The Personals
Brian O’Connell
The Personals reveals how classified ads are not just a few commercial lines of text in print or online – they can be a treasure trove of fascinating human stories; stories of love, loss, loneliness, redemption and hope. Some people do Sudoku, others watch Netflix. Brian O’Connell loves the classified ads. In an era of spin doctors and press releases, celebrities and social influencers, the classified ads can open a door into the lives of ordinary people with extraordinary stories. What draws Brian to the classified ads are the intriguing human stories he finds there, the unexpected twists and turns, the personalities, the curious objects and the range of human experience waiting to be discovered. The Personals is a diverse collection of compelling stories about the people and the lives behind the small ads.
(#u02bac65b-4738-563e-9594-7c57dd2d8310)
Copyright (#u02bac65b-4738-563e-9594-7c57dd2d8310)
In order to protect privacy, some names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
FIRST EDITION
© Brian O’Connell 2019
Illustrations © Micaela Alcaino 2019
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Cover images © shutterstock.com
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Brian O’Connell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008321345
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008321352
Version: 2019-09-06
Note to Readers (#u02bac65b-4738-563e-9594-7c57dd2d8310)
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008321345
Dedication (#u02bac65b-4738-563e-9594-7c57dd2d8310)
‘Just for a second, I thought I lost myself,
And I watched my body falling,
And all the colours look brighter now.’
Brian Carey, RIP
Contents
1 Cover (#u4bee3e60-711c-5eea-a55a-4be8990ebb56)
2 Title Page
3 Copyright
4 Note to Readers
5 Dedication
6 Contents (#u02bac65b-4738-563e-9594-7c57dd2d8310)
7 Introduction
8 PART ONE: LOVE AND LOSS
9 When East Meets West
10 A Ringless Marriage
11 A Dress for the (Middle) Ages
12 A Chance Encounter of a Shocking Kind
13 A Long Engagement
14 Addicted to Love?
15 A Marriage Worth Waiting For
16 PART TWO: EQUIPPED FOR LIFE
17 The Car That’s Bulletproof
18 For Your Eyes Only
19 Running Up That Hill
20 PART THREE: PETS’ CORNER
21 A Monkey Is for Life – Not Just for Christmas
22 Finding Shangri-La
23 Making It Pig in Hollywood
24 PART FOUR: ARTICLES OF WAR
25 Married to the Past
26 ‘Grow Wheat – The Crop That Pays’
27 Zen and the Art of Phone Box Maintenance
28 Engineering a Step Back in Time
29 The Weight of History
30 PART FIVE: SENTIMENTAL VALUE
31 Rekindling a One in a Million Chance
32 Remains of a Detached Day
33 Giving a Doll’s House a Home
34 PART SIX: COLLECTORS
35 ‘We Are Collectors ... and We Will Die as Collectors’
36 Signing the Past Away
37 PART SEVEN: LOST CAUSES?
38 Being Frank
39 Building a Bigger Shrine
40 PART EIGHT: THIS MORTAL COIL
41 Meeting a Man About a Hearse
42 Plotting a Way Out of Grief
43 PART NINE: SIGNS OF THE TIMES
44 Nursing Hidden Desires
45 Cut-Price Counselling
46 The Homeless Hotel
47 Making Study Pay
48 Acknowledgements
49 About the Publisher
LandmarksCover (#u4bee3e60-711c-5eea-a55a-4be8990ebb56)FrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter
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Introduction (#u02bac65b-4738-563e-9594-7c57dd2d8310)
The story goes that Ernest Hemingway and a few of his literary pals were knocking about the Algonquin Hotel in New York one night in the 1920s, before they had the joys of social media to help them avoid conversation, and they began challenging each other to write a novel using just six words. Cutting a long story short, Hemingway is said to have won hands down with the words: ‘For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.’
He’s reputed to have said that those six words were the best he ever wrote. They are loaded with life experience, love, loss, death and hope perhaps; a six-word portal into lived experience that Dorothy Parker or William Carlos Williams might have been proud of. The only problem is, while this sounds a plausible story that has been handed down over decades as literary fact, it probably never happened – or if it did happen, it almost certainly predated Hemingway and his bohemian clique. An essay about a similar short story by William R. Kane appeared in 1917 and a newspaper column by R. K. Moulton in 1921 pointed to an advert he had seen: ‘Baby Carriage for Sale: Never Used’ and informed his readers that it embodied the plot of a story. The Hemingway anecdote probably evolved over time, as a literary agent more or less admitted decades later when he said that he had first heard the story from a newspaper syndicator in the mid-1970s, more than a decade after Hemingway had died.
The point is that classified ads have long held fascination as a rich source of human experience and stories. When starting out in journalism in local media, I remember staring out of the window on a dreary Tuesday morning, stuck for story ideas for that morning’s pitching session. I shared my frustration with an older editor, who told me to try the small ads. So I did, and I have returned to them again and again in the two decades since as a source of stories.
