KEY POINTS:
"Power couple." What a vile term. It sounds like people who synchronise their BlackBerries for QT and josh about how important it is to make the right friends; only they aren't really joshing.
Power couples probably have upwardly mobile dinner parties, putting on the nosebag with useful
bores rather than, like the rest of us, slumming with raffish chums who won't be scandalised if you fall asleep in your soup or like to do high kicks after a few Negronis.
I imagine the sizzlingest power couples are like aerobics instructor-turned-newsreader Suzy Clarkson (nee Aiken) and her investment banker husband, Tim.
She publicly volunteers the information - why? - that they enter their month-old baby's sleep patterns and bowel movements in an Excel spreadsheet. A colour-coded Excel spreadsheet. Freaks.
See? I can't help being snarky about them. And call it the Hillary effect, but I have noticed whenever there is a super-achieving twosome, it is the female half of the team who tends to attract extra opprobrium.
Venture capitalist Jenny Morel and Reserve Bank governor Alan Bollard for example (have any of Morel's investments actually been that successful? ask the critics). Or Microsoft COO Chris Liddell and university fundraiser Bridget Wickham (the Knowledge Wave was a flop).
Then there is Chief Justice Sian Elias and former Fletcher Challenge head Hugh Fletcher (he is an absent-minded professor but she is derailing the legal system). Former TVNZ head of news Bill Ralston got his share of criticism but his journalist wife was referred to as Janet "Rodham" Wilson within the broadcaster. 'Nuff said.
The most controversial power couple in corporate New Zealand, former Sky City CEO Evan Davies and former Sky City general manager of operations Heather Shotter, are a couple no longer.
But even when there was disquiet about the pair's domination of the listed company, Davies was still portrayed as the executive of the year and Shotter the nepotistic upstart. Legendary entrepreneur Bill Foreman is a good egg while his wife, Diane, frequently gets to be a schemeing Hitchcock blonde.
I remember uber-agent Andy Haden once saying to me that he advised famous client couples not to do publicity together as each half became doubly vulnerable; suffering not only for the rises and falls in their own fortunes but for the vagaries of their partner's success or failure as well.
He might have added, especially if they are female.
In our creepily small village of Newzild, being half of a doubly successful twosome seems to make women doubly reviled at the parish pump.
Perhaps in the still shamefully cliquey local establishment, having a powerful other half is seen as the ultimate "who-you-know" advantage.
Of course this is not a solely New Zealand attitude. Who was most loathed: disgraced media mogul Conrad Black (a clever-clogs bon vivant who was a bit vague with accounting treatments) or his wife, Barbara Amiel, who once joked "my extravagance knows no bounds" in an interview with a fashion magazine? You know the answer. And Rupert Murdoch may be the dirty digger to hacks worldwide but his Mensa-bright wife, Wendi Deng, gets referred to as a geisha.
Still, like anything, there are always exceptions. In this country's most muscular power couple it is the male half of the duo, Peter Davis, not his wife, Prime Minister Helen Clark, who is the figure of ridicule.
Which maybe goes to show it is not about gender after all, but as always, about who has the most power.
