What Killed the Gates Marriage?

I haven’t had anything to say about the Gates divorce, because, frankly, I do not care. Or, at least, I did not care until I ran across a Daily Mail article by one Jenni Murray. As Lizzie Crocker once opined: "What would we do without the Daily Mail?"

It is fair to say that the media is spinning a narrative about the Gates divorce. For the most part it is what you would expect. Bill Gates is being tarred for have a mistress or two. And besides, he knew Jeffrey Epstein and even flew on his private plane. When Bill Clinton spent time hanging out with Epstein, it was a non-story.

Now, the innuendo is that Bill Gates, tech oligarch, one of the richest men in the world, one of America’s leading straight white males is being blamed for the breakup of his marriage. According to the rumor driven stories, the Gates children are all siding with their mother.

Whoopee.

It was predictable. The fault for the failed Gates marriage lies with white patriarchal privilege. It was predictable, and not very compelling,

For that reason I was interested in Jenni Murray’s column. She recalls a conversation she had with Melinda Gates two years ago when MG published something that was fairly obviously a feminist tract, called: The Moment Of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes The World.

As you might guess, I have not read the book. It sounds like something that came straight out of a college women’s studies course-- filled with trite banalities, pabulum and mindless bromides. The concept of "life" was obviously an attempt to pretend to be really, smart. It did not work. No one paid any attention to her pretense. Surely, we were not in the presence of a great thinker.

Anyway, Murray recalls a remark that MG made in their conversation, one that told her that the Gates marriage was doomed. 

The first thing this chatty, articulate, immensely likeable woman blurted out was that she was a passionate, ardent feminist, but that was something she would not have said a few years ago.

What does this mean if not that feminism killed the Gates marriage. It has been an increasingly common story. If American marriage is broken, perhaps irretrievably, perhaps it is time to reckon with the fact that feminism has played a major role in producing this outcome.

Forget the passionate, ardent nonsense. Melinda Gates has become a zealot, a fanatic, someone who was happy to sacrifice her marriage to the goddesses of feminism.

When the couple married in 1994 Bill Gates was still running Microsoft. He did not give up the role until 2000, slightly after their second child was born.

But, Melinda thought of herself as her husband’s equal. The point tells us that she had always been working to impose her daffy feminist beliefs on the marriage.

And yet, in what world would the two have been equals? Did they bring equal accomplishments, equal achievements, equal intelligence, equal wealth, equal anything to the marriage. Like it or not Bill Gates is a giant in the world of high tech. Melinda Gates married a rich guy. Bill Gates earned what he has. Melinda Gates married it. 

I will note in passing that the Gates marriage bears an uncanny resemblance to the Clinton marriage. In truth, whatever dubious achievements dot Hillary’s resume, her greatest achievement was to contract an arranged marriage with Bill Clinton. If it were not for her marriage, she would still be trying to pass the DC bar. And yes, I know that Barack Obama called her the most qualified candidate for the presidency in American history-- it should be obvious to everyone that he was joking.

So, a no-account Melinda French believed that she was Bill Gates’s equal. She tried to remake him to conform to feminist ideology, the better to make her marriage look like what feminism prescribed-- a partnership of equals. Sadly enough, Bill seems to have gone along.

When it came to bringing up children, Melinda was unhappy that her husband was not spending more time on childcare. As though the CEO of Microsoft had nothing better to do with his time. We note that Melinda, who had been fully indoctrinated by feminism, had no awareness of who her husband was and what his life was like.

She described her husband as a strong personality, a ‘hard charging CEO’ and she had a ‘long climb to an equal relationship’.

When their first child was born, she had felt very lonely in the marriage. 

Bill was ‘beyond busy’ and she began to wonder if he wanted to have children in theory, but not in reality. She believed they were barely on the same page about what they wanted and they had little time to discuss it.

She felt it was important for women to be transparent about how hard it can be to become equal partners in society, the workplace and in our homes.

She thinks that the couple did not discuss their priorities. But, of course, they had; Melinda forgot about it. She had agreed to work less and to spend more time taking care of her child, but then the call of her powerfully demanding career drew her away from caring for children. We will note that she was a relative nobody at Microsoft, but then became co-head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was consolidated at around the time that the couple had their second child.

In order to placate the feminist longings of Melinda Gates, the foundation included her name in its title and gave her an office that was precisely the same size as that of her husband. Dare I say that she had very high and very bloated self-esteem. As happens throughout the world of woke ideology the notion of actually earning something seems to have escaped her. She has excelled at giving away money that someone else earned-- point which makes her a natural-born Democrat.

Given her august position she now feels competent to comment on the coronavirus pandemic and other such matters as a television talking head. Thereby, she shows a complete absence of humility.

Anyway, the problem was not communication as much as it was her disinterest in being a full-time mother. Murray explains:

She had agreed, when their eldest child was born, to ease back from her work outside the home and care for her, but then realised she loved and missed her job.

‘It took us time to work things out’, she wrote in her book. ‘I faced a life-forming question in those early years. Did I want a career or to be a stay-at-home Mom? My answer was first career, then stay-at-home Mom, then a mix of the two, then back to career.’

So, Melinda decided to make demands on her husband, to reduce him to a notably compliant house husband. She made him drive the children to school. Apparently, they could not afford to hire a driver to perform this task.

No one, not Murray, not Melinda, not Bill Gates himself seems to have seen that this would be humiliating for the world’s richest man. Worse yet, other women in their neighborhood took the opportunity to harass their husbands about driving children to school.

Bill complied with her demand that he should share the responsibility of driving the children to school and appears to have started quite a trend in the locality. Other women had said to their husbands, ‘If Bill Gates is driving his kids to school, why can’t you?’ Good point!

Good point or not so good point. She might have won the battle, but she lost her marriage. How many other marriages follow the same dynamic? How many divorces has this absurd notion cost America?

Speaking of humiliation, Melinda spoke proudly of the fact that she had managed to turn her son, now a college graduate, into a feminist. Good parents to not embarrass their children publicly-- but that is what Melinda did to her son.

The Sun reported:

Marking his 18th birthday in 2017, Melinda wrote on Instagram: “When my son Rory was born, I spent a lot of time imagining what this little person would be like and who he would be as he grew up.

"Now, as we near his 18th birthday, I have my answer. Rory is compassionate and curious.

"He’s a great son and a caring brother. He’s inherited his parents’ obsessive love of puzzles.

"And one of the things that makes me proudest: Rory is a feminist.

This gives her motherly pride. She has turned her son into an ideological fanatic and a zealot, a young man who is ready to fight the capitalist patriarchy and to overthrow the world of white privilege. Hopefully, he will outgrow his adolescent zealotry.

It all sounds pathetic. It shows that Jenni Murray is correct-- feminism broke the Gates marriage. Making a human institution fulfill the terms of an ideology is a formula for failure.

We wish Bill Gates the best.