A woman needs a man

09 Sep 2007, ST

I've come to the realisation that a woman isn't complete unless she has a partner

By Sumiko Tan

I NEVER thought I'd say this, but here goes: A woman needs a man to be complete.

Recently, a reader mentioned how she was feeling the pressure to get married. And she's not even 30.

I wrote back to her: 'Don't let anyone pressure you into marriage, although speaking from someone who's 43, single, and looking back at my own life, if you do find a soul mate and marriage is a possibility, do grab it.

'Singlehood has its many advantages, but to be able to share a life with someone who loves you and whom you love, well, that's a happy position to be in.'

My, how the tide has turned.

For ever so long, I've been anti-marriage. Well, 'anti' is too strong a word, but I've always felt that the institution of marriage was overrated.

Perhaps it was from seeing so many people emerge broken and bruised from bad marriages. Or it could be because I grew up in a home where domestic peace was rare (although you'd think that I'd have long stopped using childhood trauma as a crutch for anything that's wrong in my adult life).

Or maybe it was a defence mechanism, given I've yet to find a man worth marrying, or whom I liked enough and who'd marry me - you know, two people so deeply connected they are willing to become stakeholders in each other's lives.

In any case, I've never bought into that whole white wedding thing. (Babies, yes, for a while, but not marriage.)

Except for a brief and regrettable period in my early 20s, I've never wasted brain cells on the treacly trimmings that others dream about when they plan their Big Day. (Raffles or the Ritz-Carlton? Pachelbel's Canon in D or Etta James' At Last? Ten-course Chinese dinner or five-course Western lunch?)

Singapore women, I've always felt, should avoid being overly dependent on men. Don't go spoiling them (or peeling prawns for them). It's more important to be happy with ourselves and to work on being self-sufficient, self-aware, self-confident and all those other fierce I-am-woman-hear-me-roar slogans.

What has caused my change of heart?

Is age - shudder - catching up with me?

THE thing I have come to dislike most about being single is attending 'couples' events.

They include concerts and plays where you're the only one invited without a 'partner' because the organisers know that, too bad, you don't have one.

And dinner parties which you bravely attend alone only to suffer tiresome couples who seem to enjoy flaunting their twosome status to singletons the whole evening.

At lunch one weekend, I saw a stomach-churning display.

A good-looking couple with baby in pram were out having a meal - well, good for them. But they kept making goo-goo eyes at each other and couldn't stop smiling. When the food came, they said grace, then actually kissed each other delightedly on the lips before turning to their meal. He then proceeded to feed her from his dish using his fork. Oh please.

My lunch companion consoled me: 'They've probably been married for just over a year, lah. It'll fade.'

And then there's going by your single self to watch movies and the cashier kindly offering you that 'single' seat at the back of the hall, segregated for wheelchair-bound people and lonely, solitary folk like you (for your information, that's seats K2 in GV Grand's hall 4 and J18 in hall 5).

Such a relentless onslaught of this singling out of singletons is enough to make even the most self-assured of independent women lose their self-esteem when, really, they should be cherishing their freedom.

BUT the inescapable truth - one that I've finally allowed myself to acknowledge - is this: Life is really much nicer when you have someone to share it with.

As an unmarried friend in his 50s puts it: 'A partner is paramount when you're older. Having regular lunches with old schoolmates is certainly not enough. The isolation can be painful.'

I'm not even talking marriage and husbands here but just the idea of having a 'mate' - yes, that frankly rather childish concept of a 'boyfriend' - in your life.

When there's someone to love, and who loves you back, isn't life so much sweeter?

A colleague who married at the relatively late age of 35 says that she's slowly realising why marriage is such a good idea.

'It really is like having a 24-hour best friend,' she says.

'Wake up together, go to work together, come home to someone to complain to, have hobbies together, go to sleep together. Ultimately, marriage is not about sex, financial security or even kids. It's about companionship and having a 24-hour friend who makes life easier most of the time.'

I suppose you could argue that companionship and fulfilment needn't necessarily be from, and with, a man.

Surely what we all hunger for is just someone or something to love, and from which we get some feelings of love and appreciation back, and must this be in the form of only a husband or boyfriend? Can't it also be from a parent, sibling or child? From a pet, even, or an exciting career?

But, oh, who are we kidding? Let's be honest. Nothing beats the frisson of commanding the time and attention of someone from the opposite sex whom you fancy and who fancies you. After all, humans are hardwired to mate.

No amount of cake and coffee with your girlfriends (sorry, girls, but you do know what I mean), or a pet dog's unconditional love, can give a woman the same happiness as when she is in the company of the man she adores and who loves her back.

The caveat, of course, is that he isn't a prince you kissed who turns out to be a frog, but someone who's kind, decent and sweet and who watches out for you.

It does involve risk and taking a leap of faith in your ability to read people.

After all, many a match starts off well but descends into hell. And hell needn't be about fights and acts of meanness. It can be plain boredom - that trapped feeling when you sit down for a meal with a supposed loved one and discover you have absolutely nothing left to say to each other anymore.

So, yes, the life of a woman will be complemented and enhanced by the right male companion.

But as my colleague also said, she'd rather be single and alone than to be married and miserable - and there are an awful lot of unhappy 'happy couples' out there.

For her, though, it really is a case of finding the right partner.

If only we were all so lucky.