In an era of PR handlers and press releases, of government advertising camouflaged as journalism, and carefully chosen interviewees who are sometimes over-coached and underwhelming, the world of classified ads, both online and in print, offers an unfiltered window into society.
I’ve spent almost two decades in journalism, and something interesting has happened in that time. People have never put as much of themselves out there as they do today, whether through social or digital media, or by sharing their stories or ‘opening up’ in more traditional media. There have never been so many filters or gatekeepers trying to shape those narratives. Sometimes an interviewee may have shared their story online, had a media training workshop, or may already possess a ‘them and us’ mentality about journalists and the media in general before I even get to speak to them. Some of that mistrust is warranted, and very healthy of course, but there’s also cynicism in a lot of encounters, and many more competing agendas than previously when I sit across from someone and press record.
When using Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook live, video and audio messaging we are all much more aware of how we project ourselves than ever before. As a result, people often display a caginess and deep self-awareness of how they conduct themselves during an interview. One contradiction I’ve come across is that the more people are willing to expose of their lives online, the less personal and intimate they may want to be in one-to-one encounters. Authenticity can become a casualty, chance encounters become less likely and conversations without agendas are at a premium.
Hopefully, because of all that, you can see why personal ads – and the people and lives and secrets and stories and heartbreak and quirkiness that sometimes lie behind them – are so appealing to this fortysomething and somewhat sentimental hack, and why I thought they would work well collected in a book. The ads allow me to move away from the managed world of spin doctors and carefully planned media campaigns to a less self-conscious world – one that I think is at times more authentic.
Of course, part of this book is about items for sale, but that section is also about the off-piste moments when an ad for a ring turns into a discussion about dementia, or a poster for sale reveals the struggles of independent shops in rural Ireland. These ads also show how letting go of an item becomes a lesson in how to own your grief, or how living with and then discarding addiction can paradoxically set you free. Classified ads brought me into people’s lives for no other reason than the fact that they let me in. There were no PR agencies, no communication strategies, no media advisers and no campaigns wrapped tightly around case studies. As they say on Judge Judy, the stories are real, the people are real!
On a basic level, I’m also drawn to these ads because they throw up some humdingers of stories. The excitement for me, and I hope for you reading this, is going from a few lines of text to the trenches of the First World War, or getting an insight into the complexities of a relationship break-up, or the obsessive mind of a fixated collector – or simply capturing a time or a story or an experience that would otherwise not be documented.
When I was about halfway through researching this book, my wife peered into my office and saw me sitting with my feet on the desk, steaming cup of tea in hand, scrolling through a list of ‘never worn’ wedding dresses for sale. The slightly worrying thing is that she didn’t bat an eyelid. My obsession with classified ads is really an obsession with people’s lives and stories – the ads are just a doorway through which I stick my head.
There was a time not long ago when I sourced most of these stories solely from ads in print media – places such as the Irish Farmer’s Journal, Ireland’s Own, The Echo and many broadsheets had extensive classified sections, as well as personal pages. The majority of these ads have migrated online, as sites such as Craigslist and later Adverts, Gumtree and DoneDeal made it much easier to buy and sell in the digital era. And so I have followed suit.
By collating a selection of recent adverts and some I have captured over the last few years, I want to take you down lanes and into homes, into hearts and cluttered minds and tell stories that would not otherwise be told. In all except maybe half a dozen of these stories, I have met the people behind the ads in person, usually travelling to their homes or meeting them in a car or cafe nearby. When that wasn’t possible, or the poster did not want to meet, we spoke at length on the phone or through email.
What draws me into these ads are the personal stories – the reasons for a break-up, how a child collector became an adult one or why someone feels the need to sell a treasured ring that has come to represent something tainted or tragic.
Through the years there have been some important ads that have signalled significant societal change. These were the ads in the early part of the twentieth century looking for ‘good Catholic homes’ for the children of ‘fallen women’ for example, or the aged bachelor farmers looking for girls in their late teens to become ‘life partners’, or those looking for domestic servants, or the emigrants in Australia trying to reconnect with family many decades later. You could write a whole social history on the classified ads of past decades.
Two books worth reading on this are Strange Red Cow, Sarah Bader’s fascinating trawl through the vintage classified ads of US publications, and Classified by H. G. Cocks, an interesting take on how sexuality and society evolved in Britain, again through the prism of the small ads. In his book, Cocks traces the rise of personal ads to respectability, from one of the first ecclesiastical style ads in the fifteenth century through the invention of modern newspapers in the mid-seventeenth century right up to today. One of his central points is that the internet today ‘merely accelerates processes which, when people had to rely on print and the postal service, just took longer to achieve.’ Cocks makes a compelling argument that the small ad was a ‘symbol of everything that was both exciting and dangerous about modern sexuality’ and that the classifieds have been a gateway to all sorts of delights and dangers ever since their invention, showing how ordinary people grappled with love, sex, marriage, friendship and commerce through recent centuries.
