As we start a new year, I want to issue a plea. Please can we stop blaming women for the way their husbands decide to treat their own family? I expect there was a lot of this over the festive period – relatives casting side-eyes across the table at a woman who married into their clan, who they blame for darling Max never picking up the phone to his mum, neglecting to send birthday cards or any number of offences.
If only he hadn’t married that woman. It’s all so predictable: the narrative of the ‘toxic wife’. The manipulative, selfish woman who is determined to cut her defenceless husband off from his relatives. Please. I’ve heard it one too many times: the tale of evil females preventing their in-laws from spending time with the grandchildren or putting the kibosh on regular Sunday lunches. As if these adult men have no influence over what they do.
Look, families can be a nightmare. In-laws can be a nightmare. But the image of the domineering wife who has her husband under a spell is straight out of the misogyny handbook – the one that has us pegged as either trad wives or scheming bitches (just ask Meghan).
All of which is to say that I feel sorry for Nicola Peltz, wife of eldest Beckham son Brooklyn. The reason Brooklyn is reportedly estranged from his parents, it seems to have been universally agreed, is down to his wife. She is why the couple didn’t attend David’s 50th birthday celebrations. She is why they had a second wedding in August, with not a single Beckham present. She is the sole instigator behind their lack of congratulations over David’s knighthood. And it must have been Nicola who snatched Brooklyn’s phone out of his hand and pressed ‘block’ on his parents and brothers on Instagram before Christmas. The poor darling would never have thought to do so himself.
Peltz is seen as the cuckoo in the nest when it comes to the previously perfect tight-knit Beckham clan, who we really know nothing about other than what they’ve projected publicly over the years. Maybe she is a giant pain, maybe not. Whatever the truth, it’s very convenient to have a young woman to point the finger at when the eldest son doesn’t want to play ball any longer.
A similar narrative has unfolded around Olympian Adam Peaty and his new wife Holly Ramsay (daughter of chef Gordon, close friend of the Beckhams). Peaty’s mother and brother did not attend the wedding at Bath Abbey at the end of December, with headlines claiming they were ‘brutally banned’ following a feud that erupted when Holly did not invite her future mother-in-law to her hen party – prompting an aunt to brand her ‘divisive and hurtful’.
Family estrangement is complicated and painful. The toxic wife trope isn’t just reductive – when we paint these women as vipers, we tread a dangerous path. It lets men off the hook. It gives them a scapegoat, even as they profess undying love for their spouse. It normalises hatred against women. Enough.
