Learning the Hard Way

I’ve been married three times. Many find this amusing, some sad, one or two reprehensible. Some seem delighted by evidence that optimism can triumph over experience. Each marriage has taught me lessons that I obviously needed to learn and as ill luck would have it I am particularly stubborn about learning lessons.

Applying these lessons to anyone else other than myself is probably not helpful. They’re borne from idiosyncrasies within my character, my scars and wrinkles. You may find some of them resonate with you. If so I’m glad. After all a smart woman learns from her mistakes but a wise one learns from the mistakes of others.

Husband 1: Andy aka Geoff

Andy and I were married for 7 years. I was 22, he – well who knows exactly. It ended in a flurry of acrimony and adultery but here is how it unfolded or rather, collapsed..

I met Geoff in a pub where Bob Marley and the Wailers were playing live in London’s west. I was moonlighting there several evenings a week desperately trying to save money for my ticket back to Australia. I had been away for nearly three years and was starting to long for a landscape where the eye could scan the horizon and not snag on a sign of human life.

I was clearing glasses with a tray piled high when I squeezed past him to get back to the bar and he said ‘you can do that again’ with insouciant charm.

He found me behind the bar at the end of my shift as the pub was closing and we chatted a while which led to me following him out to his car to score some grass which he said he had. One thing led to another as it usually does and before I knew it I couldn’t shake him.

He rang me at work. He rang me at home. He turned up on my doorstep and at my work. I wasn’t keen but I was also young. I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem I guess although at the time I didn’t know that. The young often don’t. Before you know it he had moved in with me and we were a ‘couple’. It seemed as if I had little choice in the matter. He had decided for me.

He was an East End boy through and through. Cock sure, muscle bound, a bit dangerous, a sort of glowering charm when he wanted. He exuded dodgy sexual charisma (I thought). Put my rose tinted attraction down to the fact that at the time I had a crush on Ian Drury of Blockheads fame and Andy was my ‘bit o’ rough’.

When some weeks later he told me his name wasn’t Geoff but Andy and I asked him why, he said ‘well you never know do you?’ ‘Know what?’ I asked. ‘Whether or not you’re going to have to do a runner or anything’ (except he said ‘anyfink’). I asked where and how he’d decided on the name Geoff and he said it was the name of a kid he went to school with who he didn’t like so if he was up to anything ‘dodgy’ he always used his name. It was at this stage that I should have been asking myself why he thought he may have to ‘do a runner’ from me or was contemplating anything 'dodgy'.

He took me to meet his family. His mum and dad were living apart so I met them separately. She was in a depressingly Stalinist housing estate tower block in Hackney with Andy’s younger brother Michael and his kid sister. His older brother Eddie was away doing something no one seemed to want to talk about.

His dad we met in an eel shop down Hackney High Street. In that part of London in the early 70’s these little culinary gems still existed with their steam clouded windows, lino floors and Formica topped chrome tables.

Old timers congregated over chipped plates of revolting looking jellied eel. Roll ups hung from the corner of bristly toothless mouths. Cloth caps pulled down low. I recall meeting an old smelly skinny bloke called Fred in a grubby shirt and braces who sniffed a lot, looked me up and down with rheumy speculation and snorted with derision when I declined to try the eel and told him I was vegetarian.

His mum, Val, was a lady who loved the Bingo. She took me to the hall one rainy afternoon. It was full of women who looked just like her. Largish women in cheap nylon house dresses with yellowed sweat stained arm pits, wearing heel trodden and well-worn shoes. Hair home dyed usually a dense black or unrealistically burnished bronze often still in curlers and covered by a scarf. The ubiquitous fag with lipstick smeared filter smouldering continuously in the corner of their mouth. Babies rugged up tightly and too warmly in shabby push chairs, coughing and wailing as their gossiping mothers puffed over them. Occasionally a skinny brassy blonde would strut herself past but these, according to Val, were very much ‘no better than they should be’.