All the stories in this book are quite recent and attempt to document snapshots of life in Ireland today. There are also stories and ads which I hope bring history to life – such as the military medals and memorabilia for sale, the nineteenth-century hearse, the impact of mother and baby homes or the frayed match programme for a long forgotten All-Ireland final.
I’ve divided the book into parts and the timeline roughly spans the period from 2012 to the present. In several of the stories, you’ll notice that I haven’t given the name of the person posting the ad and don’t identify where they’re located, or I’ve used a pseudonym. This is at their request and I was happy to proceed on the basis that no one was identified, especially with some of the more sensitive ads. I don’t think this detracts from the account of their experiences.
The way I sourced the material was simple. Most weeks I scoured the small ads in places such as the Evening Echo (since renamed The Echo) or online on DoneDeal. I was looking for hints that there was a story or a life experience worth hearing hidden behind the few lines of text on page or screen.
When I thought an ad had potential I would text the poster, explain that I was interested in the story behind it and ask whether they would take a call. Some thought I was part of an elaborate scam to fiddle them out of their item for sale, while others, particularly those recently bereaved, were very happy to sit and talk about their life experiences.
I’m very grateful to everyone who shared their stories and let me into their homes, or met me in hotels, cafes or parked cars, or took a phone call and spilled their heart out and shared with me intimate details of their life. There was really nothing in it for them; by the time this book is published most of their ads will have long since expired, so it was hugely refreshing to be able to talk to people simply because they wanted to share some of their story with me.
While the ad is a signpost, it’s ultimately the people who drew me in, and the adage that everyone has a story. The privilege for me is in contacting a stranger and shortly afterwards sharing some of the more intimate moments of their life, with no agenda or preconditions. Throughout this process the joy was in finding unexpected twists and turns, lessons learned and the life experiences gained, all trapped iceberg-like beneath a few lines of classified text on a page or screen. Those kinds of discoveries are what brought me back again and again to these stories.
Some people do Sudoku, others binge on box sets; I trawl the classified ads ...
Part One
LOVE AND LOSS (#u02bac65b-4738-563e-9594-7c57dd2d8310)
When East Meets West (#u02bac65b-4738-563e-9594-7c57dd2d8310)
Beautiful wedding and engagement ring for sale. €3,000 or nearest offer. DoneDeal, June 2018
Weeds are growing up through the barriers at the edge of the estate I’m driving through, as Google Maps and I have one of our many disagreements and I circle round at least half a dozen times.
The gravel-filled fields beyond those barriers were once called ‘Phase 2’ on a glossy Celtic Tiger era brochure, probably launched in a penthouse with a rugby player and canapés. Now the scabby site adjacent remains a stubborn scar on the landscape, a reminder that we lost control and that this estate was over-hyped and over-extended until the building came to an abrupt end.
I’m in one of the attractive, three-bedroomed, semi-detached houses which could easily have been the show house. Large candles are lit around the fireplace and there’s one of those evocative black and white coastal prints on the wall. Despite the welcome, it has been made clear to me that I will have to grant anonymity to the seller, because the events which led to the rings being put up for sale were relatively recent and raw. Apart from that precondition, she really wanted to tell her story and had seemed warm and friendly on the phone.
She is a fortysomething woman, and in her sitting room there are clues that she is well travelled – an African mask here, an Asian figurine there. I’m not sure that it’s a house that has seen many four a.m. Christy Moore singalongs; everything seems particularly placed, and because we meet just as she’s come in from work, I assume that the house always looks this gleaming and wasn’t scrubbed for my sake. I also guess that no small children live here – the lighted candles and open bowls of potpourri give this away.
We take a seat on the couch and I can see she’s a little nervous, but also quite open, and in her hand, she flips the lid of a ring box open and closed while we make small talk and I compliment her on the interior. I watch as each flick open reveals glistening stones, while each movement shut smothers the sparkly diamonds in darkness. She tells me that her rings have been in this box since last year and pauses, presumably waiting for me to ask what happened. I hold off as I often do in these encounters. Sometimes the longer you hold off talking about the elephant in the room the louder the elephant will demand to be heard. Also, we’re having tea and the biscuits are really nice.
By way of easing into the story, I ask her to describe the rings to me, which saves me the embarrassment of discussing something I know zilch about. ‘The engagement ring is a solitaire ring and it has encrusted diamonds halfway on each shoulder,’ she explains, thinking about, and then resisting the urge, to put it on her finger. ‘The wedding ring would have the same type of encrusted diamonds. So, this is a band of diamonds and they have the same set on the side. They are stunning rings. I think in total it’s one carat. I initially picked the diamonds and I got them in Dubai and the company that were making them for me called me up to say they had sourced a nicer-quality diamond, and they were looking for permission to put it in. So, it was crafted with great care and consideration and there’s no inscription on them.’
