serious campaigning.

The reason for the gossip is not Macron’s "women," but the woman he married ten years ago - Brigitte Macron. You see, Brigitte is 64 years old. The couple has a 25-year age gap between them, and this normally wouldn’t have elicited much comment if it had been Emmanuel Macron who was the older of the two. After all, Donald Trump is 70 and Melania is 47 and we barely read anything about how scandalous the age gap was.

The Emmanuel-Brigitte love story is quite unique. Emmanuel was only 15 when he met Brigitte, the 40-year-old mother of his classmate (she also had two other children), and was his school teacher. At 17, he declared that he would marry her and his parents had to forbid Brigitte from entering into a romantic relationship with their son at least till he turned 18.

Now such a relationship would have raised eyebrows even if the genders had been reversed - one cannot imagine the media to have been any less forgiving if a 40-year-old father of three had been romantically involved with a schoolgirl.

The outrage would have been justified if Emmanuel were still a child. However, it is important to remember that neither Emmanuel nor Brigitte are in school any more. Emmanuel was 29, most certainly an adult, when he and his longtime love got married. It’s been a decade since this happened and yet, an old photograph of the two of them in which schoolboy Emmanuel is kissing Brigitte’s cheek is being bandied around as proof of their "odd" relationship.

The disbelief that the Emmanuel-Brigitte pairing inspires volumes about  conditioning in general - it’s far easier for us to accept a much older man’s relationship with a young woman than it is when the age difference is the other way around.

Sachin Tendulkar’s wife, Anjali, is a mere five years older than he is,  everyone in the country knows this fact. If you were asked for the age difference between, say, MS Dhoni and Sakshi, would you have the answer at your fingertips? The seven year age gap between the last pair is unremarkable because it’s Dhoni who’s older of the two.

Films, too, routinely have much older men paired with women young enough to be their daughters. Daniel Craig (47) famously slammed an interviewer who asked him how he felt to have an "older woman" like Monica Bellucci (51) seduce him - this when Bond girls have typically been decades younger than the suave agent and no question has been raised about the "inappropriateness".

Whether Emmanuel Macron becomes the French president or not, the  irrational interest in his marriage will always stand as a reminder to how much further we have to go before we can truly say that we’ve moved out of the narrow