Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: May 13, 2017 08:56PM
Rhetorical question. Judgmentalism is too much in our cultural DNA.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/opinion/brigitte-macron-france-election-roger-cohen.htmlFrom the column:
PARIS — This is a city of stolen moments, its romance tied to realism about the vagaries of the heart. Nothing surprises. Little is judged. In the realm of sex and coupling, a shrug of the shoulders is what you get from the French. Or as they would put it with dismissive bluntness: “Bof.”
Intimacy, for the French, is nobody else’s business. A strong respect for privacy prevails. It is combined with reluctance to attach any moral baggage to people’s love lives. The effect is liberating. France does sex and food with aplomb. Guilt is not really its thing.
People come to France for its beauty, but what finally beguiles them is its civilization, at once formal and sensual, an art of living and loving.
I have been thinking of this non-judgmental French gift as the newly elected president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte, prepare to move into the Élysée Palace next week. They are an unusual couple. He is 39; she is 64. They met, as everyone knows by now, when he was a teenager and she was his drama teacher, a married woman with three children. Macron, through her, now has seven grandchildren whom he embraces as his own.
To all of which the chief French response has been: Who cares? There has been a celebration, particularly among women, of the fact that the norm of the older man with the much younger wife has been challenged. (The Macron age difference is roughly the same as between President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania.)
So, dating/marrying much older women? What would the Mormon reaction be? Your reaction?