My wife asked me what I think about the separation of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger and I said a few bumbling things, then I asked her what she thought.
Both of her parents have died, she sees the dark finger of death a ways off, it’s much closer than it has ever been. It sort of wakes her up in her own life to the idea, I’m in the final third and what is the point of staying with this guy?
I’m sure that her family never approved of him. He was a Republican. He had had plastic surgery. He was sort of a Nazi [supported Kurt Waldheim]. He sexually abused women. Not only did he sleep around, but there were these cases against him.
She was from a tradition of creating the Great American Family and sort of smiling at all their peccadilloes. Her father, her uncles– they all did it. So that was the way she was raised, to turn a blind eye. She went along with that, especially because she was creating her own Great American Family. But she was creating it with a guy they didn’t approve of. They said, Come on, he’s a weirdo, he’s a sleazebag. Believe me, they do not approve of men having plastic surgery.
And therefore, she had to defend him, and make it appear that she believed she had made the right decision. She’d swallowed her family values. She was believing in those stay-together Catholic values: you put up with the good times and the bad.
And then both her parents die, and it’s a giant wakeup call. One day she wakes up and thinks, What am I doing? She stopped pretending. She made a videotape saying, “I don’t know what to do next, I don’t know what to do with my life.” I never saw it, but I heard about it, and I could tell she’s in a crisis. [Shriver did it in March, you can watch it here.] I love when someone in the public eye can say, Hey things aren’t going well, I don’t know what to do.
What about the vindication she’s giving her family members who said he was a sleazebag?
She doesn’t care. She’s in a spiritual crisis. She’s not in the competition any more.