The rings, the box, the inlay cards and the lack of inscription all make it look as if they’ve just come off the shelf from a high-street jeweller. Have they ever actually been on her finger, I ask? ‘Yes, they went on my finger in December 2015 and they came off in September 2017. So just under two years. Do you want to know the story?’
As we continued to chat over tea and Club Milks, it became clear that while parts of this story were about lost love (or perhaps false love), another part was about the pressure to conform. More accurately, it’s about the social anxiety that builds when you get to your late thirties, see your friends marry and partner up one by one, and feel that part of society has its sights fixed on you and that some judge you by your singleness. In reality of course, those who have partnered up and are dealing with early morning Peppa Pig breakfasts are probably so preoccupied with lack of sleep and reducing their mortgage repayments that they barely notice anything except their expanding midriffs and greying hairs.
That insight into single life will come later; for now I ask my host if she would like to tell me how she fell in love. ‘Well, I married a non-EU national, someone from the Middle East, in Lebanon in December 2015,’ she explains, in a voice that’s not so much bitter as rueful. ‘We had known each other a year and a half at that stage. What attracted me to him was his drive and his commitment to working with young people. I share the same values. He proposed to me and of course I said yes to this handsome man.’
And for the first time the nerves are gone and she’s smiling as she recounts their early courtship. Had she any hesitation at the time, I ask? ‘In my naivety, no,’ she says. ‘I had considered motivations briefly; why he would ask someone to marry so quickly, but I would have thought maybe he loved me. I didn’t really question that. I should have.’
After they married, she returned home in late 2015, and after Christmas that year applied for his spousal visa so he could come to Ireland. This application turned into a lengthy and intrusive process during which their relationship needed to be verified, requiring testimony from family and friends that it was a legitimate marriage.
All her family were happy to give their testimony, and all were convinced this relationship was for real. In total, the process cost €4,000. This should have been the starting point for a wonderful life together in Ireland. Instead, it became the point at which their short marriage came unstuck and she felt the gaze of partnered society even more acutely. ‘His visa was refused in August 2017,’ she says. ‘And the day after I told him it had been refused, he told me he was marrying someone else. Just like that.’
Her voice fills with emotion as she tells me this, as when someone recalls a recent bereavement. Two weeks after that phone call she was devastated when it was confirmed that her husband had in fact married someone else. While their relationship had been long distance, he had been to Ireland for a visit, and she had been to his country several times, and they spoke on the phone every day. But a fortnight after she had told him of the visa refusal, her husband’s new wife sent her a screenshot of their marriage certificate. Talk about moving on quickly ...
It’s a difficult question, but I ask her whether she thinks his second marriage was prompted by the visa refusal. After a long pause, she looks at me with reddening eyes and says: ‘Yeah. I think it was just a matter of what will he do next to make life comfortable for himself? I think he was able to draw a line under it very quickly and move on to his next plan. He denied it for a while. His family confirmed he had got married again, and for a while I was bargaining with him, saying, “It is OK; you can remain married to her and remain married to me as well,” – he can have four wives after all, because of his culture.’
Our conversation was taking place 11 months after the break-up and while the wound is still not fully healed, she has moved on significantly. She shakes her head when she tells me about her attempts to bargain with him, and how she considered allowing her husband to have another wife in another country. She recognises this as a sign of her desperation to keep him and their marriage, whatever the cost. It’s totally understandable, I tell her – she’d told all her friends and family, had the big day, made life plans with someone and then, bang, it was all pulled from under her.
‘It was an enormous shock. I was definitely not able to eat for about three weeks,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t even talk about it, to be honest. There was a lot of shame because I should have known better. You read these things in magazines and you see these things on TV shows. And you are saying to yourself, that would never happen to me, how stupid could that person be? But, it’s not until you experience it and are drawn and pulled into it, in what appears to be a meaningful relationship. And then you have utter shame around falling for it. But it happens …’
‘Yes, it happens,’ I say reassuringly. Her vulnerability is clear, and while I can see she has thought long and hard about this whole episode, and has probably spent many nights looking at those log-sized candles flickering and filling the empty space on the couch beside her, the grief has not gone away; she has just learned to adapt to it most of the time.
What’s keeping her anchored to the sailed ship that was her marriage is the fact that she cannot legally divorce her husband, despite the fact that he is living with another woman in another country. ‘I’m not able to divorce him from here,’ she affirms. ‘I don’t want to go over there and get divorced. But I have made enquiries and the only choice I have is to hire a solicitor in his country to do the divorce or else go back to the mosque so he would have to grant it. I was advised not to go ...’
So, while she figures out how to remove herself from the marriage, she is faced with legal bills for the failed visa application, not to mention the costs associated with the wedding, most of which she has borne. The engagement and wedding rings were bought in Dubai. In total they cost €5,000, the majority of which she paid herself. She will sell them for €3,000. ‘They are stunning rings,’ she adds. ‘When they were on my hand, everyone would stop and pick them up and look at the weight of them and remark how stunning they were. You won’t get them on anyone else in Ireland.’