I discovered to my chagrin that I was useless at Bingo. The women could look at a dozen or more cards and flick away with their pencils their eyes as sharp and intent as a chicken pecking at scattered seed. Val would still manage to complete her cards then lean across and tick my solitary one before I'd had a chance.

I was more interested in observing them. I was like some anthropologist in an alien land peopled by strange folk who still managed somehow to look vaguely familiar because they resembled a cast of extras from East Enders.

My day job was working for Forum and Penthouse Publications. I was assistant editor of Forum Magazine – the self-proclaimed journal of Human Sexuality. I thought it best to keep that to myself though with Andy’s family at the risk of being thought ‘no better than I should be’ by Val. Fred I suspect would have found it amusing.

You really would think that I, a well-educated middle-class hippy girl from the beach suburbs of Sydney, would steer clear of guys who seemed to have an endless supply of stuff they could ‘lay their hands on’ at a day’s notice none of whom actually seemed to work but all of whom seemed to have wads of “readies’ and flash ‘motors’ but I found them all fascinating and rather exciting.

Andy, after a couple of weeks living with me, declared he wanted to come to Australia when I returned so I doubled down on my efforts to earn cash and finally had enough for one ticket (Andy was conveniently skint – the only real constant in our relationship). I swallowed my pride and did what every middle class girl did in those times. I asked my parents for a fare home and used the money I’d earned to buy his ticket. I not only blew my one chance of escaping a doomed relationship but also paid for the privilege of bringing the problem back home with me.

When I left Forum, as a farewell gift they presented me with a large black vibrator. These were regularly sold through the magazines back page classifieds. It made going through Australian Customs a bit tricky. The customs woman pulled it from my luggage, held it up in front of all and said ‘what’s this?’ I said ‘it’s a vibrator’. She went beet red and hastily re-stowed it back in the bag much to the amusement of those behind me in the queue. I bet that little interaction made the Customs Officers’ Christmas Party blooper tape.

That vibrator taught me what it was like to have an orgasm which says much about the skill and care level of boyfriends I’d had till then. Andy and I used it a fair bit – at least it meant I got something out of what had become by then a tiresome bore.

A couple of years had passed and he was spending a lot more time away in the evenings. He said he was out with mates. To be honest I didn’t really care. By then I’d realised we had next to nothing in common and I was happy when he wasn’t around and I could settle in and read a good book.

I was a really big reader but Andy was to all practical purposes pretty much illiterate. He hated me reading. In an effort to try to convert him to the pleasures of losing yourself in a good book I started reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to him. It had an effect I came to rue. He got involved in it he would nag me to read for hours till my voice gave out. I knew I had to get out of the relationship before he discovered The Hobbit or, god forbid, Ursula Le Guin.

It actually happened quite fast. The first inkling I had was that he had a ‘bit on the side’ or even ‘several bits on the side’ was when I noticed my vibrator was missing from my dresser drawer. I asked Andy if he’d seen it and – just let this next bit sink in – he told me ‘it had been playing up and need repair so he’d taken it away to a mate to fix it’.

I am I think an honest sort of person. I always stay true to what I believe the truth but at that stage of my life I was also a coward – and so I made myself gullible. I chose to believe him and made myself forget about it until a few days later when a note was passed under the door asking when he was ‘coming around again’ and signed Karen.

The whole thing blew up when I realised that Karen now possessed my vibrator and I moved home to my parents and he went wherever and it was all over. The divorce cost me $11k which I had to borrow because in the seven years of our marriage I had bought a house and made every payment while he just lived there but that was the only way I could get rid of him. An expensive lesson.

Lesson #1

1. Muscles, a cocky attitude and extensive tattoos are fun for a short while but they wear off real fast and certainly don’t compensate for limited intelligence supplemented by considerable cunning and a devious nature.

2. When you start to wonder whether you can trust someone or not is when you already know you don’t and it’s not a relationship if only one of you is in it. Wish I’d gotten the vibrator back first though.

3. Gemini men are not for me.

Husband number 2 – Pete

Peter came at a time in my life when I recognised that I was not immortal. Of course I’d academically known this before but I realised with a shock that if I continued as I was then I was in fact making a decision by default to not have children.

