On What Would Have Been My 25th Wedding Anniversary...
On Saturday night, I was chatting with a lovely writer I had never met before, our books are along similar subjects — formidable women — but towards the end of our conversation, she said she had to ask:
‘Did you write about your marriage once?’
I thought this was going to be a conversation I have had many times, one about this piece of mine that made it to many news sites a few years ago, but it wasn’t.
‘I think you wrote a piece about how your wedding had been more important than the marriage and I’ve never forgotten it,’ she said, ‘because the same thing happened to me.’
I’ll admit, I had to cast my mind back, but it was true, I had written about that in a broadsheet newspaper twelve years ago, and the funny thing was that very same morning I had thought about that first marriage of mine because I’d realised that, had I stayed, today would have been my 25th wedding anniversary.
There is another version of me out there somewhere, the one who didn’t leave, she’s had a few kids, she paid off her mortgage, she didn’t achieve her ambitions, she has more wrinkles which she attempts to keep at bay with botox, she perhaps has a place in Spain. She comforted herself all those years she didn’t leave with buying things – that’s how she got the villa in Spain, though thanks to Brexit they don’t get out there as much as they once did and so they rent it out on Airbnb. It’s now a place other people use as a base for their adventures. She has children with names like Olivia and Octavia. She told herself in her twenties she would encourage her own kids to have the adventures she never dared to, but as she’s got older she’s heard herself persuading them instead to be more cautious so she doesn’t have to worry, as a result they are settled with nice boys from the village. She’d never let on but something deep inside her is disappointed for them, that they couldn’t have been braver, but she also knows she’s to blame. She’s had plenty of nice cars on the drive over the years – she’s found it’s a good way of measuring her success against others’, or rather she should say her husband’s because hasn’t her life been about supporting his career? They’ve had a good marriage all in all, he’s a good man and she knows she’s lucky. She’s overlooked any transgressions she suspects he may have made whilst away on work trips because what did it matter anyway, they’d hardly touched each other since she fell pregnant with their last child who has just finished his A levels. The thought of her husband seeing her naked now induces hot panic and cold sweats. She makes good cakes which her husband enjoys. She has the same friends she’s had since her teens, all the other girls who got together with the boys who played rugby for the city, they all married too. She’s kept the secrets of their affairs – even with each other – though she’s judged them, silently. One of those women left her husband once and, though she loved her friend very much, they never spoke again — her loyalty was to the one who stayed because it made her own decisions feel less challenged. She has lived in the same village all her life, she left the magazines in London and went back to work for the local paper when she got pregnant, and when that closed she gave up work altogether to focus on the kids. She wanted to travel but they’ve only really had package holidays, and then there’s the place in Spain where they know the owners of their favourite local restaurants. Her life has got smaller and smaller. She is going to write a novel someday, but she knows deep down someday means never. She’s forgotten now what it was she wanted to be, she lives instead through her children, though she has a vague memory that 24 years ago, when her father died, she once thought about leaving. For the most part she’s glad she didn’t, but sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and wonders how her life might have looked if she had, if she had been brave like her own mother when she had left her first marriage in the Sixties, the same mother who had told her to stay, the same as she would now tell her own daughters…
Anyway, snapping back to this life, I thought you might like to read the piece I wrote for that newspaper. There are a few things I regret about it now – I’m not sure how kind I was to my ex ex-husband for one thing, and that stings. But that’s the thing about committing your life to black and white and sharing it with the nation, you have to live with what you wrote back then, you have to remember you were in a certain place, at a certain time. I don’t know if he saw it at the time, we have spoken since and he has never mentioned it.
I’d like to edit it now, to describe to you in the words I use these days what getting married at 23 had been like for me, how it was standing at the foot of my dad’s deathbed that made me wake up to the wrong decision that I had made, that I swapped a good man for an adventure in the world, that I don’t regret it.
I have a recurring dream, even now, to this day. It is always the same, that I am marrying my first husband again. It is always the night before the wedding and I ‘wake up’ in the dream and think ‘how the hell did I get into this mess again?’ knowing I will need to extricate myself from it, that I will need to hurt this good friend all over again, knowing I will have to leave.
So strange to have had the same dream over and over for a quarter of a century, and yet no regrets. It’s been almost comforting – definitely validating.
I thought about editing this piece, to make myself sound a little kinder with the wisdom of age, to round off those hard edges that the word limit of a newspaper column demanded, but in the end I decided to publish it as it was written because it turned out that there was a woman who read it then, nodding, seeing herself in it, perhaps wincing as I do, too. But that woman told me on Saturday night it had been a comfort to her – she didn’t know then that more than a decade later she would be chatting to the author of it about something entirely different.
But that’s why we write, right? That’s why we share our lives, even the bits that don’t look so favorable, because there might be someone out there who feels less alone as a result of our honesty. I saw this yesterday from notes, it is from a post by
:
So anyway, here goes, with no edit made for the bits I’d change about it now, on what would have been my silver wedding anniversary had I stayed, the piece about my first marriage that I wish I had written better…