There’s obviously both an emotional and financial catharsis in getting rid of the rings as quickly as she can now. Anyone who has ever been in a failed relationship will tell you it has an impact long after the last tears have been shed. But in a situation like this, when there was no advance warning, and when one party feels they were duped into love, that impact is all the more magnified. ‘I am getting there now but immediately afterwards you do question what men say. You analyse them more now and I guess I’ve to be very careful I don’t bring this into a new relationship,’ she says candidly.
I tell her that her openness and insight and her inherent humanity (which she says is often interpreted as naivety) should not have to become a casualty of this. These are the things I tell her that will paradoxically give her the best chance of falling in love again. There is something likeable about my interviewee. She has warmth and oozes care, compassion and decency. I imagine she is the kind of person who sees a news bulletin about famine in Yemen or drought in Kenya and hits the donate button there and then. But I wonder how much the failed marriage has changed her; how much it has made her less receptive to love. ‘I would be more self-aware now,’ she says. ‘I know I was a little bit naive. But I would prefer this way than to be cynical. I would prefer to be able to fall in love than to always query and question. I think that’s a lonely life. I won’t be too cynical about it. I mean, there wasn’t ever a question of whether I loved him or not.’
Before I leave she carefully puts the rings back in their boxes, and as she’s doing so, I ask what is the biggest lesson she’s learned from the whole experience. ‘I think that it can happen anyone and I think, well, you can beat yourself up about it but I think you can in the future say to yourself, you need to step back from a situation and try to look at it from different perspectives. Some of my friends would have said, you know, are you sure about this? Without overtly coming out and saying I was being duped. I said, of course I’m sure; he loves me, he tells me it. Those same friends have never come back and said we told you so. If you’re hurt to that extent, then you have to reflect on what you have done, what would I have done differently – am I that vulnerable, naive and gullible? You ask yourself all those questions. You question yourself if a man says to you, “You look lovely.” I hate that it has changed me that way, but it’s to be expected, I suppose.’
Does she ever wear the rings now? ‘No. Not any more. They’re not mine now. I hope they go on someone’s finger that will have many years of happy marriage.’
We finish our tea. I tell her that I hope she’s talking to people about how she feels, and she says she has some very close friends and they share. She’s determined not to allow the whole experience to inhibit her or in any way reduce her chances of finding ‘the one’.
Somehow, I think she’s going to be OK and I leave thinking that selling the rings is the manifestation of a need to start again, of choosing deliberately to put what were once symbols of the future firmly into the past.
A Ringless Marriage (#litres_trial_promo)
Vintage wedding and engagement ring for sale; €2,000 or nearest offer. Comes with valuation. DoneDeal, July 2018
I’m early and have parked outside a house in the west of Ireland. I’m sitting in my car waiting for the owner of the above rings to arrive home. Someone is knocking on my car window and wants to lead me into the house. As I follow, a large Alsatian appears and eyes me from inside the open front door. Just then a Land Rover pulls into the drive and a woman gets out, brushes past me and quickly closes the door before the Alsatian bolts. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says, before adding casually, ‘That dog bites.’ She half chides the man who let the dog out, before asking if I want tea or coffee and clearing a space at the kitchen table for us to sit.
I notice that the man is quite self-conscious and I also notice that she’s overseeing his tea making, or at least subtly checking each step while trying not to make it obvious that she is doing so. The kitchen is cluttered – managed clutter, I’d call it – and even though the house is on a main road in a village, outside are a collection of sheds and outbuildings, bales of hay and fields. I’m guessing that they grew up on farms, and this is their way of keeping one foot in the fields, living on the side of a busy road, yet constructing a mini farmyard out back.
There’s a nervousness in the room and some tension. I don’t sense that it’s caused by me or my microphone. I think it’s more the fact that their space is now shared with someone else and they’re very conscious of that. As cups of coffee are served the man gets closer to me without saying anything, as if he is afraid to say the wrong thing. And then I notice the box on the windowsill behind the sink. Every day of the month has a little window and some are open, advent calendar like, while others are unopened. Inside are red and white pills, and the day and date is printed on each little portal.
Something clicks, and I’m taken back to an interview I’d done years earlier beside a mountain in Tipperary, with a man and his mother, who was in the final stages of dementia. She kept pleading with me to take her away because she believed he was poisoning her. He wasn’t, of course. In reality he was keeping her alive, and had sacrificed much of his own life to ensure his mother could stay in her own home as long as possible. Her illness meant that she took her anger and frustration out on him every day. She kept saying to me over and over, pointing to imaginary marks on her body: ‘Look what he did to me ... look.’ And there they lived, together and alone at the foot of a mountain; mother and adult son entwined in their love and false hate, their reality and their fiction. Long after I’d driven away from the house they were still with me. They are in my mind now in this half farmhouse, where two adults are reframing their relationship, forgotten fragment by forgotten fragment.
