Part 2 Of Your Love Life | This is what happened to me (2)

Yes, my former husband may recall things completely differently. But this is genuinely how it seemed — and still seems — to me.

So there we were, married for over a decade, a seemingly happy and established couple. The first year or two of married life was testing: my husband suddenly faced possible redundancy which threatened to stall what seemed a promising career. I battled a persistent health condition which sparked a bout of depression and anxiety. All was resolved through the everyday but still miraculous forces of time, love, commitment, and personal resilience.

Now we were in the clear, sunlit uplands of a shared life. 

‘Isn’t it wonderful the way you two were brought together and how well you fit?’ an older friend, who worked as a counsellor, once commented. ‘Your husband's job involves a lot of travel away from home but it's never an issue with you. You both adapt.'

I can't take credit for that as, brought up practically as an only child, I knew how to enjoy my own company and spend time well while we were apart. And then the delicious anticipation of his homecomings! The sound of him parking his car in the drive, his front-door key in the keyhole, him shouting, 'Minky moo!' (private joke) to announce his arrival as he came through the front door. Wrapping our arms round each other, sharing what had been happening while we were apart. Relaxing back into mutual home-life till the next trip.

But the stark truth is, you never really know what is going on in your spouse’s head. You may think you do, but you don’t.

You never truly know what is going on in your spouse’s head

Doing brilliantly at his career, he began to feel restless and the need for new challenges. A friend from work had bought himself a TVR Griffith sports car and my husband decided he wanted one too. I wasn’t into cars as much as he was but I was happy to share his enjoyment. First, he bought a Subaru Impreza, a rally car, then traded it in for a TVR Chimaera. It is a stunning, classic British car, and I fell in love with it too though I only dared drive it on one exhilarating, never-to-be-forgotten occasion.

A rower in his schooldays he thought about taking it up again but his profession meant he was unable to commit to the regular training needed to reach the élite level he aspired to, and anything less wouldn’t satisfy him.

So with my light-hearted agreement which contained no sense of foreboding, he joined his company's sailing club on the coast. It wasn’t a sport I could participate in: I couldn't swim, suffered from seasickness, and being wet and cold affected me miserably. But I was happy to support his new hobby and had no wish to tag along which I thought would only detract from his enjoyment by making him worry about whether I was enjoying myself.

I found it natural that we had some things we did together and some we did apart. It didn't seem strange to me. Should it have done? There were examples all around me of couples with individual interests. He brought home hilarious stories of the arcane world of sailing. Sailors, he explained, divided into two sorts: 'There are racers and there are cruisers. Racers like beating everything else out of the water. Cruisers like...' his voice trailed off as he struggled to find polite words for something he slightly looked down on. 'Cruisers like nice sunsets,' he finally concluded.

Gradually, his involvement deepened. He  took out a shared time-ownership of a J109 racing yacht with other club members, speculating maybe it was something we could use as a base for future holidays in the Greek islands. We loved out holidays in the sun. Around the same time I began to pick up small but significant shifts in his attitude and behaviour which struck me as strangely unlike the man I had married.

No more Mr Nice Guy

He had a reputation as a nice guy but suddenly he once said, out of the blue, ‘If people knew what really goes on in my head, they wouldn’t think I’m so nice.’

What?

I knew him as a gentle, modest person. Now I sometimes picked up a smirk in his voice and around his mouth when talking about certain people, as though they were beneath him.

He had always been very calm. Now after an extended family dinner, I remember him half-shouting and gesticulating in anger to me, ‘I was THAT CLOSE to having a real go at xxxxx!’

Once when we were late for a holiday flight due to his insistence on waiting till the last possible moment so he could spend longer chatting to a buddy, he took our lateness out on me. For the first time in our life together, I saw an expression directed towards me I had never seen before, his looks contorted and made ugly by pure anger as he snarled at me in front of the security officers, ‘Come on!’

Well, people snap when they’re under pressure, I told myself, feeling shaken as we settled into our plane seats. I didn't want to start our holiday by dwelling on this little scene.

But it was a side of him I had not seen before, blaming me for his own mistake, and there was no apology for it when he had calmed down. I can remember only one time in the past he had seemingly lost his rag, and then he had immediately apologised, saying, 'Sorry about that — a devil must have got into me!'

I felt there was something ominous about this new behaviour.