Try A Little Kindness

I can guess that being President of France is not a real cushy gig. (Aside from the fact that you get to live in a cool palace and have great food prepared for you.) Your biggest ally (us) has been pretty fickle lately and ..well….he has to try to govern the French. (Mon Dieu!)

From my perspective of almost 71 years, I was thinking of all the developmental changes a person goes through in the course of a lifetime. He met the woman who would become his wife when he was 15 years old and he was her student. Did he get to do what most 15 year olds get to do? Like date and, basically, be allowed to grow up? Looks like a big ‘no’ on that one. I can assure you that any relationship I entered into at age 15 would long have been histoire.

So now she’s 72 and he’s 47. Even by libertine French standards, this is a little…shall we say…unconventional. (I’m not even going to go into what it would be like had he been the older one.)

Emmanuel strikes me as an earnest fellow. Relationships take work. It appears they were having some kind of marital eruption which took place—unfortunately— while the cameras were rolling. There are enigmatic elements behind the scenes in most relationships. This one is characterized by serious shifting power dynamics over an extended period of time.

I say we cut the guy some slack.