I have to confess that this thread has piqued my interest in Alice Evans and Ioan Gruffudd.
So she left Picasso's grandson for Gruffudd when she was already in her early 30s and he was in his late 20s. Then after 6 years she apparently had to give him an ultimatum to get him to propose and they got married when she was 39. Then the first few years of their marriage were marked by many gruelling rounds of IVF to have their daughters. And now this.
It's a bit of a shitter, really, isn't it?
Can you imagine it as a post on the relationships board?
"DP and I have been together for over five years. We met at work, fell in love and I left my ex boyfriend for him. I was 32 when we met, 37 now. He's five years younger than me. I want to get married and have children but he doesn't seem to want to commit. Also, we're both actors, when we met it looked like we'd hit the big time, but it's been a bit difficult since. Either we're not working or one of us (usually him) is working but away for several months at a time working with gorgeous co-stars. What do I do?"
People would have been accusing him of future faking and wasting her fertile years, and the advice would probably have been split between "cut your losses, move on, find someone else who wants to get married and have kids NOW" or "give him an ultimatum, tell him if you're not married and TTC within the next year you're leaving him".
Evidently she went for the second option.
Fast forward a couple more years, she'd have been here on the conception and IVF boards, distraught because having waited so long to get her man down the aisle she now can't get pregnant as she'd hoped. And she's still not working, whereas he is doing the occasional thing, earning decent money by ordinary people's standards but nothing like enough for the glamorous lifestyle they imagined when they moved to LA.
Maybe she'd post again on relationships or AIBU.
"DH and I have been married for a couple of years. I'm TTC/doing IVF/pregnant. It's been hard. I haven't really worked since we got married, maybe a bit before because it's hard to get work in my industry at the best of times and even more so when you've been going through what I've been through in the last few years. It's not really compatible with family life unless you're making enough money to outsource literally everything, which we don't. DH is in the same industry but the work is very sporadic. There are years when he's making six figures, but he's literally gone for months at a time, and other years where he's not working at all, he's grumpy because he doesn't know where his next pay cheque is coming from, and we're having to live off savings. We live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, all our friends have way more money than we do, I know the kind of money I'm talking about sounds like a lot but it really doesn't go far in this town. I don't know why I'm really posting on here but I could use some advice."
People would be telling her she and her husband should count themselves lucky, that they don't know they're born, do they know how many people are struggling on minimum wage, that if they can't afford their fancy pants lifestyle they should move back home closer to family and get normal jobs. Have they considered retraining as teachers?
The reality is, Alice was absolutely gorgeous when she met him, but she was already in her 30s and had had no real acting career to speak of. If it's already slim pickings when you're 32 and beautiful, you have no chance of making it in the film industry ten years later when you're doing IVF. Possibly even when she met him she knew her acting days were numbered and that 102 Dalmatians might turn out to be the pinnacle of her career.
So she gambled everything on a slightly younger man who might have turned out to be a big star, and waited far too long for him to be ready to get married and TTC. If she'd cut her losses after two years and thrown herself into the London dating scene she could probably have found herself a non famous man who was rich enough for it not to matter that she had no career to speak of. But she wanted Ioan Gruffudd to be her husband and the father of her children so she stuck it out.
I think that if he had hit the big time and become much more rich and famous, their relationship would most likely still have ended in much the same way and for the same reasons, but probably earlier because he'd have had more women throwing themselves at him. Women who were rich and famous and successful in their own right.
But the real stinger in the tail here is that he never hit the big time and so she won't even get enough in the divorce to give her financial security and help soften the blow of having thrown her life away on the wrong man.
I very much understand the attraction of Ioan Gruffudd on a superficial level (happy to admit that I've thought he was hot since the Hornblower days), but she really did back the wrong horse, didn't she?