For a less poetically written version of this story, read The Mirror: "Wealthy mum says husband 'left for another woman in lockdown and didn't want custody of kids'/Flobelle 'Belle' Fairbanks Burden, 54, from New York, US, said Henry Davis wanted to end their marriage during Covid lockdown at their Martha's Vineyard home in spring 2020." Here, unlike at the Times, the ex-husband is named and we see photos of the couple, plus news that Belle is a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Here's a long Wikipedia article about her mother, Amanda Burden.
Anyway, back to "Was I Married to a Stranger?" To me the most interesting part is that Belle Burden chose to embrace the continuing strangerhood of the husband who drove off one morning:
His strangeness only increased, becoming an adversary in the divorce process... As the pandemic dragged on, there was so little social interaction and information flow that I heard nothing about him from anyone. I don’t know if the other woman is still important to him or if she didn’t matter at all. I don’t know if he cheated throughout our marriage or if the affair was his first betrayal. I don’t know if he changed abruptly or if I was sleeping with a stranger for two decades. I could have hired a private investigator, could have called the husband of the woman he was seeing, could have pursued my in-laws for answers.
But all these roads felt sordid, like I was trading my dignity for scraps of information. I had to figure out how to move forward without knowing....
You know what's not sordid and undignified? Publishing a NYT "Modern Love" column, written in lofty language, inviting the whole world to join you in your elegant state of unknowing and making that man a stranger to us all.
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57 comments:
“I don’t know if he changed abruptly or if I was sleeping with a stranger for two decades.”
Isn’t this an entire genre in movies and television?
They hook up. They cohabitate. They dequarantine. Urban love, cured.
Money and social position cannot insulate you from the pain of living and an uncertain future.
To teach those who find this a revelation, the media must be alerted. Has she done us a great service, or are we sharing perhaps a bit too much? My Mom used to call it "hanging dirty laundry."
Not included, one would bet, any acknowledgement that she might be a reason he wanted out and that 24/7 exposure pushed him over the limits of his endurance.
I have a friend, recently divorce, who had been really unhappy in a loveless marriage for over a decade. His wife made no bones that she had no interest in sex (apparently with anyone). Yet, by damn, HE had better not be looking elsewhere. She revealed this over dozens of awkward and painful conversations over the years. Humiliating for him.
She remains astonished that he would leave the wonderful woman she imagines herself to be.
Whether sordid or not- I can relate to the disbelief of having been so wrong in loving someone.
Trust&thruth go hand in hand. What’s one w/out the other?
the MAN filled for divorce? Can't say i've ever heard of that..
Actually, gilbar HAS heard of that; But ONLY because the Man's girlfriend was pregnant
In my (limited) experience, it is ALWAYS a woman that initiates a divorce.
Can y'all think of (m)any outliers ?
Ha! Not sordid at all.
I was googling Burt Bacharach and his second or third wife, Carole Bayer Sager. They had known each other for years before they married, and of course they were both in the song-writing business--Burt the music, Carole the lyrics. Surely the makings of a great marriage? She eventually said something like: she assumed it was a great thing that they came close to spending every minute together. Isn't this what many couples dream of? Don't busy people say: some day we'll spend all our time together? It eventually dawned on Carole that this was exactly what Burt didn't want. How do you tell the other person: we're spending too much time together? Something to be said for separate vacations, separate pastimes?
I don't know if there was an affair, but Carole was quite bitter and made sure she got California cash, a coveted house, and so on.
oh! there you go! gilbar (finally) read his assigned reading!
Wealthy mum says husband 'left for another woman
As the kids say, "100%". I got the jump on The Mirror by simply googling her name (no reason to use a pseudonym, right?) which brought up her wedding announcement from the NYTimes. So this was an 'artful' way to embarrass her ex-husband and really embarrass the 'other woman,' who now will know what a cold monster she is in a relationship with. It is embarrassing behavior, and very aggressive as well.
This woman thought the divorce would be amicable? LOL. As rare as hen’s teeth. Money is involved, lady. And plenty of it considering there is a Martha’s Vineyard house.
She’s just using the NYT to advertise for dates. Like when Martha .Stewart appeared on the cover of SI and then said she prefers younger men. Martha is enjoying a series of one night stands this summer in The Hamptons.
If only Tom Wolfe was still alive! Belle Burden!
