Why Ulrika can't find love

WHEN I interviewed Ulrika Jonsson for a TV programme a couple of years ago, I warmed to her, not because she is both beautiful and sexy, but because she is so manifestly a well-intentioned, decent person. Yet, despite this, her muchchronicled love life has been erratic and often painful. Why should it be any different with Sven? It partly depends on whether she has really gained enough insight into herself to avoid repeating cycles from her childhood past. But it also requires that she has understood how modern life inflates and distorts the expectations of insecure young women like her.

A young woman today is some three to 10 times more likely to be depressed than her equivalent in 1950. Jonsson, 34, neatly illustrated some of the reasons why. Raised in Sweden, her parents separated when she was five and divorced when she was eight. Her mother moved to Britain and for four years she was raised by a philandering father who was "ridiculously absent, forgetful and thick- skinned", although also "adorable".

In choosing lovers, we are usually attracted to aspects of our oppositesexed parent, whether divorced or not.

Famously punched in a Paris bar by her then lover, Stan Collymore, Ulrika has fallen for a number of rotters like her father. However, there are many signs that she also identified with him and his philandering tendencies.

She incorrectly attributes this similarity to shared genes. In fact, she was probably copying the way he behaved.

After "a slow start" to her sex life, during the 1990s she acquired a taste for young muscle-bound men, driven by the lust that no doubt powered her father's conquests.

In her only marriage, like her father she was the Bolter rather than the Boltee. She married young to "a very stable man", she told me, "someone who was terribly secure, no threat, who provided a constant. But the lack of constancy within me and the lack of security about myself became a problem".

The solution was an affair with a TV cameraman and divorce.

But it would be mistaken to attribute all Ulrika's difficulties to her shaky childhood. At least as important is the social environment of the 21st century.

Few would advocate a return to the gender inequalities and hang- ups of the 1950s. But it must be admitted that in that era, a vulnerable, insecure woman like Ulrika would have been less at risk of the turbulence and unhappiness which has marked her love life. The moral certainties and structures of society would have provided some protection.

Ulrika made implicit recognition of this when she told me that: "I still have a desire to achieve this monogamous, settling-down, establishing-roots thing, because I need to have stability".

In all sorts of ways, the new freedoms of young women have greatly increased their chances of fulfilling themselves at work and play. But a significant proportion had childhoods that make them flaky and flighty.

In Ulrika's case, she told me that, "as a child I didn't have any experience of boundaries at all, of what was really right or what was wrong".

Male patterns of smoking, drinking, drug use and high-risk promiscuity are surely not what women's libbers burned their bras to achieve. The trouble is that the expectations of Cosmo Woman have been inflated beyond what reality can provide.

LIKE Bridget Jones, they have been led to aspire to and expect, as of right, an exciting, fulfilling job with prospects. They are encouraged to dream jetset holidays, complete with mini-break proposals of marriage from a loving, caring, sharing boyfriend who somehow also manages to be a dominant-in-bed hunk.

Small wonder that so many are depressed, because on top of all this, when they bang their head against reality they are liable to blame themselves for not achieving the unattainable, feeling that, "I'm fat, I'm stupid, I'm nasty", when they are not.

For her relationship with Sven Goran Eriksson to succeed, she will need to become more stable through selfknowledge. But she must also grasp how unrealistic her ideas of love are.

Where the relationship with Eriksson differs from past ones is the 20-year age gap, a break with the youthfulness of past consorts. Perhaps she has ceased identifying with her lust-driven father and, in choosing someone old enough to be him, will find the stability that has so far eluded her.

Oliver James is the author of Britain on the Couch - Why we're unhappier compared with 1950 despite being richer, (Arrow, pounds 6.99).

Copyright 2002
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