A Hearty Inflation Rate in the Cost-of-Loving Index

Love hurts, love scars

Love wounds and mars . . .

Every time I hear that opening doleful line to the 1975 Nazareth classic “Love Hurts”--practically wailed by a lead singer who must have needed extensive therapy after the recording session--I bellow my own plaintive cry.

After all, who among us has escaped the wounds and scars? Who among us doesn’t know just how awful the other person can be when it comes to taking care of our own perfectly reasonable emotional needs?

Two current cases have brought love--or, more precisely, love gone wrong--back in the news.

The trial of “Mr. Wonderful” will resume next week in an Orange County courtroom. In that one, Matt Edward Mathews, so nicknamed by former girlfriends, will open his defense against charges that he used his seductive powers to bilk women out of thousands of dollars.

Court records indicate that Mathews, who is charged with grand theft, wowed women with attentiveness and pledges of love.

Meanwhile, in a lawsuit filed this week, an Orange County man is suing a woman for failing to follow through on her promise to marry him. He says he gave her $120,000 in exchange for the promise, and, darn it, he wants his money back. With interest.

He accuses her of despicable behavior, deception, fraud and conspiracy.

I think someone needs to inform the fellow that no marriage is perfect.

That case reminds me of another one that passed through Orange County courts a few years ago. A man sued his ex-wife for fraud, claiming that during their 11-year marriage she was never physically attracted to him--a claim she didn’t dispute. The jury awarded the poor guy $240,000. An appeals court later overturned it, however.

Don’t think for one second I am speaking about love out of personal misfortune. True, I am a one-time loser in the marital arts, but I emerged a sadder but wiser man. OK, just sadder, but who cares about my problems?

I ask family practice attorney Catherine Lawler about the pain love brings. “You mean,” she says, “like the client who went out for the night and when she came back, her husband had moved out and forgotten to tell her?”

Yeah, I say, stuff like that.

“It makes them a little angry,” Lawler says with nice comic understatement. “But the same woman a year later is sitting in court getting a divorce and sees another crying and says to her, ‘In another six months you’re going to feel like me--great.’ It takes time.”

Lawler, who practices in Orange, says, “What I see is that sometimes you’re in court battling not legal issues but emotional issues. People want the court to make the other spouse do certain things or act a certain way. The court can’t do that.”

Still, the current cases hardly compare to the granddaddy of all Orange County love disputes. In that one, a local jury in 1994 awarded Claire Maglica $84 million following the end of her 20-year relationship with companion Anthony Maglica, the founder of the multimillion-dollar business that makes Mag-Lite flashlights.

The couple never married, but Claire Maglica says everyone in social circles saw them as husband and wife and that Anthony Maglica had made promises to her about their lives together. Anthony Maglica’s attorneys brushed that off as “pillow talk.”

An appeals court overturned the original judgment last year, and the case may go to trial again.

Eighty-four million dollars.

That’s when love really hurts.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to [email protected].