I’d never been a clucky sort of person. In fact the first baby I held in my arms would be my own. I just wasn’t interested. But I was interested in having experiences and I felt that having a child was a pretty big one to miss out on. If that’s what I was doing.

I felt the way I did a bit when I turned thirty and realised I was now too old to join the police force. I had zero interest in being a police officer but to be told I was too old! That bugged me for some reason.

About six years had passed since my divorce from Andy and I was now in my mid-thirties. I was financially fine and had a good job in an advertising agency in Adelaide. I had plenty of friends all around my age and situation. I was having a good time. But there was a niggling feeling that there was something missing.

This feeling was illustrated by a story I tell as to why I left advertising and the rat race and basically just dropped out for a while.

Back in Sydney where I’d started in the advertising industry I worked for a large agency in the city. I sat in a cubicle next to an older woman – probably in her 50’s – called Gwen. Gwen used to manage the accounts for one of our biggest clients – Kellogg’s. She was a very nervy woman. Quite highly strung and had been at the agency working on that account for decades I believe. Her husband was a long distance truck driver so he must have been away from home a fair bit. When he wasn’t though he apparently would patiently sit through long fretful discourses from Gwen about the problems with Kellogg’s accounts. This apparently had gone for something like twenty years. Finally though he snapped and in a wonderful moment of clear headed observation he said ‘But Gwennie, it’s only a Corn Flake’.

Gwen, bless her, also had a sense of humour so when she came to work the next day she shared this blossom of wisdom and thus it was that I realised as I stood in front of my fridge gazing at nothing more than several bottles of champagne and some mouldy cheese that my life was full of Corn Flakes. All the way down. I decided enough was enough so I packed it all in and went travelling.

I ended up a few months later in the Whitsunday region and as funds gradually trickled away decided that it was time to return to the Corn Flake world back in Sydney to try to earn some money and decide where to next.

So when I learned that I was pregnant I was firstly terrified – after all I wasn’t married and back in the mid-eighties there was still a bit of middle class disapproval floating around for single mothers and my parents were staunchly middle class, but when that subsided I knew it was time for another adventure and this was what I wanted to do.

The father was a fellow I’d met when in my decision to head back south I agreed to act as cook on a yacht being sailed from the Whitsunday Islands down to Brisbane for repairs. Pete was the owner and skipper of that vessel.

When I first said the words to him ‘we’re pregnant’ Pete sat there looking like a stunned mullet. He was nearly 40 and had never married (code red warning sign!). Eventually I said to him ‘so, are you going to give this baby your name?’ He replied ‘what call it Pete?’ That should have warned me that we weren’t really on the same wavelength but ever intrepid I soldiered on and so arrived at Husband #2.

We were married nearly fourteen years. They weren’t all bad. Some were almost unbearable.

The main problem was that we were total polar opposites. I’m a sort of happy optimistic kind of person whereas Pete was the sort of bloke who believed that the good Lord had singled him out deliberately and personally for everything that went wrong with his life. His constant refrain was ‘why God? Why me?’ In the end I used to answer ‘well why not?’ or when it had been particularly bad day ‘because you’re a miserable old bastard, that’s why’.

Not content with having an only child I went ahead and got pregnant again and had our second son twenty-two months after the first. I have to say that those two boys have proved to be among my better decisions in life. I adore them both and they now are fine young men that I’m exceedingly proud of.

So there we were living in paradise in the Whitsundays. We bought a house on acreage and I started working as many jobs as I could because once again I’d married someone who struggled to earn a living.

Pete never cheated on me. Not because he restrained himself but just because in a small town you are too well known to everyone and on top of that he just wasn’t interested. He had enough time grappling with what he saw as his own poor fortune in life. He truly was the most miserable person I have ever met.

I stuck it out for the sake of the boys for another decade or so but when the eldest was ready to go to high school I agitated to move south which we did and the marriage broke up about 3 years later when I managed to lure him with the offer of enough cash to buy a motor bike and travel around Australia unencumbered by wife or family. Another expensive lesson. This time I vowed there wouldn’t be another.

