But the second reaction, after scouring the newspapers for the “what it means to you” bullet points, is to shrug the shoulders and put it all down to the mysteries of high finance. This is a sector that has been too slow to innovate and has a poor record of customer relations. Recent advances in telephone and Internet banking have left the three independent UK banks – NatWest, Barclays and Lloyds TSB – trailing in their wake.The humble consumer is likely to be bemused by the sheer size of the RBS’s pounds 27bn bid, and even more so by the record pounds 74bn bid by Vodafone for Mannesmann, the German phone company. Agreed mergers are good only for managers, which is why that between Carlton and United News & Media will probably be a disaster.
The RBS bid, on the other hand, promises the sort of electric shock treatment that is long overdue in personal and small-business banking. It is better for customers, shareholders and the wider economy that the RBS, a good, well-managed company, should make a “hostile” takeover bid for NatWest, a mediocre, neither-one-thing- nor-the-other kind of high-street bank.
Whether that’s a victory for nature or nurture, who cares, so long as it keeps the lawyers, estate agents and therapists out of business – and the children happy.. IT IS just as well that merger talks between the Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest broke down. (Ironically, a la Bridget Jones, this search may be taking a damn sight longer than desired not because of the abundance of suitable partners who possess Fisher’s “multiplicity of talent” but because of their dearth.) A woman who cohabits or who goes up the aisle older, wiser, and with a lot of living already done, may be prepared to work harder at a relationship, aware that what’s wrong with Mr Right isn’t likely to get fixed in a day (or, for that matter, 48 months).Margaret Mead, the American anthropologist, once said: “The first relationship is for sex; the second is for children; the third is for companionship.”Perhaps in the millennium there’ll be increasing recognition that all three shifts of gear can be incorporated in one relationship. So how come, in Britain, divorce is on a plateau?I suspect the woman who holds her own purse strings now, can and is taking her time to choose the man whom she wants to father her children.
In short, we will soon witness serial monogamy on a grand scale. They want him emotionally more intimate, more sensitive, as much a soul mate as a body in the boudoir.Fisher, a 53-year-old divorcee, argues that cultural conditioning has artificially extended marriage but, “the increasing economic independence of women will ensure that genes will out”. But an even larger proportion are marrying later – and six out of ten will stay hitched.According to the Fisher theory, the four out of ten women seeking a divorce should be citing PMB – post-matrimonial boredom. They might even mention the better looking bloke next door (appreciated, naturally, only for the opportunity he offers to widen society’s pool of creative genes).Instead, what seems to be the most common complaint amongst departing wives, is that they want more of the old man – not less. Some marry young and divorce before they hit their mid twenties, presumably moving on in search of fresh fathers. In the Fifties, for instance, nurture won in the battle against nature – a good woman married for life, “Til death do us part”, tied to her husband not necessarily by passion but out of financial dependence.Now, in the 1990s, the evidence is more contradictory. It’s a hugely enjoyable read not least for seeing how she manoeuvres round those tight genetic corners.
Or, as some of us older pea’-hens might put it, if you’ve seen one peacock’s tail, you’ve seen them all, give or take a feather or two.The professor first articulated her views seven years ago in her book, Anatomy of Love. The brain chemicals that make us fall in love last three years. The fourth year is spent seeking an alternative spouse, presumably in ignorance of Dorothy Parker’s advice that, “Every love’s the love before/In a duller dress”. So, forget the seven-year itch, it’s the fourth-year female flit that really carries clout.
Fisher argues that shortly after marriage, a woman begins to consider moving on. On BBC 1’s Everyman, anthropologist Professor Helen Fisher told us that the woman who changes husbands every four years isn’t fickle, faddish or infantile, she’s just following her genes. As a serial monogamist, she is acting as a saviour of the human race. And to think we thought Elizabeth Taylor was just a good-time girl.
Professor Fisher claims that women are genetically programmed to seek brief relationships. This is because their genes dictate that children fathered by a series of men, create, “a multiplicity of talent” which gives a better chance of survival. But even a fashionable “yes” vote based on perverse radicalism is better than nothing.. ANYONE WHO happened to be watching television last night, in the company of their fifth husband, probably swelled with pride. He suspects it is the latter rather than the former and I incline to agree. But the Barbican plays its part in these shifts of habit and perception.
