Imagine phoning your mother to tell her that, despite her best wishes for your future happiness, you are going to marry the man known as the Toxic Bachelor. A man who before he met you was fast gaining a reputation as one of New York's biggest cads. Ideally, cads should be learning experiences rather than serious life-partners, but Ilene Rosenzweig must have had to make several similarly shamefaced phone calls to friends and family when she decided to marry Rick Marin, who recently published his memoir, Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor (Ebury Press).
Billed as the 'view from the other side of the bed', Marin's book is a testosterone-charged alternative to Sex and the City and Bridget Jones's Diary. After a messy divorce in 1991, Marin devoted himself to dating and the carnal pursuit of as many women as possible until his answering machine sounded like a sonic art installation of unreturned calls. 'I haven't heard from you.' 'You were supposed to...' 'Is this still your number?'
The women who did merit a phone call got a rough ride, and, true to the title of the book, some downright caddish treatment. In one particularly revealing story, Marin is dating a kooky restaurant owner by the name of Tiina. She does what she can to fan the dimming flames of his passion, including dropping to her knees in the restaurant bathroom to administer an excruciatingly staged blow-job, but still he embarrasses her about her literary knowledge in front of friends before finally breaking up with her on the phone.
Marin quickly realises that the story of his divorce is fabulous dating material and develops a routine around it, taking off his horn-rimmed glasses and studying them, muttering 'I don't really like to talk about it, but..'.
It works like a charm. Until he meets Ilene Rosenzweig, an editor on style and celebrity magazine Allure. The turning point in the book comes as he describes their first encounter: 'The first time I met Ilene, she ignored me, registered such profound indifference to my presence that I backed away speechless into the party throng. I'm not even sure she spoke, just threw me a nod. Who was this chick?'
What sets Rosenzweig, 38, apart from the other women in the book is the way in which her life seemed to be thriving with or without a serious boyfriend. She is co-author of Swell: the Girl's Guide to the Great Life, a book that has spawned a very successful mini-empire, including a line of homeware.
Not only is she something of an authority on having fun and being fabulous, she's also extremely well able to take care of herself. On the phone from New York, she says she was in the middle of a dating 'dry spell' when she met Marin, but makes it very clear that this was by choice. She'd become a happy member of the New York singles scene when she came out of a relationship three years earlier, before taking a break from dating.
'I just wasn't up for it any more,' she says of the period in which she makes her debut in the book. 'Though I'd been having a lot of fun going out platonically.' Some friends actively suggested that Marin would be her perfect match, while others 'raised their eyebrows about him in a way I didn't understand', she says. 'Because I didn't see this more devilish side of him.'
The devilish side made itself clear soon enough, but Rosenzweig was intelligent enough to see beyond it in a way that other women didn't, and was so comfortable in her single status that it didn't bother her. When confronted with Marin and an extremely attractive woman at a party she pronounced his ploy to make her jealous 'transparent', while admitting that she was flattered.
She's the first to admit, and it's certainly something that sneaks up on you while reading the memoir, that, despite the hype, Marin isn't really much of a cad. He might mean to be, and he certainly seems to find it an attractive persona, but in many ways there's little to separate the 'toxic bachelor' from plenty of other thirty-something single men. Under-the -table restaurant encounters aside, there can be few bachelors, toxic or not, who haven't failed to return the phone calls of people they've slept with, or done everything they could to get out of post-coital brunch, because there's just nothing left to say. As Ilene points out: 'Cad is a fun and retro name, but to me what you're really defining is the average guy.' It might be the most emasculating blow she can strike to a self-declared cad, to say: 'Guys are cads in their heads a lot more than they are in their behaviour.'
It's no wonder that she is referred to as the 'Cadette' in the book's dedication. When the cad-cadette behaviour finally ended and Marin and Rosenzweig settled down to a serious relationship (and the two do seem to have fallen deeply in love, speaking of each other with genuine affection), Marin proposed on their five-year anniversary on Sunset Beach. Ilene recalls with horror how he presented her with his great-grandmother's engagement ring, which she decided to wear on her little finger. 'I do have commitment phobia,' she says. 'And I was being a jerk, so I'm like, "I'm going to wear this as a pinkie ring, this is going to be my style statement". So we're dancing around, having fun on the beach, and he's suddenly like, "You're still wearing the ring, right?" And I look down and it's gone.' The cadette had lost the family heirloom in the sand. They searched for the ring for 12 hours on the beach.
'The thing that was very princely about him,' says Ilene, 'was that he didn't yell at me once. If it had been the other way around, I don't know if I could say the same about myself.' Adding, with a delightful Freudian slip, 'He's a better man than I'.
It sounds like they'll make the perfect couple.