I found Belle’s picture. I’d jump her bones!
My first and main question after 21 years: Was she menopausal? Had she transformed into a different creature? Seriously. It does happen and she may not be a reliable witness to her own behavior. It takes two to tango.
Michael Jordan experienced a similar thing. In his case, saying he'd "spend more time together after basketball retirement" with his wife of 17 years morphed into a divorce. Of course, he has a reputation for being a hardcore psychopath in real life and she may have had to leave.
With her blue blood, wealth, property and social status, it must have been quite the coup at the NYT to get a juicy tell-all like this. New Yorkers want the Styles section to be their own National Enquirer.
Her need to inflict pain on her spouse is an aspect that wont be aired. She already has the kids, so maybe this is about getting max child support and keeping the house on Marthas Vinyard. The story was probably pitched by her divorce lawyer.
Hell hath no fury...
Somebody, somewhere, somewhen came up with that for a reason. Is it true? Don't know, but when people read "sordid and undignified" claptrap published for an audience of millions about a relationship so complex and entangled that no one who did not experience it can begin to understand it, let alone offer a critique, they encourage scorned-woman fury by rewarding it. Belle Burden may not have intended to harm Henry Davis, but the writing and the publishing combine to inevitably harm him.
Why did the NTY publish this? Is it newsworthy? Is there any public interest claim involved? No, and no. Did they contact Mr. Davis? Probably, but when the press solicits a comment the purpose is to topple the walls of privacy, not to shore them up. If Davis keeps quiet, he does himself harm. If he speaks up, he does himself harm. Wanton cruelty is the only explanation that makes sense to me.
gilbar said...
the MAN filled for divorce? Can't say i've ever heard of that..
Actually, gilbar HAS heard of that; But ONLY because the Man's girlfriend was pregnant
In my (limited) experience, it is ALWAYS a woman that initiates a divorce.
Can y'all think of (m)any outliers ?
7/5/23, 7:27 AM
_____________
My observation is that the man will file for divorce when he decides to marry his mistress.
If the woman files for divorce it is because she is sick of the marriage.
sartre was right, one week are you kidding me,
If she was able to keep the place on Martha's Vineyard, perhaps she can take in a few migrants now that her husband moved out.
Sorry. 54-year-old NY rich liberal with a place on Martha's Vineyard. I'll be she's a total Karen.
The thought of being locked down with her was probably more than the husband could take. Run Forrest, Run!
Why does the old Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen song "Love and Marraige" immediately pop up as an "ear worm"?
Burden v. Burden. He wanted to lay his burden down.
Woman: Sex isn't a priority anymore.
Dr. Laura: Is your marriage a priority?
What is it with Wu Flu? Does it destroy the male brain? Or does it strip away decades of self-delusion about the Good Life?
The New York Times will now enlighten us. Or at least titillate us, with pseudo-patterns discerned by its discerning writers.
Anecdotally, I see a lot of this amongst mid-level white-collar men who go through the charade of marriage and family, but maintain their personal identity through work. Marginally committed to their families, they don't do -- and do not wish to do -- the hard consistent work of being a husband and father, so they give it all at best a lick and a promise, then bail and delight in their self-absorbed freedom, which often, as noted, does not involve custody, or being an active father or sensitive husband. Never did.
Around here, in one of America's 25 wealthiest counties, over 90 percent of custody cases go to the woman, meaning 60 to 100 percent parenting time. That's at least understandable, but it's a secondary effect of so many marginally-involved men, in that women can commonly claim (rightly) that they were by far the primary parent.
A few of us, however, end up as collateral damage. My ex-wife had a ten-year history of physically abusing me and our young daughter [DV conviction, multiple charges], as well as documented mental illness issues, including a police-involved suicide attempt. I had a tremendously difficult fight to obtain 50-50. Colorado does it best: DV conviction? Statutory termination of parental rights, and all a judge can influence is the terms of visitation.
IMO family law needs to be addressed -- at the state level -- all across the country, and I hope Colorado's approach becomes more widespread.
Guys, your job won't be there at your funeral, and if you're not careful, neither will your kids. And you'll have missed out on one of life's greatest experiences.
@gilbar -- I am an outlier (see my slightly earlier post). You're correct in that roughly 85% of all divorces are initiated by the woman, but that also means that when we men file for divorce we've often got a bloody good reason, in my case literally my own blood on the kitchen floor.
