Macron's wife

If Emmanuel Macron is elected President of France there will be two trivial but irritating points to contend with over the next five years. 1) His surname will be mispronounced as 'Macrawn' or 'Macrone' in English-language media. He will join a list of people or characters whose name ends with an 'n' that ought to be silent, like Jean Valjean (Les Mis), Gaston (Beauty and the Beast), or Dion (French Canadian songbird Céline). This would not be a problem if Marine le Pen were elected, as the pronunciation 'le Penn' is correct in her case, unusually. 2) The age of his wife will be mentioned constantly - as the age of Melania never is, for example, even though the gap between the Trumps is roughly the same as between the Macrons (24 or 25 years). The key factor in the Macron marriage is that the wife is the elder. For all that we are browbeaten with the notion that love is love, and can withstand any permutation of orientation or identity in addition to race or social class, the notion of a young man loving and marrying a woman who is beyond child-bearing age continues to be problematic. Understandably so, but only if we allow that our instincts about what is right and what is icky or yucky have some validity. Of course we think a man should marry a woman of child-bearing age, because a woman's main currency as a marriage prospect is tied to her youth and her capacity to provide offspring. We all know this, and it's not a bad thing, even though it's now considered too politically incorrect to mention outright. But sometimes the woman a man loves does not fit into that role, and no, that doesn't necessarily mean the man is simply covering up his homosexuality by using the woman as a 'beard'. The majestic Derek Prince (1915-2003), inspirational Christian, Bible teacher extraordinaire and emphatically heterosexual, married a 55-year old woman when he was 30. And she was no oil painting, as the saying goes: plump, short, bespectacled, completely un-retouched aesthetically. He loved her because they spoke the same spiritual language and they made a great team. Their happy, successful marriage lasted until her death some thirty years later. Macron and his wife Brigitte likewise seem to speak the same language in a secular sense. Macron makes no secret of his reliance on her support. Come to think of it, would a younger woman be ready to support her husband as Brigitte does? Might that have something to do with it also? Obviously he should not be elected in order to make a case for older women as worthy wives, but such a case could be a positive footnote to his potential presidency. The worst scenario would be that such a footnote is the best one can hope for from a candidate who seems content to describe the 'terrorist menace' as reliably ongoing and who once said French society was partly responsible for the terrorism it has already endured.