Over the weekend I was chatting with a woman I know about various things when the subject of a mutual acquaintance came up. Needless to say, out reactions and the messages we got from the events in this man’s life were diametrically opposed. For your possible edification and/or entertainment I will provide the following bit of back ground on our acquaintance.
The man in question, I’ll call him Ron, is several years my senior and several years younger than the woman to whom I was talking. Ron is somewhere in his late 40’s. He is a self made and self destroyed man. We’ll get to that in a second. Ron has always been an image guy. Expensive clothes, worked out constantly, and I suspect used steroids. I don’t know this for a fact, but having spent several years doing weight training and power lifting, I thought I saw those tell tale signs. Ron has always been the consummate salesman. Always coming off as just a little too slick, but people seem to gobble that stuff up.
Ron’s soon to be ex-wife is a half dozen years his junior and what Talleyrand likes to call an ‘aging dime.’ During her prime years she was as close as any woman can get to an HB10 without airbrushing. As she’s aged, she’s kept herself in shape, had various forms of cosmetic surgery, ie boobs and lipo, and generally stayed quite attractive. Ron and his soon-ex have three children all between high school and college aged. Two girls and a boy.
When Ron met his soon-ex he literally had nothing. He was a salesman working out of a van. I’m trying to not be too specific because he’s well enough known in the big city that someone could put two and two together. Anyway, Ron had big plans and he put them to work. He started his own business marketing an upscale product with superior finishing. The SWPL’ers ate this shit up. Soon he was expanding his business and setting up a home with his soon-ex. The soon-ex loved his new found status, exotic trips, and the mansion he set her up in. Ron flew higher and higher for over a decade and a half until the bottom fell out in October of 2008.
The fall of ‘08 saw Ron’s world implode. His business collapsed like a house of cards. Like many businesses he was over leveraged. The banks were scrambling for money to cover their asses and they refused to renegotiate terms preferring to liquidate. The soon-ex confronted Ron about a sexual affair he was having. She requested they go to counseling, but this was really nothing more than a prelude to full on divorce. The money Ron had set aside and that he thought was safe was frozen by the banks. They had other assets but they weren’t nearly as liquid. The soon-ex revealed in counseling that she knew of not just his latest affair but of all the affairs he’d had throughout their marriage (which were many). She stated that she really didn’t want to work things out. The soon-ex has also turned the three children against their father. She’s the aggrieved party. She let Ron know that she’s going after the house and all their protected assets. C’est la vie.
So here I am talking to this woman and she’s filling in all the latest details which I hadn’t know about. She says to me that it was Ron’s insecurity that made him cheat and think he could get away with it. I disagreed. Insecurity had nothing to do with it. I said it was the sheer volume of women that will willingly throw themselves at a multi-millionaire like Ron. There are few men who can say no to temptation when it’s always there. I asked this woman what she thought of the wife. To me it seemed obvious that the soon-ex was willing to overlook the affairs so long as she was kept in a lifestyle of ease and comfort. Once Ron lost everything and the upkeep of the soon-ex’s lifestyle was no longer a possibility, Ron was disposable. She was going after his remaining assets like a true gold-digger. I pointed out that placing all the blame on Ron’s shoulders was attempting to absolve his soon-ex from any responsibility. Predictably, this woman couldn’t or wouldn’t see it that way.
