I read details of the world’s biggest divorce with a mixture of agony and awe, and then I read it again. Natalia Potanina has refused husband Vladimir’s £32m offer, insisting that Russia’s richest man (who, after a 30-year marriage is leaving her and their children for his pregnant employee) should give her half of his £10bn fortune.
If only all heartbreak could be quantified. Lots of my good friends have recently become single and they are dealing with it in various ways: they’re running, they’re writing, they’re falling in love with their piano teachers.
Some of them can list, easily, the costs of their break-ups. Scatter cushions, £25 each, that was the first one. Cushions that her ex plucked from the sofa to cushion his crockery in the cardboard boxes he moved out in. Paint – £14.99. To repaint the walls where his pictures had left ghostly lines. He took his computer, of course, but on it was their shared music collection, so she was left with silence, and also their photos – a record of the last time she was young and gorgeous. He asked her to buy their TV off him and she did it, to avoid her cushionless sofa having nothing to face. Time, though (she sighed as if she was 80 rather than 34 and hadn’t just had a successful one-night stand with a part-time model), is the big cost.
There are major expenses, the overdrafts of a break-up – the friend who can no longer spend time with his ex’s daughter, the confused cat – and there are the little write-offs, the jumper you left behind. The bra.
£600. That was what one friend’s recent break-up cost. She’s including the price of the trains she now takes to work, because on her bike she can’t listen to music and needs it to block out her thoughts. Eating out, she’s including, because cooking for one is too imbued with tragedy. Another friend added up the costs of narcotising his heartbreak. More expensive, though, is the realisation that a song or film the two of them shared can never be revisited, at least not with the naive passion of before, but then that naivety is something gone too – £750. No, £800.
All your favourite places – the pick-your-own strawberry farm, the pub by the bridge – are stained and need rebuying. One friend, who has slipped quite easily into a new relationship in that eerie way he does (“Don’t call me a relationship guru, Eva. Don’t call me a guru”) says that the expenses keep coming. You think you’ve settled up, he says, until you realise you’re paying for your girlfriend’s previous heartbreak. What’s the promise that you are not going to cheat worth?
As George Michael might have muttered, cashing Potanin’s £1.5m cheque for singing at his New Year party, everything has a price. Natalia Potanina talked to Russian Tatler about her life with Vladimir, sharing photos of the two in 1977, when they were in a Soviet potato-digging brigade. “This person was for me like a rock,” she said, “the back of the armchair that I was sitting on.” She is furious about the lack of respect she believes he’s shown to her. “Somehow this appears as a dimensionless feeling of permissiveness, as if you can customise the law and the justice for yourself. It should not be so.” If only all our break-ups could be translated from Russian.
An hour listening to them talk about the meaning of Lost: £35. The day they got sunstroke: £160. When a bird flew into the flat, and nobody knew what to do, and you both shut yourself in the loo until it sounded like it had escaped: £80. Let’s be fair. All things considered, £5bn sounds reasonable – £5bn for everyone who has been damaged by love, humiliated by infidelity, felt quite faint with heartache and had to hold on to a building on the way to lunch. I implore you, though, from a pit lined with friends’ broken relationships, do keep your receipts.
