The Susan Sarandon-Tim Robbins Split: Why Women Leave?

When I first heard about the biggest liberal split since Alec Baldwin and Kim Bassinger, I assumed that Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins were calling it quits because he'd left her for a younger woman. She's 63 and he's 51, so that makes sense, right? No, actually. But my reaction had nothing to do with age.

Because no matter what ages partners are when they split, my first thought is a horrified lament: "He's left her."

I am so stuck in the '80s. I spent my impressionable years watching men leave their first wives for younger trophy wives. I worried that if I married just such a tragedy would befall me. I mourned for every woman who was so callously abandoned.

But that is so over. It's been over for more than 10 years. Now it's the women leaving the men. I don't know what's going on. But the story has reversed.

Women are leaving, and as they do, they're often saying the same things about men that men were saying as they went out the door: "I've grown. And he/she hasn't."

So when the (denied) second-wave rumors began that it was Susan rather than Tim who has a younger friend, I wasn't exactly surprised. Just rueful; times do change.