When love survives the acid test

21 June 2007, ST

The Pugaches' love story is not for the faint of heart: He maims her, she goes blind, he goes to jail - then marries her

HOLLYWOOD - Plenty of women stay with men who have abused them - sometimes because they are financially trapped, sometimes because they are afraid of provoking more abuse if they leave and sometimes, quite simply, because love transcends violence.

But what can account for the love story of Burt and Linda Pugach, who today, nearly half a century after his heinous crime against her, are together, bickering and laughing like any cranky couple who have been yoked for more than 30 years?

This is the issue that Dan Klores, the New York public relations man, set out to explore in his fourth documentary, Crazy Love, which premiered in January this year at the Sundance Film Festival and opened recently in Los Angeles.

'I think they represent everything you fear that could happen to you,' said Klores, a bearded, bearish 57-year-old who co-directed the film with Fisher Stevens.

'At least, where I come from, the first time I had my heart broken, I was so devastated. I was 19 or 20 and there wasn't a day I didn't think about her, see her on the street, on the subway... is she gonna call me? There were times you would call and hang up. Obviously Burt went way beyond that.'

In 1959, long before domestic violence was taken seriously, before stalking laws existed, Burton Pugach, an ambulance-chasing Bronx lawyer, grew obsessed with Linda Riss, a woman 10 years his junior whom he'd spotted at a local park.

He wined and dined her at a nightclub he owned, introduced her to celebrities, flew her in his wobbly little plane, bought a house in Scarsdale, New York, to entice her into marriage and became incensed that she would not have sex with him. He even forced her to undergo a medical exam to prove she was a virgin. (She was.) And then, she learnt he was married.

Crime of passion

NOT only did she discover that he was married but she also found that he'd forged the very divorce documents he'd offered as proof that he was free. Fed up, she left him, which is when the 'If I can't have you, nobody can' harassment began.

Detectives at her local precinct refused to help. A protective order was rescinded by the court. The cops told her, sorry, lady, nothing to be done until and unless the guy does something to hurt you.

'I was the only one who was aware of the danger I was in,' Riss says in the documentary, 'and no one else cared'. 'I was gonna kill her,' admits Pugach on film. 'But I just couldn't do it.'

Eight months after she broke up with Pugach, she agreed to marry a man her own age. The day after celebrating their engagement, someone posing as a messenger knocked on her door. Thinking her fiance had sent her a gift, she answered, vulnerably, her hands behind her head as she fussed with a French knot.

The messenger, hired by Pugach, flung the contents of a mayonnaise jar at her face. The jar was filled with lye (caustic soda).

Riss - raven-haired, creamy complected, dark-eyed and all of 22 years - was instantly blinded in one eye and maimed for life.

The press was all over the crime and the trial. Tabloid heaven. As columnist-author Jimmy Breslin says in Crazy Love: 'Sensational... That sells your papers.'

After laudatory newspaper stories about her fiance's loyalty, he dumped her as soon as interest in the story waned. Another man got close, but when she removed her dark glasses, as a kind of test of his love, he fled. 'I am now damaged merchandise,' she recalls matter of factly as she recounts the story.

Years passed, she lived in near poverty, alone, partly sighted.

(She would lose the blurred vision in her second eye in 1990 and is now completely blind.) Riss tried, unsuccessfully, to sue the police for failing to protect her.

Meanwhile, from prison, Pugach continued to stalk her relentlessly, writing pious and florid declarations of undying love.

He befriended attorney William Kuntsler, who interceded with Riss by phone. If he loves me so much, she asked, why doesn't he send me any money?

Pugach, who claims in the film to have reversed three murder convictions as well as represented the bank robber Willie Sutton while incarcerated in Attica state prison, began charging fellow inmates for his legal services.

The first cheque he sent her was for US$4,000. Other checks followed, and, impressed by his attempts at restitution, the parole board granted him release in 1974. He had served 14 years. And now he was divorced.

Pugach was barred by a court order from getting close to his victim, who adapted to her injuries by wearing wigs and sunglasses (and frankly, it's almost shocking how these accessories gave this physically damaged woman a glamorous air).

So he proposed to her via local television, while being interviewed. Riss accepted. They wed on Nov 27, 1974, in a civil service officiated by a judge.

And it was tabloid heaven all over again: From the original 1959 'Acid Blinds Bride-to-be', it was 'Linda, Burt Wed; He Blinded Her' in 1974. 'An Acid Bath for Love', read another headline.

'In my heart, I probably do love him,' Riss tells TV journalist Geraldo Rivera after the marriage. 'I just find it hard to say the word.'

Telling their story

FILM-MAKER Dan Klores, whose other documentaries have explored his childhood friendships, became intrigued with their story after the New York Times published a postscript in 2004.

He spent about two years on the film, which he had first conceived as a feature, researching the case, ferreting out leads, gathering archival records.

By phone from their Forest Hills, New York, apartment, the Pugaches recalled that when Klores was interviewing them, they believed he was gathering material for a feature film. Both professed surprise - and delight - that he made a documentary instead.

They said they were shocked at the positive reception they received at the Sundance Film Festival, where they participated in a Q&A session after the film's premiere.

'We came into the room and got a standing ovation,' said Riss. 'That really freaked me out. Maybe I was expecting tomatoes. I am sure there will be people who think I am crazy. I accept all of this. What I did was not so off-the-wall.'

When asked on the phone if she loves Pugach, who is 80, she replied: 'When he behaves.'

When asked if she is happy, she answered: 'How do I sound? I guess I am as happy as I am ever gonna be.'