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[Note: I've re-worded some parts of this blog entry since its original entry earlier today to make it more coherent. I'm trying to sympathize with Bushnell, despite her mistakes. And I'm trying to assign traditional roles to this marriage despite it being as non-traditional as they come. I still think that people expect traditional roles in marriage, and that one of the reasons why marriages fail could be when couples pursue non-traditional roles and paths. I think Bushnell had those traditional expectations.]
Charles Askegard, recently retired New York City Ballet dancer (just this past October at forty-three), married Candace Bushnell, the writer behind the Sex and the City TV show, in 2002. They remained married for nine years, until Bushnell filed for divorce this year.
This Daily Mail article is not clear if Bushnell filed for divorce before she found out about Askegard's affair with a much younger fellow dancer, or if she found out about the affair during the divorce proceedings, and then added Askegard's mistress as "co-respondent" (equally culpable?) in the demise of her marriage.
In any case, nine years ago, when she married thirty-four-year-old Askegard, Bushnell was an attractive and young-looking forty-four-year-old, more like someone in her mid-thirties than her mid-forties. And not surprisingly, nine years later, she looks much younger than her fifty-three years, and even younger than what she looked like at forty-four (perhaps she's had cosmetic "alterations" done recently). And Askegard, when he married Bushnell at thirty-four, looked older and more mature, more like someone in his early forties than early thirties (I've posted chronological photos of the couple below).
On a side note, an April 2011 photo of the couple (below) shows a bloated and aged Bushnell. Something must have been transpiring behind her smiles for her youthful looks of 2010 to age.
So, on a on physical and appearance levels, they looked similar in age when they first met. And despite her forty-some years, Bushnell looked attractive and pretty, so it is not surprising to me that Askegard fell in love with her and married her.
Bushnell looks more attractive, youthful and pretty at fifty-three, than at forty-four (could she have had cosmetic surgery?). Does this "youthfulness" have anything to do with their marriage turning sour? Perhaps she was competing with other younger, more nubile women (especially those ballet dancers).
Perhaps Bushnell became too demanding later in their marriage. Perhaps Askegard wanted to have children, which was unlikely for Bushnell even when he married her when she was forty-four and could have had a slim chance to conceive (with all the dangers that entails).
In any case, Askegard married Bushnell. He wasn't a giddy adolescent when he married her, but a mature, professional, thirty-four-year-old, who had spent years in a grueling profession, which demands youth and vigor. He surely must have understood the fate of physiology and biology.
Now, he divorces her (or causes her to sign divorce papers), and even worse, is implicated in adultery with a much younger woman (a dancer, of course) who is even younger than his wife was when he married her.
I don't fully exonerate Bushnell and her thoughtless disregard for biology and tradition in the pursuit of a whirlwind marriage with a much younger man. But Askegard did marry her, after all. Now, he is discarding an actual human flesh, a woman he must have loved at one time, in his pursuit of a whirlwind affair.
Perhaps I'm putting too much pressure on the male, but surely the marriage bond, whether fragile or strong, is still held together by the insistence of the man. And if one isn't man enough to do that, then what good is anything else such a "man" does?
But did Bushnell want Askegard to be her protector, or was she just attracted to his youthfulness. The latter seems to be the case according to Mark Richardson, who writes:
...Candace Bushnell felt the impulse of masculine and feminine roles only with older men, rather than with younger ones. Her rejection of men older than her suggests that she is not accepting of a man expressing a masculine role as a husband and father within a marriage.Well, she got her young man, but then she lost him I think precisely because of his youth, and his immature inability to stick through his marriage vows.
Such is the quagmire of modern liberal life, where women think they have all the power (and glory), but are in fact mostly led by their whirlwind of desires. A strong man who cannot reign in such energy cannot really be depended upon to perform duties that would require the harder, harsher, affairs of the world.
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