And we cannot touch them in self-defense, or WE go to jail.
These third and fourth and fifth generation patricians have lives that are insulated from our realities. Having exhausted the possibilities of hedonism and progressivism, they tend to inhabit a space of existential inertia. Their lawyers and money managers quietly escort them to oblivion.
@gilbar
"Can y'all think of (m)any outliers ?"
Me.
"She’s just using the NYT to advertise for dates."
1. See the next post up in which Bill de Blasio uses the NYT to advertise for dates.
2. And what a great ad -- you can spend the summer in a fine place on Martha's Vineyard.
"A change in the weather is known to be extreme
But what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream?"
Man leaves for another woman.
Woman leaves because man doesn't fulfill her.
She is wealthy enough to get a private eye to answer all her questions about his infidelity and past behavior. She doesn't want to know.
Even without nude photos, does this fall under the heading of revenge porn? Red meat for female readers, right? Hell hath no fury like a spurned woman writing in the NYT.
Gentlemen: remember the hot/crazy/writer matrix. Of course, these days everyone is a writer, so there's that.
I think the NYTimes has done former husband Henry Davis a terrible wrong in printing this revenge screed. We have here a very one sided view written by a very bitter woman. Though her ex-husband is not named in the NYTimes piece, he is readily identifiable. He comes from a middle class family without the Vanderbilt, Amanda Burden. Babe Paley, etc. trust fund connections. Belle is punching down. The NYTimes could have published the Modern Love article anonymously BUT then it would have lost its upper crust titillating luster.
He married her for that Vanderbilt connection. So posh! Otherwise, why would an up and coming lawyer bother.
My guess is pre-quarantine, he was perfectly happy maintaining a performative (Ha! Ann) marriage while banging his "goomar" several times a week.
Then, faced with a lockdown without amazing sex, he pulled the proverbial trigger.
A day in the life of a NY Times reader.
Isn’t “Belle Burden” a little too on-the-nose? It just makes it all too concise and too clear.
Happy? Happy! Happiness is for children. This is life. You get on with it. Happy my ass. "OOooh! My life isn't perfect! Run away!"
Buncha pussies.
She and her ex may well be the WASPiest couple I've ever seen.
Only Whit Stillman could make a decent movie out of their story.
Who are these people who run away from their own kids?
My observation is that the man will file for divorce when he decides to marry his mistress.
imho, it is the mistress that decides he should marry him.. But WHAT would i know? i've never been married
(just watched a bunch of people)
This hits close to home for me. The woman that I married was not the woman I divorced. Yes this happens. A LOT. For both men and women. It wasn't even gradual. One month in 2017 she simply turned into a completely different person. I'm a clinical psychiatrist with additional background in psychology and all of my professional capability was for naught. I worked for almost 2 years to help her, get to the bottom of the behavioral change I'd witnessed, changed myself, everything.
To this day I don't know what happened, if it was something she read or something I said, or even something I did. I did a massive pathological self-examination of myself. I asked friends and acquaintances to be brutally honest with both me and, if they could reach her, my ex-wife. Nothing popped up with enough preponderance of evidence to suggest a smoking gun or a rational reason for the total doppelganger that suddenly occupied our home.
In the end I was, at least I feel I was, forced to present her with an ultimatum in the hopes that maybe that would serve to jostle loose some recalcitrant feelings or concern for the real world she was destroying. I consulted other colleagues and professionals in my career for advice who suggested it might be worth a try. Not only did it not work, she asked where and when she could sign, and packed her bags. She did not fight me on anything or for anything.
With the exception of one return text to an innocuous query in 2019, I have never heard from her. Neither have her friends. I do not believe she was in or she is in another relationship, just call it a hunch. I believe she still communicates with some of her family but they will not speak to me. Although I believe she is still alive, I have no firm proof. She simply vanished.
When people do this, there is no closure. You end up with the realization that you will never have closure, and that you will pretty much be left to figure for yourself what went wrong until the day you die. The person who holds all the answers to what and why won't communicate those answers to you, never gave you a chance to correct what might have been wrong, and has chosen to take that knowledge to their grave. It is extremely hurtful and psychologically damaging. If you are doing this or planning to do this you need to seriously rethink your life.
