Dear Bel,
Last year I retired for a very simple, rural life abroad with my 59-year-old husband. We have been together for 20 years, married for 17.
I always worked in a professional, quite demanding, role; he has had some self-employed work, occasional short-term employment, nothing else. He was an only child, never made many friends and seemed incapable of fitting in with a work environment.
I think I always realised I was carrying everything – financially, domestically and socially – and he was too dependent. But he has many good qualities and, to put it simply, I loved him.
However, retirement has turned into relentless cooking, cleaning and chores while he works at what he feels like doing outdoors. Some of it is useful, some things remain unfinished and others are not helpful – like spending days planting onions and potatoes which are not particularly suited to our soil, aren’t likely to thrive and which are cheaper at the farmers’ market.
I have raised this and his overall response is that if there was more money he could buy more tools and equipment and achieve more. Since he’s living off my pension and small amount of capital, I am getting absolutely fed up with this attitude. His other response is to ask what I want to do about it, though I’ve told him it’s up to him to have an idea to make my life a little easier.
I now feel constantly tired, stressed or depressed. I’ve booked a holiday to try to cheer things up. Although I strive to appreciate all the positives (like companionship) I find myself thinking I live like a pauper’s wife and he lives like a queen’s consort. That tells me how bitterly I am coming to resent it all.
I don’t see any advantage in complaining to family. My friends don’t know (though they probably suspect) and years ago his mother and aunt said he didn’t ever take much responsibility and leaned on me too much.
I cook from scratch every day and on special occasions produce his favourite meals – salmon, venison, duck and Christmas, Easter and birthday cakes. We go out for a meal on our anniversary (which I pay for), otherwise I’d be cooking for that too. I give, but don’t get, Christmas or birthday presents from him though I do get a card.
I need to break this cycle, perhaps go away on my own or try a trial separation? I am not expecting you to have the answer but would value your thoughts.
Marion
Bel replies: So you moved abroad after your retirement to chase the dream of a romantic country life, only to find that – as is so often the case – the reality did not live up to the fantasy.
Your marriage has always been unequal: you married a man eight years younger and far less successful, because you loved him – and fortunately that love was enough to sustain you for years.
Yet now you are questioning it. Your letter is a long cry of disappointment and frustration. Boredom too – the rigorous, self-imposed domestic routine is tiring you out.
Now the key question is whether you are at heart bitterly regretting the decision to move abroad and transferring that disappointment and sense of failure on to your husband – or whether he has been the problem all along.
There’s so much bitterness in the words, ‘I live like a pauper’s wife and he lives like a queen’s consort’.
In the past, you relished your role as the powerful one (the ‘queen’) in the relationship. It was fine when you could go out to a satisfying job, earn money, organise everything.
I suspect you continued the habits of indulgence started by his mother years before. Did you excuse him – because you were infatuated – when, lazy and selfish, he didn’t bother with a present for you? Such patterns of behaviour are very hard to break.
You cannot live out the coming years in rural isolation harbouring such resentment. Yet somehow I doubt whether a separation could bring you anything but sorrow and loneliness.
Your mention of ‘companionship’ is key – because that is worth so much. So instead of thinking about a solitary holiday or trial separation (How would that work? Where would he go?) you could try hard to mend your marriage. And I don’t think blaming your husband for everything is the way forward.
To me it looks as if both of you need to reframe your life together. Each of you needs to look critically at the lifestyle you are still in the process of creating, talk seriously with no blaming, then make a mutual vow to improve it.
His faults are clear; I’m always shocked to read that a husband doesn’t offer his wife even the barest minimum of attention, like choosing something nice for her birthday. I always wonder what on earth is wrong with these slackers? How come you let him get away with it?
I’d kick up hell if my husband didn’t bother to get me a present, even if small. But yours has been rewarded with special meals on his birthday!
Since you say you organised everything in your married life, I’m imagining the decision to move abroad was yours. Your husband doesn’t sound dynamic enough to make it.
But now when he attempts to enact the rural dream by growing vegetables, you dismiss his efforts as a waste of time. That must make him feel rather small.