The man’s wife tells me that his dementia and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been a relatively recent discovery, or more accurately, that she didn’t know her husband had been diagnosed until recently. ‘I felt there was something going on,’ she says. ‘He was short-tempered and not totally focused on certain chores we would share. He wouldn’t do them, or he would forget where the keys were. Those things didn’t come in one day – it was over a period of a week. The biggest thing that made me go to the doctor with him was the fact that he wasn’t concerned about how he was dressed. He would forget things. More and more he would forget where keys were or that he put milk in the fridge without using it; silly little things really.’
Throughout these changes her husband didn’t seem particularly bothered, she says. When he got frustrated, he would lose his temper a little and it could be over the smallest of things. For example, if she asked him if he’d put the kettle on and make coffee, he might get a little hot-tempered and react by saying he was always doing it. She believes now that he has had dementia since 2016, and that Alzheimer’s developed after that. He is aware that he has Alzheimer’s, but doesn’t accept that the change in his life is due to the condition. There should be a lot more help and support for families like theirs, she says, and sometimes she feels alone and abandoned by state services. There are practical things that need to be done, such as signing the house over to their children, which he is reluctant to do.
‘He is changing into someone else,’ she says. ‘I could put my arms around him today and say, “I love you”. I could whisper in his ear that we had a great life and sometimes his response will be more measured. He might agree and say, “Remind me again how many years we are together?” But I could do the same thing later in the day, especially in bed, and he will push me away and say, “Stop that now, I have to sleep.” It’s hard to know how he will react sometimes.’
She says he can be very curt and sharp with her, and often if she is upset or crying he won’t stop what he’s doing to ask how she is and will simply walk by, oblivious to her feelings. She tries to continue to treat him as normally as she can, especially in front of other people. It would hurt him if she treated him any differently. Increasingly, she has been taking him with her when she has to leave the house. This is partly because it’s good for him to get out and about and not isolate himself, but also, at least when he is with her she knows he is safe and won’t wander down the road or leave the door open.
Of course she worries about the future, and she worries too about how much longer she will be able to manage the situation. She’s done a lot of research into the condition and she believes that often it follows the personality and character of the person living with it. ‘In general terms, if the person is a quiet gentle partner and takes things in their stride and is easy-going, then often that is how it will be for them,’ she says. ‘My husband has always been active and forthright, like me, and he could lose his temper on certain things, so his illness is a manifestation of that.’
She’s aware that he’s in the early stages of the illness. The medication available can slow it down, and while it does have an impact, she wishes she had known about her husband’s diagnosis sooner. Maybe he forgot to tell her, or a letter from his consultant might have been mislaid. Either way, she feels huge guilt for having arguments with him about forgetting certain things, when all along he had been given the dementia diagnosis and she didn’t know about it.
‘He was the kind of man that if anything in the house needed mending, he was on top of it,’ she says. ‘Now, if a radiator leaks, he will say, “I will fix it” and often it will be leaking even more afterwards. If I say anything, he will blame me for it and tell me to do it myself. I’m telling you all this because it’s not easy and there are significant challenges, and it’s heart-breaking to see someone you love change so much.’
As he tidied up she watched and tried not to make it obvious that she was overseeing what he was doing. We moved to the sitting room, where she produced a velvet pouch and began taking out rings. She was very deliberate in how she handled them, having taken them from an old shoebox which also contained several letters and some other items of jewellery. To my surprise, it turns out that the rings didn’t belong to her. ‘They’re my late mother’s rings,’ she says. ‘And she never wore them.’
The box contained two rings. One was an engagement ring made of 18 carat white gold. To my untrained eye it looked more like yellow gold, but most people would describe it simply as a diamond cluster ring. The wedding ring was also 18 carats, again white gold, and it was more modest than the engagement ring. Both came with their certificates and valuation forms. While she’s connected to them emotionally, I don’t get the sense that they are treasured deeply. There’s something in the way she holds them in her hand – the casualness perhaps, or the fact that there’s a firm-handedness in her movements with the rings. When I suggest this, she corrects me. ‘They do mean an awful lot to me,’ she says, ‘but I can’t keep them because I think they are better off on somebody’s finger, rather than just shutting them away in a safe.’
When she told me that they had been her mother’s and never worn, of course I thought of all sorts of heart-breaking reasons why. But she tells me that her mother had gone ahead with the marriage. In fact, it had been her second marriage. And the reason she hadn’t worn the rings was fairly simple – she had still been in love with her first husband. How had her second husband responded to that? ‘He respected it. You see, my parents loved each other very much, but they couldn’t live together. The marriage was very difficult when they were living together but they became best of friends after they divorced.’
We’re talking here about the mid-1970s, when the seller’s mother had remarried. At that stage, she had been separated from her first husband for about six years. Sadly, she passed away some years ago in a nursing home in England, while the seller’s father moved to Eastern Europe, where he also remarried. While they were both alive, they had kept in touch. And the last time her mother and father actually met each other? ‘It was at my brother’s funeral,’ she tells me. ‘He had a heart attack and died suddenly. My father came home and he stayed alongside my mother at the funeral, sitting really close beside her. It was clear the connection was still there. I think they both had the same type of character and personality – the same type of short fuse.’
