The Half a Million Pounds Wife

If happiness has a price, in any currency, it’s zero.

The author at 33, in the marital home. Note the ‘rescue me’ eyes.

A friend’s death shocked me into leaving my first husband. Adrian was a seemingly healthy man in his early thirties, recently engaged to another friend who invented the best banana cake recipe in all human history. A few weeks before their wedding, he unexpectedly collapsed while walking their dog on Eastbourne seafront. Rushed to hospital in an ambulance, he was told he had an undiagnosed heart condition and would need an angiogram to discover exactly what was going on. This involved injecting dye into an artery, something normally done under local anaesthetic. Adrian had a needle phobia, so he asked for a general, and they obliged.

He never surfaced. His funeral was held at the church where they would have been married. Their reception venue hosted the wake. All the men wore cartoon ties at his fiancée’s request.

Standing in the church pew singing a funeral hymn next to the husband I no longer loved, I suddenly realised I, too, could die anytime. And if I checked out at the age of 32, I’d have nothing to show for my adult life but misery. That’s when I knew I would have to leave my husband.

Extricating myself from the marriage had several stages.

1. There was the year we spent going to Relate, where I desperately hoped the counsellor, with her professional experience and insight, would diagnose that we were utterly incompatible and unfixable, and help him come to terms with losing me. Instead she listened to him insisting it was all about not having enough sex (read: not having any sex, because I was now repulsed by him), or ‘intimacy’ as she liked to call it. She gave us unbearable ‘homework’ utterly unsuitable to a situation of coercive control.

2. There was the time I told him straight that I thought for the best of everyone (including the children) we should separate, and he roared at me for an hour until I was curled up in a little ball on the old church pew in the kitchen, with one of my children, also under the blast of his roaring, trying to comfort me.

3. There was the indelible “If you ever leave me you won’t live very long, and if you ever get a boyfriend he won’t live very long either.”

4. There were the months of illness and hospitalisation as the stress of staying in a toxic relationship began to wreak havoc on my body, during which time — because of my physical vulnerability - he ramped up his cruelty.

5. There was the moment where I stood at a hotel window, calculating whether the drop was high enough to kill me outright because it looked like a blessed relief.

But between stages 2 and 3 — let’s call it 2a — there was the time he asked if I would stay married to him in return for half a million pounds.

This photo makes me think of a magnificent tiger in a tiny, filthy cage.

He was a man who loved money. He wouldn’t take holidays because they cost so much; the price of the holiday, plus the money he’d lose from a week or two of not earning. When our eldest child was five months old, D started working 200 miles away, staying North all week to make as much money as possible. I was left to cope alone with the baby, and within three years, two toddlers and a baby, from Sunday night to Friday night. At the weekends he was, in effect, a fourth child, demanding to be fed and looked after and never so much as changing a single nappy. Which was not what we had originally agreed, when we were both freelance computer programmers.

Don’t think I hadn’t objected. I had. But coercive control is powerful and insidious, and I had been groomed for it by an abusive childhood where I had already learned to swallow emotions and say nothing. My marriage was the higher education course in the same dumb discipline. He’d destroy me with words, or punish me with silence, and I’d have to take it. My unsaid words made a lump in my throat. A lump that eventually turned into a goitre.

Mainstream medicine has not yet fully recognised the link between emotions and physical ailments, beyond an understanding that ‘stress’ is a common risk factor in 75-90% of all diseases. ‘Stress’ is essentially the umbrella term for chronic negative emotions. But as Louise Hay knew as early as 1984, specific emotional experiences will affect specific parts of the body, and in such a way that it becomes obvious that it is our own thought processes shaping the outcomes. What else could explain the symbolism that is so routinely demonstrated?

Being silenced, which is to say, suppressing my own speech for damage-limitation purposes, led to a series of problems all focused around my throat and vocal cords. Repeated bouts of tonsillitis (something I had suffered as a teen in another house where I was silenced), one bout so bad I couldn’t even swallow medication or water, and had to be admitted to hospital for intravenous antibiotics. I began coughing up blood and this, too, was so resistant to normal treatment that doctors suspected TB at one point. Eventually, it was diagnosed as bronchiolitis (something suffered more commonly by those most powerless of creatures, babies). I even developed quinzies, an unfashionably historical condition that sounds like it should have disappeared with the dropsy. Quinzies is a throat abscess, and was a common complaint of Victorian women. The epitome of women silenced and suppressed.

