affairs

In which I ponder….Lemonade

/ howtobemeagain / Leave a comment

 

So…it’s finally properly and completely over.

Although we’ve been separated over 5 years and divorced for almost exactly 1 year, I have only just today received our court stamped financial settlement.

I’m neither happy nor sad about it really. It’s good to know that I will no longer be lining the pockets of lawyers, and that I at last know what the future is likely to look like financially. I’m never going to be rich but I’m not going to be poor either, and that’s fine. I won’t have the sort of life I would have had if I had remained in the marriage, but for every material thing I’ll no longer have, I’ll have a ton of happiness to which I previously would not have had access.

There was no fighting about the settlement – I took what I was offered, and I didn’t ask for more. But I was careful to seek legal advice throughout the process so my decisions – although often against the advice of my lawyers – were well informed. The most important thing for me was to maintain my integrity and find a path through what was equitable and fair, and what was enough. In the end I went for enough, because what I was offered was enough. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life feeling that I was lucky that my ex husband was so successful. I want to spend the rest of my life knowing that I’ve worked hard and that with hard work comes rewards.

It would have been easy in some respects to fight – and certainly that was what my lawyers were hoping for, since it would have lined their pockets. But if you should ever find yourself in a similar position, make sure you consider whether the psychological and emotional toll of the process would be worth the potential financial gains. I was constantly aware of the incongruency of feeling envious about the fact that my ex appears to live in such comparative splendor given that I have spent my entire career working to improve the lives of the disadvantaged. Why should I be entitled to anything better than the actually very nice life I already have?

But envy is an insidious thing. It creeps up on you as you scroll through your social media feeds, watching your friends living the life you expected to have post childrearing – exotic travel, holiday property purchases, renovations, rediscovering romance with your loved one. It mixes up with anger and takes you back to a place you thought you had left. Then I realized that my envy was really just a disguise for the grief I was experiencing for the life I had lost, both present and future, that I thought was going to be mine and ended up being one of the casualties of divorce. And I was reminded, again, that nothing is guaranteed, nothing can be promised, and that you have to make your own luck.

Even without fighting though, I found the process draining and demeaning. In addition to my inner turmoil about the above, the system seems to consider that the material assets built up over the course of a 21 year relationship belong to your husband, who may, out of the goodness of his heart, decide to give you some. Then you are supposed to be grateful and consider yourself lucky.

I refuse to be grateful.

I am grateful for my beautiful children, and I am grateful that I have the means to support myself going forwards – but everything I have taken from my marriage is part of what I helped to build up and as such I have taken my share. I am not lucky that my ex husband is successful – we (he and I) are lucky that over the course of our relationship we jointly built up a life and careers from which we will both continue to benefit.

Now I can start the work of really planning how I will protect my financial interest going forwards – something that I should have been doing all along.

I already know that leaving my husband is the best thing I ever did for myself. I’ve never regretted it, although I’ve found it hard to process. But I will no longer torture myself over what was done, or not done, or could have been done. I will not wish for the life I would have had, or mourn the one I’d left. I will race forwards in life, reaching out for all the opportunities I would have missed, all the adventures I would not have had, all the lovers I would not have kissed.

And should I ever find myself in a similar position again – God forbid – I will simply channel Beyoncé…

“This is your final warning…

  You know I give you life

  If you try this shit again

  Gonna lose your wife”

 

 

In which I ponder…the ties that bind

/ howtobemeagain / 3 Comments

cut

My ex-husband found out about my blog.

Not a massive surprise really, although I had been blocking key people (our children for example, and his family members) from any posts that I thought were very controversial.

He sent me an email and he was obviously upset and angry. Which I suppose should also not be a surprise. He said I had publicly shamed him.

I felt terrible. I still don’t like upsetting him.

The ties that bind two people who spent 21 years together are very strong, even when things have got seriously messed up.

So I called him – from my new landline, so that he couldn’t ignore my call. He didn’t put the phone down when he knew it was me.

And I told him I was sorry he was upset. That I had not intended to upset or embarrass him, but that I am simply writing about my life. That I own my experiences and that it is not my job to keep his secrets. But that I was sorry I had upset him. And I meant it.

