The Personals. Brian O’Connell
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not just a river in Egypt, as we used to say in rehab. But for Paula, it’s almost easier to accept her husband’s behaviour, knowing that he does have an addiction. ‘I think I would be very angry with him if he was behaving like this and he wasn’t an addict,’ she says. ‘I am more forgiving and understanding now, though, and it is easier to accept that he is not a completely black soul. I just think now that maybe it is the addiction that has made him the way he is.’
His drinking was becoming a daily problem and then, in addition to the emotional abuse, he was physically violent. Eventually she plucked up the courage to go to her solicitor and seek a separation. Any emotional ties she had had with him had long since been cut by this point, and physically, she and her ex-husband had been apart for some time. His actions from the day she told him she wanted a separation convinced her that she had done the right thing.
‘I didn’t have to open my mouth; the truth all came out and not from me. I am a very private person,’ she says. ‘While all this was happening, a woman told me about the affair she had been having with my husband for two and a half years. She then wrote me a letter and said if I ever needed it for anything legal to use it. What she did was so courageous. I know her quite well. I thought we were kind of friends. She didn’t really get on with other mothers and the irony is I used to make an extra effort with her. Little did I know ...’
To anyone looking in from the outside, Paula’s husband seemed a highly functioning individual. He was careful only to drink at night but it became apparent after several years that he had lost a lot of work opportunities. He could have done so well, she says, but his dependence on alcohol held him back hugely. Despite all his faults, her son still very much looks up to her ex-husband. She hasn’t tried to influence his opinion of his father; she says he will figure that out for himself some day.
After all she has gone through, including emerging from an abusive relationship, I’m curious as to why Paula has decided that this is the right time to put her rings online and try to sell them. The break-up is still relatively recent. ‘If I don’t, I’m afraid I will lose them, or they could get stolen,’ she says. ‘He could also take them back, and I thought if I do sell them, it will provide a fund for the kids’ education. It would be something positive, and I’m a big believer in turning negatives into positives.’
The whole experience and ongoing fallout from the break-up of her relationship has impacted on Paula’s ability to make future connections and relationships. ‘I don’t think I ever want to get into a relationship again,’ she tells me. ‘I think he would have to be extraordinary for me to even look at him twice! I feel like I wasted many years, but I learned so much and I am proud of myself for coming out of it. I question everything now when people talk to me. My eyes have been opened and I can’t believe how gullible I was. My faith helped me. When I was outside the door, crying into my hands after a bout of abuse, I would cry out, “Please God, help me” and He did, and along the way, I found groups like Al Anon really useful, to be honest.’
At her worst, Paula was afraid her husband’s drinking would drag her down with him, and depression would become an issue for her. She says she came from a very happy family: both parents were non-drinkers and theirs was an open house in the country. It was the kind of childhood home where they drank tea five or six times a day and everyone was open and honest with each other. ‘I often wonder how I did not see that these traits were missing in the person I married. How did I miss that? If by me going through this though, I prevent my kids falling into addiction, then maybe it will have been worth it.’
We’ve been talking for almost an hour, and Paula tells me she has to do the school run and needs to go. I thank her for her time, openness and honesty.
I came away from our phone call thinking that it was relatively soon after her break-up for her to be selling the rings online and that in my experience most people travel a few years down the road before they take that step.
A few days after our chat, when I noticed the ad had expired, I texted, asking whether she’d had any luck with a buyer. ‘I decided to take the ad down,’ she tells me. ‘I just thought, maybe I should think about this more. I didn’t want total strangers contacting me and then having to explain the backstory. I’m just not ready to face all that right now.’
For sale: beautiful NEW ivory wedding dress. NEVER WORN or altered. Size 18. Seeing this dress is a must. Will sell half price: was €1,400, sell for €800. No time-wasters. Evening Echo, October 2018
It had been a while since I’d come across a wedding dress ad in the free ads section of the Evening Echo. There had been a time when bridal wear had a whole section to itself. However, online ads allow sellers to post pictures of items for sale and many online classified sections allow more control, as you don’t have to use your real name or publish your phone number if you choose not to. And this can be very important when someone is selling a dress for a wedding that never happened. So the fact this ad was in the Echo at all caught my eye straight away, and then when the words ‘NEW’ and ‘NEVER WORN’ also appeared in the advert, I knew there was likely to be a story.
The seller, Jean, tells me that this is the second time she’s put this ad in the newspaper. The dress cost her €1,400 and she’s letting it go for €800, or the nearest offer. ‘Myself and my husband planned to get married,’ she tells me. ‘But I was already married and I thought the divorce would be through by then. But the divorce didn’t come through until [years after]. It actually went on for about 14 years whereas normally divorces should only take five years.’
The divorce finally came through seven years after Jean and her partner had hoped to get married. By this stage, organising a wedding that would keep everyone in each family happy was proving difficult to say the least. Also, both Jean and her husband had lost their jobs as the recession hit, and so their big dream wedding had to be shelved out of economic necessity.
These are the ripple effects of the downturn that still resonated many years after the so-called recovery had taken hold. It is almost impossible to calculate the whole impact of the recession – you can document the numbers: who left, the people out of work or the families who had their homes repossessed, but for years after the downturn, I met people like Jean who would tell me about the ways in which the economic tsunami (not of their making) had massively changed the course of their lives.
People have told me about the son or daughter in Australia they couldn’t visit for half a decade. Or the retirement plan that never materialised, or the family member languishing on a waiting list for five years for a hip replacement, because one of the first things to go after the crash had been their health insurance. How do you properly assess the cumulative impact of all those knock-on effects?
For some, the recession had a more positive impact ultimately, forcing them perhaps to go off and spend a month at the Ballymaloe Cookery School and do what they should have done 30 years earlier before the entry exams for the bank came up. In some cases, it helped people embrace humility, or discover empathy or form a kinship with people from a whole cross section of backgrounds which they might never have thought possible. I met them at Men’s Sheds, car boot sales, coming out of the repossession courts or, unfortunately, at coroners’ courts. They were all marked in some way by the events following the collapse of a bank many had probably never even heard of.
So after the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank in 2008, when Jean and her fiancé were talking about their dream wedding, perhaps with the three-day venue and the chocolate fountain and the dozen doves being released, their plans didn’t seem in keeping with the times. Both of them were out of work. Her husband had retrained and ended up starting at the bottom of his profession on minimum wage, trying to work his way up again. Jean says that they had both been on an upward curve financially before the recession. Once they lost their jobs, things began to slide very quickly. Soon they were in mortgage arrears and they continue to struggle to clear those arrears to this day. They face the prospect of losing their home.
‘I