Telling me the story of her parents’ divorce and their subsequent friendliness towards each other, she says she doesn’t want to over-romanticise it. It’s not just the story of two people thrown together and then pulled apart and yet still there for each other at the end. Her parents had separated after a period of time when the arguments between them became worse as their children moved through their teenage years. She doesn’t want to go into it too much, but those years left their mark and did have an impact on her in later years. Luckily, when her mother remarried, her daughter always got on very well with her stepfather. She describes him as a fantastic man, and totally in love with her mother.
‘He was a gentleman. A small man. Very, very polite and very gentle,’ she says. ‘He loved my mother so much. He would do anything for her. When she started getting ill, he gave up his job and he waited on her hand and foot. He would buy her anything, take her wherever she wanted to go. And when she had to go to a nursing home, he gave up work and went and sat with her every single day. He absolutely idolised her.’
When the man had given her mother the engagement and wedding rings now on the table in front of me, what did she do with them if she didn’t wear them? ‘She had a chain,’ her daughter tells me, ‘which I have, and she put the two rings on a silver chain and put it around her neck. And she went through the rest of her life with no rings on her fingers. I also have her first wedding rings. These ones are too valuable to be just left in a safe. To me these two rings are beautiful but I don’t feel the same connection with them as her first wedding rings. I idolised my stepfather but he has also given me the right and the blessing to sell them.’
The rings are now for sale for €2,000. She would be thrilled to get €1,500 for them and to know that they have been given a new lease of life. I tell her I admire her for putting them up for sale. Her mother had made a defiant stance in not wearing them and she is now making another by selling them. Why be weighed down by the past? If she does succeed in selling them, the money is already accounted for, she tells me. ‘I will buy my mother a little plaque which has a mother’s verse on it and I want to put it on her grave from her children.’
So far she’s had a few offers but won’t let the rings go for much below the asking price. I ask her finally whether she’d ever talked to her parents about the years she lived with them when they were having difficulties in their marriage. ‘I did,’ she tells me, ‘I spoke to my father. I didn’t get a chance to speak to my mother. He always said he would keep a special place in his heart for my mother and he respected her and he said it was such a pity they could not live together. He is 86 years old now and lives in a different country, but he always advised me to never go to bed on a row.’
She keeps this in mind, even with the added difficulty of caring for her husband during his illness. The years ahead will be uncertain, so now feels the right time to break with the past, and move on. She’s hoping for the right buyer and will be slow to let the rings go to a dealer or speculator. ‘Even though my mother never wore these rings, there is a lot of happiness in them,’ she tells me. ‘They just need to find a home now.’
A Dress for the (Middle) Ages (#litres_trial_promo)
For sale: beautiful medieval-style wedding dress. Never worn. Evening Echo, 2014
Jane lives in a small two-up, two-down in Cork city with her husband and two cats. She studied history at university but a series of illnesses meant that she had to give up her work as a part-time tutor. Two days a week she now works from home – a job, coincidentally, that she found through the classifieds. Jane always wanted a traditional church wedding, but her fiancé wanted something less conventional and more ‘out there’. They compromised and decided on a medieval-themed wedding in a church. Jane ordered her dress, a medieval satin designer gown, from a designer in the United States.
So far so good, but as the day of the wedding grew nearer, the pressure of getting married got to the couple. Ireland was still clawing its way out of recession and the lack of credit on offer from their bank meant they were worried about getting into more debt. Her fiancé had to travel long distances for work so they spent more and more time apart. After weeks of discussion the wedding was postponed.
As you can imagine, the couple and both their families were devastated. ‘My dress was made of cream velvet with large bell sleeves and a criss-cross design in the front and back,’ Jane explains. ‘We had it all planned and everything and for one reason and another it didn’t take place and we put off the wedding for a while.’
Thankfully, this story does have a happy ending and the couple ended up having a medieval blessing on Cape Clear Island in summer 2013. Jane wore a more casual medieval dress for the occasion and her husband dressed as a knight. He wore four patches of colours and a long gown and both arrived at the ceremony carrying large swords. The blessing came from an old Viking text and two ‘druids’ performed the ceremony using ancient stones. ‘We even have an official medieval certificate,’ says Jane. And even though they are both medieval enthusiasts, and her original wedding dress is now up for sale, she says she hasn’t given up hope of a more traditional church wedding at some point in the future. Maybe without the swords.
A Chance Encounter of a Shocking Kind (#litres_trial_promo)
White gold band valued at €4,950. Will sell for €1,000. Also, 18-carat cluster diamond ring. Brand new, barely worn. Valued at €7,000. I will sell for €1,000. Evening Echo
Was €12,000 worth of jewellery for sale for €2,000? It seemed almost too good to be true. ‘I need the money because my son needs orthodontic treatment,’ the somewhat hesitant voice at the other end of the phone tells me. ‘So I thought, time to sell the rings.’
