I am NOT a Trophy Wife… And I Can Prove It

Some­times it’s called “rob­bing the cra­dle.” Another euphemism is “May-December” rela­tion­ship. My usual way of stat­ing the age dif­fer­ence between The Hus­band and myself is to say that he is “sig­nif­i­cantly older than I am.”

The fact is that my hus­band is 29 years, 2 months, and 25 days older than I am. I usu­ally just round it up to a 30-year age dif­fer­ence. I’m 43; he’s 72.

So, yes, I am a lot younger than my hus­band. And yes, I’m his sec­ond wife. And since my goal with this blog is to be as trans­par­ent as pos­si­ble with­out com­pro­mis­ing our anonymity, I will even admit that at one point I was “the other woman.” But I am not a tro­phy wife and I can prove it.

Fact No. 1 — I am not a tro­phy
Fact No. 2 — He is not a tro­phy winner.

Ask any­one who knows me and they will con­firm fact #1. Noth­ing about me screams (or even whis­pers) tro­phy! in the typ­i­cally under­stood def­i­n­i­tion of a tro­phy wife. I am as flat-chested as they come. I don’t “do” make-up; I have no inter­est in clothes or baubles or purses or shoes; I pay no atten­tion what­so­ever to my hair; I keep my nails short, never use pol­ish, and have never had a manicure.

The Hus­band, as I stated, is not a tro­phy win­ner. He’s no Daddy War­bucks, he’s got wrin­kles that resem­ble the Grand Canyon, and unless baby-blue leisure suits make a tremen­dous come­back, he’s never going to grace the cover of GQ.

I’m not com­pletely lack­ing, how­ever, in tro­phy wife qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Tro­phy wives are often seen as being high-maintenance. I am high-maintenance. I’m not even ashamed to admit it any­more. Sing it loud and sing it proud: I am high-maintenance! I require a good bit of atten­tion and affec­tion. My feel­ings are too eas­ily bruised and I can’t hear “I love you” often enough.

I do pos­sess one other trophy-wife qual­i­fi­ca­tion: I have expen­sive tastes. But instead of cov­et­ing big furs, flashy cars, and over­priced jew­elry, my eyes glaze over when I think about elec­tronic gadgets.

Imag­ine how I’d look with a new Sony cam­corder cra­dled in my palm! The only way to top that look would be to add a top-of-the-line Nikon SLR with a 300mm tele­photo lens draped around my neck. Wouldn’t that Bose Sound­Dock sys­tem acces­sorize beau­ti­fully with my white Nano?

I dream about mak­ing the switch from PCs to Mac, get­ting each child one of those incred­i­bly cool and ultra-portable Mac­Book lap­tops. Nat­u­rally, I’d have the new 24″ 2.8GHz iMac with 500gb hard drive. Our exist­ing Mac Mini would be per­fect for The Hus­band and I’d hook us all up to an Air­port Extreme-driven wire­less network.

I’ve been keep­ing a close eye on the field of net­work­able exter­nal hard-drives — imag­in­ing the abil­ity to store all of our music, photo, video, and doc­u­ment files in one place and being able to access them from any com­puter in the house, that’s the stuff of wet dreams!

My lat­est guiltily-secretly-coveted gizmo is a flat-panel TV. Some­thing that we could install on the wall and pull out and swing around accord­ing to where view­ers are sit­ting. When not in use it would hang unob­tru­sively on the wall look­ing like some sleek, new-age, ultra mod­ern piece of art. I could get rid of the big black box that sits in the cor­ner on the ancient wooden wheeled stand along with the DVD player and the VHS player and all the cables and the wires and the dust. I’m still try­ing to decide, should I go Plasma or an LCD? And what about size: 42″ is a prob­a­bly bit exces­sive, don’t you think? Maybe 37″?

A girl can dream, can’t she? Dream­ing is free.

My hus­band thinks I’m the per­fect type of tro­phy wife — my head might be in the clouds but my feet are planted firmly on the ground. I might dream of a life of elec­tron­ics lux­ury but in the real world I’m per­fectly con­tent with my 4.0 megapixel point-and-shoot Nikon, our 20-year-old 27″ color TV, and my 4gb first-generation Nano iPod.

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