Some celebrities give marriage a bad name. And we all know who they are.
To them, marriage is something transient and essentially worthless, like a suntan.
It has come to the point in Celebrity land where it astonishes no one that famous men — and it usually is the men — are pre-programmed to cheat on their spouses.
What is shocking, however, is the women they choose to cheat with. For almost without fail they appear to be a bargain-basement version of the wife left behind; the counterfeit alternative to the real thing.
Ashley Cole, for example, married a woman who millions regard as Britain's sweetheart. Cheryl is beautiful and sweet, with the grooming instincts of a prize pony. Women admire and like her, while men, including Prince Harry, yearn to be with her.
Sonia Wild and Alexandra Taylor are downmarket Cheryls, if you can imagine such a thing. The kind of Premiership lemmings who would throw themselves off a cliff for the chance to be with a footballer. They might be perfectly nice girls, but as far as Ashley was concerned their main attraction was that they were easy and they would indulge him.
Burger vs steak
The actor Paul Newman stayed faithful to his wife Joanne Woodward for decades, simply because he loved her and had no inclination to roam. Why, he famously asked, have hamburger when you can have steak at home?
Ashley had prime organic in his house, but he still preferred to be with the battery hens. It seems crazy, but he is not alone.
Sandra Bullock managed to extricate herself from her marriage with as much dignity as she could muster, given the circumstances. Behind her back, husband Jesse James had been carrying on with the kind of girls whom you might expect to find raking the sawdust between acts at the circus. Covered in tattoos and interesting piercings, they were downmarket versions of Princess Sandra, and wasted no time in helping to dismantle her marriage quicker than you could say: "What was he thinking about?"
Himself, obviously. Yet the women in his harem all bore a ghostly resemblance to his glamorous, smart wife Sandra; only a Sandra who had never read a book or combed her hair, or thought twice about stealing another woman's husband.
Similarly, when Jude Law was tempted it wasn't because his then fiancée Sienna Miller wasn't tall enough, thin enough or beautiful enough. Instead, despite all she had to offer, he still found something alluring about the homely nanny, Daisy Wright, who was more than happy to reveal the details of their "mind-blowing, rampant sex" to a trashy tabloid.
And then there was Ronan Keating, who cheated on his wife Yvonne with Francine Cornell, a dancer who appeared with him on the recent Boyzone world tour. This is, perhaps, the showbiz equivalent of running off with your secretary.
Apart from the stupidity and hypocrisy, it also reveals a certain neediness and lack of imagination on his part. Francine, as has been observed, bears more than a passing resemblance to Yvonne, the mother of Keating's three children, the woman who married him in 1998. And she comes to the party with none of the baggage that the responsibilities of parenthood and marriage bring.
And much the same things must have been on Tiger Woods' mind as he rampaged through a battalion of cocktail waitresses, strippers, porn stars, dime-a-dozen strumpets and — for good measure — the girl next door as well.
Holly Sampson, Rachel Uchitel and all the rest; were any of these Zeppelin-breasted hotcakes a match for the beautiful Elin, Tiger's wife and mother of his two children? Of course not.
So where are we at? Cheryl is filing for divorce, Ronan is praying for forgiveness and Tiger is burning bright with shame.
Humiliated, not flattered
It does make you wonder. If they just want to swap their wife for a cheaper, lookalike version they can pick up at the after party, why bother getting married in the first place?
If they don't want to conform, if they have no intention of being faithful, of keeping their vows, of obeying and respecting the conventions and the rules, why go through with the whole charade? And what does it say about these husbands that the wife is almost always more impressive than the mistress?
It must be scant comfort to the wives — who are humiliated, not flattered by the unfaithful homage — that the husband always regrets the dalliance.
For him, hindsight is the most cruel mistress of all. A kind of applied wisdom for the dim and self-indulgent, for those who can't see further than the next kiss or cheap thrill, the next bout of lookalike sex.
Why do they do it? Perhaps for the simplest reasons of all; because they want to and because they can.
