Anyway, court papers, filed by super lawyer Raoul Felder on behalf of Joumana, have so many nuggets, we hope this fight drags on for like ever.

- Kidd once beat Joumana with a purse.

- Kidd once hurled a large cookie like a “Frisbee” at her, cutting her lip, then tried to blame the kids.

- Kidd attacked her with “feet and fists, a rock, baseball bat and candlestick -- even when she was pregnant.”

What we like best is Joumana’s poetic description of Kidd as a man with an “excessive need for attention and chaos.”

Wait a second; that sounds like us!

• Researchers say that, like wild animals, we want our mates fertile, bursting with egglets and baby seed.

• We determine fertility by symmetry. We search for faces with the best-matched ears, eyes, and cheekbones.

• We also check out the prospect’s ratio of waist flab to hip fat. An ideal ratio for women is .7 — a 29-inch waist over 41-inch hips, for example. For men, the ideal is .92 — 34 inches over 37 inches would do it.

• Both sexes demand fidelity. Men hate women who cheat because they make it hard to establish paternity. Women hate cheating men because they spend money outside the home.

• We demand a mate who agrees with our self-image. If we think ourselves ugly and stupid, we want our mate to say, Come to think of it, you ARE ugly and stupid.

Given these variables, how long does it take us, on average, to fall crazy in love with the wrong person? Studies tell us that we court an average of a year and half before marrying. “Our brains want three people,” says Helen Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce. “We can lust after one person, be infatuated with a second person—which doesn’t have to include sex—and desire a calm attachment to a third.”

But a mathematical cloud hovers over all matches. If we divide the number of people we date by the earth’s 6 ½ billion population, it quickly becomes clear that the odds of three billion people finding their best match among three billion others—finding The One—is insurmountable. A heterosexual American female, say, narrowing her search for the “perfect match” to her age group—about a third of the population—searching only guys living in the United States, has a pool of 42 million bachelors to choose from. If she dates a different guy every day, it would take her 115,068 years to sample them all. If she were to go out only twice a week over a ten-year period--a furious pace that would translate into a thousand different men—her odds of meeting the best guy would still be one out of 42,000!

So, we always settle. Statistically speaking, we all marry the girl next door.  But, according to Catherine Surra, a University of Texas researcher, we already know that. She found that 38 percent of seriously-dating people continue shopping for spouses. Gee, guess that’s why so many couplings don’t pan out. Depending on the study, the divorce rate hovers between 50 and 60 percent. And no wonder. Studies of adultery among both sexes range from 15 to 70 percent, indicating one thing for sure: people lie; to their spouses, to researchers, and, (especially those fond of the term “soul mate”) to themselves.

Somehow, writer Sam Roberts doesn’t mention this once. By these criteria, according to the Census Bureau, 66% of all “women” in New York State are now living without a spouse.

In how many states, by the way, is it legal to wed at age 15?

Women dig Darcy. They are stuck on him because he is rich, handsome, shy. The shyness covers, Austen makes clear, destructive pride. He disdains Elizabeth because a) he is not at first attracted to her and b) she is lower class—though in Austen’s world the lower classes live in huge houses, with gardens and lawns and don’t work and spend their free time either hiding in the den or attending balls or playing cards.

Nevertheless, Darcy’s shyness, his hurt puppydog shtick (though he apparently has none of the usual reasons for turning into a hurt puppy dog—a history of abuse, a fiancé who jilted him, and incurable disease, a crazy mom) serves him well. All the girls, excepting the perspicacious Elizabeth, want to mother him.

But to me he is so boring. And uptight. And, in contrast to Elizabeth Bennett (whom I love nearly as must as I love Sandra Oh), he has no sense of humor. Isn’t a Sense of Humor the sine non qua of all women-searching-for-men Craigslist listings? Instead of cracking jokes, he festers and broods and writes long creepy letters and is eaten up inside by his long-running beef with Wickham.

Wickham is another problem. Yeah, he lies, he womanizes, he cheats and gambles—an all-around ne’re-do-well—and he betrays Darcy. But he’s got reasons. His dad worked for Darcy’s dad; he and Darcy were boyhood chums. But from the start it was clear to him that he was never Darcy’s equal. Unlike Darcy, he’d have to work for a living because he was born lower than Darcy. Worse, Darcy’s family pushed him into the clergy, a profession Austen trashes through the character of Mr. Collins. Call me a Marxist, but this situation strikes me as unfair.
Speaking of class, having servants gush to Elizabeth their love for Darcy gives me a serious case of the creeps. As if they who spend their time cleaning and polishing and showing the obsequiousness that befits their stations would truly admire their master. Yeah, right.
It’s okay to write fantasy, but I get the feeling Austen was inventing the perfect husband she lacked.
Not that I fault Elizabeth for marrying a handsome, rich, humorless, useless fop. Given her situation—aching as we all are for love, facing dispossession by the unctuous Mr. Collins—who wouldn’t do the same? I fault her for loving him. Real love is more complex. One doesn’t fall for the guy who saves your life (see the end Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights), one falls for the bad boy, the guy with thee hint of danger.
Another big problem: Darcy’s Brithishness, every American (and, I increasingly discover, Asian) girl’s wet dream. The pinched smile that hides—as I found during some extensive hitchhiking through England in 1977—a population that thinks incessantly, perversely, hungrily about sex. The most disgusting modern example of this human illusion is Pierce Brosnan who, with a boyish face, rose all the way from a second-rate TV gig (Remington Steel) to a James Bond impersonation that was embarrassing (made more so by the silly whiskers he grew) and got more than a few young (and, I assume, retarded) girls to fall for him—one even told me, and I’m not making this up, that Brosnan is preferable in the role to Sean Connery.
I like Connery because a) he’s aged well and b) managed, despite being required to bed numerous women, to show genuine fear on screen, and to shine in other films.
Darcy hasn’t aged well and he shows no fear. But the thing I really hate about Darcy is that he’s the anti-Jew—uptight, disdainful, devoid of onions or lox or money-grubbing self-depredation. Not a hint of ethnic self-hatred. He is ashamed for pre-judging perfect Elizabeth at the beginning of the story, but to the delight of every woman who has deigned to forgive an oafish husband, who has fantasized about a Darcy with the same fever as an eight-year-old fantasizes about Barbie, he spends the rest of the novel—hundreds of pages—patiently, silently, steadfastly trying to make up for his initial priggishness, going so far as to pay off arch-enemy Wickham’s debts.
Which brings me, unexpectedly, to Jackie Mason, who once quipped that the closest thing to a Japanese wife is a Jewish husband; a whipped, demasculated, guilt-ridden, knows-his-place obsequiant, who, in real-life time, makes Darcy look like the epitome of hedonism. Real Jewish men eat quiche.
Ergo, Darcy is the anti-Jew, a de-ethnicized hero (and we know how those 18th and 19th century British writers loved to mock the Jews) and Pride and Prejudice is, implicitly, an anti-semitic novel.
And Darcy, the progenitor of Tyrone Power, Montgomery Clift, Hugh Grant, Clive Owen, Laurence Olivier etc. is as vapid as Wonder Bread with mayonnaise.