I don’t want to demonise him. He’s just a man who was monumentally bad at being married. He listened to what I said about my writing and at the end when I offered to remove the post that had most bothered him, he said no. I could tell he was upset but it was a good conversation and I think we both felt better about it afterwards.

It’s strange, but when you know someone that well, talking to them is always kind of easy, even though generally we try to avoid it. It’s almost like it all never happened – kind of. There is a weird sort of distance of course, but it’s like everything and nothing has changed at the same time.

The truth is, sometimes people do bad things. And the reasons for them are complex, but rarely evil. My ex husband did many things that hurt me. But he also was a man who cried with laughter with me at a game show called “what’s in the box?“. He was a man who organised a ’30 and 13 days birthday’ party for me – especially allowed by the ‘National Birthday Council’ because my grandmother had died shortly before my actual birthday. The first dance at our wedding was Eric Clapton – Wonderful Tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised it he doesn’t remember that – not because he’s horrible, but because that’s just not the sort of thing he would recall. He used to sit in the cot with our son and read him stories. He always said pizza was ‘a scrotty bit of bread with cheese and tomato on’ and couldn’t understand why they were so expensive. He likes 80s disco music (I hated it) and he properly dances like a dad. He’s a man who can’t stand anyone touching his adam’s apple, which always made me wonder if perhaps he had been hung or strangled in a previous life.

I used to tell him he was the best person I knew. He’s an actual, real person and more than the sum of his actions. I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives hurting one another or picking over past hurts.

It didn’t work out.

C’est la vie…

*he didn’t make me write this

** but I did out of courtesy send it to him before I published

In which I ponder…dating again

/ howtobemeagain / Leave a comment

comfort zone

I hadn’t been doing any dating really lately, since the demise of the last boyfriend.

He’s been making valiant efforts (largely ignored) to be friends, despite having been deleted from Facebook – which these days is the relationship equivalent of being sent to a Siberian gulag.

There was a chap I went for a drink with, and rather liked – but subsequently we happened upon one another in the street, me showerless after the gym and in the process of depositing a dog shit into one of those little poo-bags. I suspected that I would probably not be seeing him again after this, and I saw him early this morning actually, walking down the road holding hands with an attractive brunette, both of them with that particular spring in their step that is only really seen in people who have recently had sex with someone with whom they haven’t been having sex for the previous 20 years. Predictably, I was in gym clothes and I hadn’t had a shower. Didn’t have a steaming poo bag though. Yay for me.

Honorable mention goes to the very nice man who took me out for lobster and with whom I had drinks on one other occasion, but then disappeared off the face of the earth.

It’s hard not to wonder if you are utterly dreadful. Especially when your husband preferred virtually everyone – your friends, the wives of his friends, colleagues, on one occasion (or more accurately, on one occasion I know about) the sister of a colleague, plus various randoms – to you. But then when I consider this, I always end up in the same place – I am probably not utterly dreadful, and the level of dreadful I probably am, will eventually be beloved of someone, and if it’s not, then that’s ok too.

And then I met a man.

He got in touch with me through an online dating site, and he seemed nice. He’d done the Camino de Santiago, which is on my wish list. He was a teacher, and had used that to be able to teach history around the world – Argentina, Mexico, the Bahamas, Monaco, Sydney. Now he was doing his Masters in Archaeology and teaching part time. We were both going to be in Paddington around the same time, so we agreed to catch up for a glass of wine in a local pub.

It was a roaring success – we get on extremely well. And we’ve seen rather a lot of each other (and I don’t mean that in the biblical sense) in the weeks since.

He seems to be a proper man. Even a proper grown up man. Which is rare, in my experience. He does what he says he is going to do. He calls me darling and sweetheart in a way that doesn’t make me want to slap him. And most importantly,  he is not afraid that if he phones, makes plans more than 2 or 3 minutes in advance, or introduces me to people I will misinterpret his current enthusiasm for a proposal of marriage which will inevitably end in me stealing his house and his money. (I kid you not – anyone who is dating in my age group will be familiar with this scenario).

Which is all really, really good. Obviously.

But what is this small voice, quiet but persistent in the background, that is telling me that it’s too good to be true? That prevents me from responding to his endearments with my own?