"Amanda Burden" sounds like a name that Bart Simpson would use to prank Moe. "Hey everybody, this chick is looking for Amanda Burden!"
Shorter Belle Burden “I Married to a Stranger?” and why she did not hire a private investigator, the title of her NYTimes article should have been:
“My Stranger Husband Was Gay and Only I DID not Suspect a Thing!”
I have a hypothesis that in maybe 10-15% of marriages (and also work situations) there's a person who is pretty oblivious to how their marriage partner and/or boss or team is regarding them. These people are the ones who are vulnerable to the sudden startling discovery that your spouse is extremely unhappy and is leaving, or your boss is (just this minute) firing you.
Most people (85-90% in my opinion) are picking up the clues. Maybe not perfectly, but the great majority of folks would not be all that surprised if this were to happen to them, even if no words like "I'm pretty unhappy" had ever been uttered.
I would test my hypothesis that some people just are painfully bad at picking up the vibes by asking them, "Is this the first time you've ever been surprised like this", and see what they have to say about that.
"She and her ex may well be the WASPiest couple I've ever seen,"
= Sherman & Judy McCoy
Who are these people who run away from their own kids?
Addicts and powerful Democrats, mostly…
"To this day I don't know what happened, "
Menopause.
Just keep your head down and out of sight until it eases up. If it ever does.
Belle is the granddaughter of Babe Paley, wife of CBS president William Paley. Babe Paley is well-known for never again having spoken to her best friend, Truman Capote, after he published the short story "La Cote Basque, 1965." Capote's story, published in Esquire in 1975, revealed the deep, dark secret that Babe Paley had entrusted him with--details of William Paley's sexual encounter with Mary Rockefeller, the first wife of NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
"Getting ahead of the story" may be a gross understatement of what Belle Burden was thinking when she wrote her piece for the New York Times. "Potential ambush" might be more like it.
The first phase of the pandemic, from when my teacher wife was sent home in March until she went back in September, 2020, was great for us. We get along really well, so we really enjoyed spending 24/7 together. (When I asked my wife recently what she wanted in retirement, she said, "Like during the pandemic, but without the pandemic.")
---He comes from a middle class family without the Vanderbilt, Amanda Burden. Babe Paley, etc. trust fund connections. [Martha]
I suspect he thought he had managed to win the superfecta with her. Money, society, fame, powerful connections. But time and maybe a far better sweetie revealed the horror of his success to him.
@Blastfax Kudos: I would contend that that kind of breakup leaves you completely off the hook. Whatever it was she wanted, there wasn't any scenario where you could have provided it.
Henry Davis should sue the NY Times for defamation, just to see what happens.
I think Neil Sedaka said it best when he said,
"To do do, down dooby doo down down
Comma comma, down dooby doo down down
Comma comma, down dooby doo down down"
This comment thread tells you pretty much everything you need to know about humanity -- repellent.
Love comment threads with random Dylan Quotes!
It’s interesting that several of the comments seem to want to blame the wife. Why do we always want to blame the woman? She changed. She withheld sex. She no longer paid any attention to him. She took him for granted. All the possible excuses to ignore what the husband did. Of course he would not have done that, had she not….
Of course it takes two - in any relationship. No one is the perfect spouse. The demise of a marriage isn’t caused by only one person. That said, it says a lot that the husband left the kids, too. He didn’t want custody. He didn’t want contact. He just wanted a life that was completely free of the life he was living.
It’s an often told story and I’ve been on the wife’s side of it. Suddenly, the husband of many years wants nothing to do with you. (It’s actually not so sudden. It had been coming for a while. And the wife is too busy with family, work and or life to notice. Shame on me for not paying better attention. Also, shame on him for never sharing how he was feeling or what he was thinking).
I just don’t get why anyone wants to blame the wife. She was the one left with all the responsibility and the remains of the life they shared. He was off to “new, exciting” things. Someday he may want to reconcile with his kids and won’t be able to understand why they seem less than excited at the opportunity to spend any time with him and his new life.
Arghh - this is bringing back bad memories. On the eve of him being crowned CEO of the company that employed him, my ex husband of 24 years left to be with his mistress.
I was left to pick up the pieces, including caring for an 11 year old son and refinancing our house mortgage so his new apartment rent wouldn't mess up our family finances. Did I mention I was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer during all this?
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