The Dude: Roman Abramovich


In 1990, Russian businessman Roman Abramovich met, fell in love with, and married a beautiful flight attendant (I’m sensing a theme here…) named Irina. By 2007, Abramovich was one of the richest men in the world and hopelessly in love with a 25 year-old socialite named Daria Zhukova, so in love that he filed for divorce from wife Irina even though there was a chance that it would cost him as much as seven billion dollars. Yes, I said billion, with a b. In the end, somehow he managed to whittle his divorce settlement down to “only” $300 million. I mean, I suppose that’s just a drop in the bucket to Abramovich, but I don’t care how much money you have, $300 million is a ridiculous amount of money to spend just because you have a hard-on for a twenty-five year old. Then again, that would be like you or me dropping a couple of grand on a divorce, and *looks at picture* fair enough, Roman. Fair enough. I would say more but Abramovich is a Russian billionaire who literally has his own private army so, uh, if I disappear any time soon, call James Bond.

The Dude: Rupert Murdoch


In 1967, Rupert Murdoch married one of his newspaper’s journalists, an Estonian named Anna Torv. (No, not the Fringe actress, although they are related – the elder Torv is her aunt, which hardly makes it surprising that she eventually landed the lead on a TV show on a network owned by Uncle Rupert.) After 31 years of marriage together, the two split up in 1998 after – wait for it – it was discovered that Murdoch was having an affair with an executive at Star TV, whatever the hell that is, named Wendi Deng. Thanks to his wandering penis, Murdoch was forced to shell out a package totaling about $1.8 billion in cash and assets. Well that’s what he gets for coming down with [redacted on the advice of Guyism attorneys for being both incredibly tasteless and vaguely racist]. The good news is that he’s still rich and a Monty Burns like avatar for greed and villainy, which is every young boy’s dream. The bad news is that now my phone probably just got hacked.

The Dude: King Edward VIII of England


In 1934, Edward, then the Prince of Wales, began an affair with a married American named Wallis Simpson. After ascending to the throne as King Edward VIII a couple of years later, she divorced her husband – who was already husband number two for her – and Edward proposed to her. Of course, the idea of a twice-divorced American peasant as their new queen didn’t sit too well with the English people and so in 1936, Edward was forced to pick between either his throne or the woman he loved. He picked the woman. Now, romantic as that may be to some people, the dude still gave up being a friggin’ king just because he had to get all up in a forty year old who, uh, well she wasn’t exactly drop dead gorgeous, let’s put it that way. I know that’s entirely superficial of me to say but, well, we’ve come this far and the Misogyny Train left the station somewhere around sentence two of this article so why stop now? Also, look, she’s shaking hands with Hitler in that picture so I don’t really feel that bad, you know? You would think this would be higher on the list because, again, the dude was forced to give up being king for this chick, but hey, at least no one died. Speaking of which…

The Dude: Paris, Prince of Troy


Sure, Cleopatra may have played a part in the Roman Civil War and helped cause the death of her man, Marc Antony, but Helen of Troy caused an entire city to be destroyed. Because she abandoned her husband, Menelaus, King of Sparta (and if there’s one thing movies have taught us in recent years, it’s that you don’t fuck with Sparta) and ran off with Paris, the whole Mediterranean world went crazy, a thousand Greek ships set sail, a legion of mythological heroes ended up getting killed, Troy was conquered and destroyed and poor Odysseus ended up lost at sea for years. Now that’s a costly love affair. But at least it gave Homer something to write about and basically gave birth to Western literature. I mean, there is that. But don’t tell that to Achilles or Hector or Ajax or any of the other dudes who died because of her. Poor Hector had his corpse dragged by a horse. Nobody needs that.