Finally, my voicelessness developed into a form of hyperthyroidism called Graves Disease, visible through its goitre (that permanent lump in the throat), a dangerously heightened metabolism, and the bulge-eyed stare of a rabbit in a trap. This wasn’t diagnosed until after I left my husband, but it was present through our final winter together. I recall picking up the kids from school in just a t-shirt when everyone else was bundled up in coats, and being asked repeatedly, ‘Aren’t you cold?’ and me saying ‘No, I’m very hot from running around’ and thinking it was normal. In fact it was an auto-immune disease, my body attacking itself. Though every problem is first a solution, and you can read the raised metabolism as an escape-assistance mechanism.

All of these throat-centred problems can be read as my body raising red flag after red flag (and note how this is reflected in our language, above: a disease described as a ‘complaint’). Crushing your own spirit, if you do it enough, can kill you. I had to be able to speak freely. And the only way that would happen was divorce.

This was my impression of ‘happy’. Fitting that the whole photo is out of kilter.

I’m telling this story a little out of order. My health complaints began in the wake of the threats that made me feel I couldn’t leave. In particular, the fear that he would kill me. I could see no way out, with no means of supporting myself and the kids, and with my husband having successfully charmed my family into his pocket, nowhere to leap to. When I told one close relative how desperately I wanted to leave, they said, ‘You’ve made your bed; you better lie in it’. Even I didn’t understand that what I was undergoing was abuse, so how could my family? At that time, psychological abuse and coercive control weren’t recognised. I decided I would, indeed, have to live with my decision, but my body had other ideas. Almost like he said ‘I’ll kill you’ and my body said ‘Not if I kill her first.’ Dying would be another way of leaving.

The death threats were his last-ditch attempt to keep me tethered, but just ahead of them, he had tried to see if he could bribe me to stay with that half a million pounds. He had made over a million on the ‘Millenium Bug’ scare, the idea that on midnight of December 31st 1999, all utilities would cease to function and planes fall out of the sky because computer systems built on a six-figure date would read ‘00’ as 1900 and every program would simultaneously crash. D had written a piece of code to turn six-figure dates into eight-figure ones (a simple search and replace). He persuaded panicked companies, including major national organisations, that a fix would take months and multiple programmers, and he charged accordingly. In truth, his program could process thousands of lines of code in a few minutes, and he employed no one. He’d transform entire systems in half an hour, hold onto the results for three months, then issue a stonking invoice. Thus, by 1997, he was a very rich man.

It’s weird being offered half a million pounds to stay miserable. I can’t imagine who on earth would take such a bribe. Maybe he thought that he would, were the roles reversed. His own upbringing had been so damaging that he thought ‘sadness’ was something you faked to manipulate people. As far as I could tell, he had minimal experience of real emotions besides anger. Not long after I left him, a police doctor asked me a series of questions about him that all had affirmative answers. They were so weirdly detailed and accurate that I asked if she knew him personally. ‘No,’ she said, ‘It’s a known personality disorder. ASP. Look it up.’ I looked up Anti-Social Personality Disorder, and the last few years of my life fell into place.

The final thing I’ll share from this episode is the power of vows. I don’t mean the marriage vows, though those certainly kept me in a dangerous place for far too long. I mean those vows we make to ourselves. They may not take the form ‘I vow’, but statements made with vehemence and certainty have an uncanny power to shape our circumstances.

Offered half a million pounds to stay with a man who was completing the crushing of my spirit that my parents began, I was horrified. I couldn’t believe he thought I could be bought. So I answered, with considerable gusto:

“I would rather be happy and poor.”

Friend, you know by now the power of words. I have indeed spent the last couple of decades being largely happy and (with a few delightful blips) largely low-income. But from this point on, I divorce myself from this pairing.

One need not be poor to be happy. Wealth and misery are not inexplicably linked. You can be rich and generous (and I know a few such people). So I release myself from my angry and damaging vow. I choose to allow myself more ease. Because, like most of us, I would prefer to have the means to be generous and sleep better at night. I am remaking my vow.

I would rather be happy and rich.

You?

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Post-It Notes

Since last week I have:

• Travelled from Amsterdam to Dunkirk to Bergicourt, to Limoges, to Ribaute near Carcassone, most of the the latter with our dog.

• Met an extraordinary couple, Boris and Sophie, hosts of a French BnB, who fed us under the stars and regaled us with their lives, which included working in theatre, film, and circus, and hosting a badly behaved artist for a month

• Come to a fresh understanding of my long relationship with being silenced, and the obsession with that which runs through my novels, both published and unpublished.

Your Turn

1. What’s your understanding of the mind-body-(spirit) connection with regards to your own health or that of those close to you. Can you see connections?

2. Has anyone ever offered you money to do something unusual? How did you feel about that?

3. Have you ever made a vow you regret?

4. Say whatever moves you in response to this piece.

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