Lesson #2

1. Never marry someone who can’t make you laugh. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with them so don’t saddle yourself with someone who is a sour puss about it.

2. Never marry someone who really doesn’t see anything positive about you – or at least never tells you they see it – but sees every tiny flaw. If I heard the phrase ‘no man would put up with you’ once I heard it, well lots of times. One time he came in and it was pouring rain which had stopped him doing something out in his shed and he had the shits with me and God over something and was again sharing that fact with me and ended it with ‘and just look at this bloody weather!’ to which I replied ‘I’m sorry, I’ll try to do better tomorrow’.

3. You can’t make someone love you by trying. It’s only going to be sustainable if they love you because you are the way you are and you are just being yourself. If they are always trying to change you then it’s not you they love at all but some fabrication they have constructed in their mind and are intent in moulding you into.

4. You cannot make someone else happy. You can only make yourself happy and if they really love you then that will make them happy. I tried for fourteen years to make Pete happy. Finally I had to realise but here was a man who was only happy when he was miserable and had something to complain about. Eventually I obliged and left him to it.

5. Libra men are not for me.

Husband Number 3 – Bryne

I met Bryne online. It was touch and go because I was 10kms outside his search preference filter but he took a punt and a packed lunch and came over for that first coffee. It’s the first time I actually just dated for the first three months and we did not push the relationship further during that time.

I’d become discouraged meeting the men who were interested in a 54 year old woman. They were in their sixties or even older most of them. Serious men who wore cardigans and (shudder) long socks. I still feel 18 inside. I wasn’t ready for this! These guys reminded me of my dad! They were grown up!

I got interested in him when he made his first Monty Python allusion. I have a wacky sense of humour and as Bryne and I became better friends I found that his mind if anything was sharper than mine. He knew more about the world and politics and all the stuff I’d never bothered with. He said he was fascinated trying to fathom the mental gymnastics of the way my brain worked. We laughed a lot.

When I’d gone online I thought well, they ask you for your preferences so I’m going to be really specific. After all, why not? So I had in my search preferences, at least 1.8m tall, intelligent, financially secure and Virgo (I'd done my research by then). I called this my List.

I advise everyone to make a list. Until you make a list of the qualities you want in a partner you don’t really know what it is you are looking for. Put all the things on it that you know you need. Things which are deal breakers for you.

The list I was working to with previous marriages seemed to have only two things on it – must be male and have a pulse. That’s way too broad as later events showed.

Bryne is logical and rational to the bone. He laughs inordinately every time I mention my Virgo requirement especially when I went and had our joint astrological charts drawn up and it came back that we were 92% compatible. I have the last laugh. Each time he marvels about how well we are going and how happy he is I smile smugly and say ‘92%’.

Lesson #3

1. When its right you know. I knew instinctively that when he asked if I would marry him that I had to answer ‘yes’. I had absolutely no doubts whatsoever. He makes my blood fizz like lemonade in my veins.

2. When you find the right one spread the joy but don’t expect everyone to be happy for you. Some of my friends are so miserable in their own lives that it’s actually painful for them to be around us. I’m sorry about that. I wish it were different for them and they too could find the right person but I refuse to let myself be burdened by it.

3. Never stop feeling gratitude to the Universe for your good fortune. It’s weird but we seem to attract that which we put out. Put out misery and you’ll reap more of it. Put out happiness and gratitude and good things just seem to shower upon you.

4. Persistence pays off but first you got to kiss a lot of frogs.

The fears I have these days are of another kind. The fear of losing one who is so precious to you that if they died you can only imagine crawling into a dark cupboard, curling in a ball and screaming silently. The endless wondering if you would be prepared to go with them by whatever means you could.

This fear leads me to the final lesson I learned which is;

5. Loving and being loved makes you a hostage to fate. Days and nights are sweet but are bitterly flavoured with the frightening recognition that at any time you may be parted… not through deceit or betrayal but through random, fickle and inevitable fate. All you can do is take your courage in your hands and jump in - but be sure to check those astrological charts first!