Any fool can have a trophy wife

Any fool can have a trophy wife.
It takes a real man to have a trophy marriage.
- Diane Sollee, smartmarriages.com

I picked up a hitch hiker on my way through the Blue Mountains as I came up to the farm last week. He was a young apprentice chef. As he was telling me about his new apprenticeship, he said these bittersweet but essentially sad words: “My Mum’s boyfriend inspired me to become a chef.” The casual way “my Dad” has become “my Mum’s boyfriend” in normal conversation is shattering. Which of Mum’s boyfriends was that? Perhaps she only had the one.
The happy part was the word “inspired”. This young man had a leader, a mentor. Just what a Dad should be. And maybe his not being a “Dad” enabled him to be a bit hip and cool and inspiring.
A further revelation: our young chef-to-be likes his new profession because he loves to cook and “it’s good to be able to cook a meal for a woman.” He has discovered the power of a degree of domesticity in pulling the heartstrings of his beloved.
He gasped in admiration when I told him I’d been with the same woman for 34 years. I read somewhere that it has become a status symbol in the USA to have a long-standing marriage. They are so rare there and people understand how hard it is to stay married. When I told him, “I met my wife when she was 17 and I was 20,” which must have been close to his own age, he was sincerely impressed.
So was I, with him. Because he believed a marriage that lasts is something worth having. I hope, like his mum’s boyfriend, I was able to inspire him a little during our short ride in the mountains that day.