I’ve tried very hard not to see men through the lens of my previous experiences. At the same time though, I’ve also tried very hard to reconnect with my gut instincts – which were largely destroyed by my marriage. When you’ve been in a relationship where, too often, something was telling you that something wasn’t right or didn’t add up, but your concerns were always attributed to you being mentally unstable, eventually you will both believe that you are indeed mentally unstable and that you cannot trust your instincts.

And now I don’t know if that small voice is my gut instinct, or fear.

I suspect it is fear. But then, on top of everything else, I’m afraid that it’s not. The reality is, though, that this really is a fear that I’m going to have to be prepared to face. What’s the alternative?

So here I am, dating again…

In which I wonder about ‘being friends’

/ howtobemeagain / 4 Comments

My friends, I am single again. For those of you who never knew I had temporarily eschewed my single state, worry not – because I am again an ‘I’ rather than a ‘we’.

This relationship ended with what I like to call the classic ‘constructive dismissal’. This is where your boyfriend behaves in a way that indicates, quite clearly, that he is no longer that into you (doesn’t return your calls, takes a day to reply to polite text enquiries about his health or his weekend, when asked when he’s available to catch up for dinner/drinks/a quiet night in tells you only about all the busy busy stuff he has got on, and nothing about when he might be able to squeeze you in – you get the picture…) but because he lacks the balls to actually end it himself, waits until you can no longer take it and you end it for him.

I’ve been in this situation before – the most extreme version of which was my marriage, in which my husband’s persistent affairs demonstrated a pretty obvious ‘not that into you’ scenario which he was not brave enough to confront himself, and it was left to me to tell him to leave. In some senses, I suppose, this did give me a certain sense of empowerment (although it didn’t feel like it at the time), and I’m sure he was surprised that I let it all go on for so long before I gave him his marching orders (I know I am, looking back with the benefit of hindsight).

After the end of our marriage, it was my ex-husband’s fervent wish that we would be friends. At first I tried very hard at this, until I realised a couple of things. The first was that he had not been a very good friend to me over the years. A friend would not have treated me the way he had done, and there was really no evidence to suggest that he had anything to offer me in terms of friendship. Friendship with him seemed to be very one-sided, and mainly about me overlooking how badly he had hurt me, and continuing to care about his wellbeing and happiness.

The second thing I realised was that my being friends with my ex meant that I continued to provide him with the bit of our marriage that he had most valued – possibly the only bit that he had valued – someone in the background who provided stability, and made him look functional. So he would come to my house and hang out, get a meal cooked for him, have me check he was all ok, spend an hour or so with his children, and then bugger off to his latest girlfriend’s house – which was pretty much what he had done throughout our marriage.

And so I put a stop to it. I told him that we were not friends and we would not be – because he had no idea how to be someone’s friend.

But now I find myself having ended a relationship again and the man in question wanting us to be friends. It’s given rise to a lot of old feelings that are not his fault, but have left me pondering why this makes me so sad.

I think the thing is that what I want from a man – first and foremost – is someone who will treat me at the very least as well as they would treat a friend. When I’m in a relationship, they are getting something deeper, more valuable, more precious than just my friendship. Why then treat me with more respect and care when I am not a girlfriend than when I am?

I think often these friendships serve mainly to help people feel better about the way they have behaved in a relationship, and I’m not sure what is in that for me. In addition to that, I’ve been (unsuccessfully) dating for nearly 5 years. I’m not sure I want to repopulate my friendship group with men with whom I’ve had a relationship. Although – to be fair – I have made a few friends out of men I dated. But those men were good friends to me during the relationship, and the transition into that new status was painless for both of us.

Then, of course, the ‘friend’ thing tends to get complicated when new people appear on the scene. A friendship is not meaningful if you are dropped when they find a new woman, and many women don’t react well to ex girlfriends pursuing even platonic relationships with their new beau. In my age group, we are all, after all, often already dealing with the ex wife. I have a dear friend, who used to be a boyfriend, whose girlfriend ended her relationship with him when I appeared (invited, obviously…) at his birthday party. When I spoke to him about it, he said that any girlfriends would need to accept his friends, whoever they are.

That is, of course, how real friendship plays out over time, no matter how it started. So if your boyfriend has failed to be a good friend to you whilst you were his girlfriend, what evidence is there to suggest that he would be any better at it when you are not?

Only time will tell, I suppose…