You may well be right that it’s easier to buy at the farmers’ market, but I can’t help thinking it might be better to find out what grows well where you live, how you could use that produce in your cooking – and do some gardening and cooking together.
Help him prioritise other jobs. Praise what’s ‘useful’ and make some demands. The pattern you never developed before is sharing as well as caring. This is the time to start.
Dear Bel,
A close relative of mine died a decade ago, and only recently have I found myself feeling triggered by memories I’d buried for years.
He was the patriarch of a large family all of whom speak warmly of his kindness, generosity and devotion. But my experience was very different. There was no public scandal, no violence, but a quiet abuse I’ve never told anyone about and don’t want to go into detail about here.
I’ve kept silent all this time. To speak honestly would shock and distress others who hold his memory dear. Yet I feel uneasy participating in what feels like a collective rewriting of history. Those who praise him knew a different man to me.
Is my silence a kindness – or a betrayal of integrity? Must death erase the truth? I’m not seeking revenge or validation, only struggling with the moral discomfort of honouring someone who caused me harm.
Is it possible to let the dead rest without lying about who they really were?
Mark
Bel replies: In the superb funeral speech given by Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar we hear this: ‘The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.’ But stop to think for a moment, and isn’t the opposite also true?
We prefer not to speak ill of the dead as they have no voice to defend themselves. Therefore it seems fairer to remember the good things they did, rather than the bad.
You write from painful, personal experience and I am so sorry to read of the past trauma which has surfaced within these memories. At the same time, I wonder whether other members of that large families might actually share them.
There is no way you can know for sure. They too might have secret knowledge about a very different sort of man – know, like you, that a myth has been accepted which isn’t the whole truth.
Or maybe they recall his ‘kindness, generosity and devotion’ while simultaneously aware that different persona co-existed with the good one. This is what Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is about. The gothic-horror story exposes the conflict between good and evil within one person – in other words, the duality of human nature.
You ask important philosophical questions about keeping silent vs the truth. It’s not easy to answer but my feeling is that, in this case, your personal feelings, your integrity, should be balanced against the good or harm that could be done by revelations.
It seems clear to me that you don’t want to ‘shock and distress others who hold his memory dear’. And it’s important also to weigh the damage that could be done to you, were you to allow a sense of righteous indignation to prevail.
Many people have skeletons in their closets – a memory which shames us – and we rejoice that nobody knows.
My instinct is to advise you to let the dead rest in peace and to realise that silence is not necessarily complicity – but self-preservation as well as tact.
If you continue to feel tormented by flashbacks, you might consider talking to a professional, in confidence, to work through what happened and try to lay your painful memories to rest.
And finally… my travels to bear witness to horrors
I’m sorry I wasn’t here last week but we took a rare holiday, on the River Danube, cruising from Passau to beautiful Budapest. It seemed amazing that in one week we could set foot in Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary – flying visits, of course, but fascinating nonetheless.
Among many memories, two things stand out in my mind. First, near Linz in Austria (which Hitler considered his hometown) is Mauthausen Memorial site. This was one of the most brutal and severe of the Nazi concentration camps; prisoners suffered not only from malnutrition, overcrowding and constant abuse and beatings, but also from exceptionally hard labour.
We saw the terrible quarry where they were broken and killed, the gas chamber, and the heart-breaking ‘Room of Names’ honouring the thousands of dead: political enemies of the Nazis, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and (of course) the Jews, who were treated with the worst brutality.
You might think that doesn’t sound like holiday fun, and you’d be correct. But we need to bear witness to what can happen in plain site of ‘innocent’ communities all around. Extremism and collusion can happen all too easily within societies. Mauthausen made me weep and rage – the only possible response. I shall never forget it.
It’s happier to recall the national pride of guides in (especially) Bratislava and Budapest. We heard how students and workers rose up against the Soviet oppressors and how the end of Communism enabled Slovakia and Hungary to be reborn.
I loved their delight in their own culture, their wish to protect it, and the welcoming patriotism that made me suspect they were rather sorry for us tourists – born elsewhere.
It was genuine, unforced and I couldn’t help but wish we had more of it here.