Even though reductions in value are expected in the classifieds, this seemed an extraordinary bargain. I was curious about the price drop, but also the fact that the ad had been placed in the Evening Echo and not online. Putting an ad like this online means adding pictures, while a print ad allows greater anonymity and a discreet sale. The words ‘brand new’ and ‘barely worn’ coupled with the low price gave me a strong feeling that there was a story to be told. Initially the seller wasn’t sure if she’d feel comfortable meeting me, but a few days after I made contact we did agree to meet.
The interview took place in the car park of a shopping centre and had taken half a dozen phone calls to arrange, including one from a friend of hers checking me out, before it was agreed. I’d given her my car description. When I got there, I scanned the faces exiting the shopping centre to see if I could pick her out from the crowd. Although I’m hopeless at this sort of thing, I find it a useful exercise to try to acknowledge any stereotypes or prejudices I may have before an encounter – even those I’m not conscious of holding.
The seller is a very private person, and it turns out that she has been through a lot in a short space of time. Her experiences have meant that her trust in people she doesn’t know, and even in people she does know, has been eroded and is pretty much shattered.
I’m guessing that she’s in her early forties and she’s of slim build and attractive, with a natural curiosity and an obvious intellect. She sits in the passenger seat of my car, remarking that this is all very strange and she doesn’t know quite what she’s doing here. On one level it is strange to sit in a car with someone you don’t know and tell them some of the more intimate details of your life. If I can’t meet people in their homes I tend to interview them in my car – sound-wise, it works well and there’s a nice informality to it. I sometimes ask interviewees to imagine that we’ve done the school run and met at the school gate and then they’ve sat in the car to shelter from the rain for a chat. Then off we go ....
The rings had been given to this woman by her former partner. The relationship ended a long time ago and in her own words, ‘Any emotional attachment is long gone.’ She says this in a way that’s definite, not as if she’s trying to convince herself of something, but stating it with certainty and with, to use that awful American phrase, a certain amount of ‘closure’.
She tells me that she was in a five-year relationship which produced two children, and as she begins to go into what happened, her hands clench tightly, perhaps mirroring the twist in her stomach, as she revisits what was an incredibly painful time.
She points to the entrance to the large shopping centre. One day, when her daughter was just one, this woman was walking through a clothing store. Another woman passed her and as she did so, she stared at her child. She could see that this passer-by was visibly taken aback. This woman said the child reminded her of her own toddler, who had died a few years previously. In fact, she said, ‘She is the spitting image of her.’ It was an odd encounter, but both parents chatted away and when the stranger asked her the child’s father’s name, things took an incredible turn.
‘I told her my partner’s name,’ she says. ‘And to my utter shock, she said that was the name of her partner and the father of her child also.’ I repeat this slowly so I can process it. ‘So out of the blue a woman walked up to you in the shopping centre opposite and said that your child reminded her of her own who had died?’ She nods, sharing my incredulity. ‘And then it turned out that the children shared a father and you knew nothing about this second family?’
She again nods her head in agreement at the unlikely coincidence. ‘I was dumbstruck,’ she tells me. ‘In that moment, I would possibly have overlooked the fact that he had had a previous relationship that he hadn’t told me about. But the fact that he had a child that died, and he didn’t tell me about it – that’s hugely traumatic.’
The second woman produced a photo of herself, her daughter who had died and the child’s father – all three of them together. ‘She was like my daughter’s twin sister,’ she tells me, before adding angrily, ‘How could he keep it a secret?’ When confronted, his excuse was that he had put his previous family to the back of his mind because of the trauma of losing his child. ‘It was something he wanted to forget about as if it didn’t happen,’ she says.
Some people choose to bury trauma and loss in this way and not share it with those closest to them. But by doing that, they run the risk of the trauma contaminating the good in their lives. While the person opposite me is humane, caring and compassionate, when she realised that her husband had had a previous family she knew nothing about, her first thoughts were not about how deeply his daughter’s death must have hurt him if he felt that he had to hide it; she was more concerned that he may have been keeping something else from her. ‘So, then I just said, no, let’s go our separate ways. This is too bizarre. I was heartbroken at the time, but I’m over it now. I think I dodged a bullet, to be honest.’
She’s reluctant to tell me much about her former partner. There is little contact between them now and the fallout from the revelation and the subsequent breakdown of her marriage have made her wary of people. She couldn’t contemplate continuing with the relationship once her trust had been broken so fundamentally. The rings, like her former marriage, mean very little to her now. The break-up of her marriage has had other implications, and finding things tough financially, she decided to put the rings up for sale. Any money she receives will be invested in her children’s future.
Despite the fact that she has been open about much of the detail, I have a sense that she is holding back large portions of her story. Perhaps this is a coping mechanism to prevent herself from being re-traumatised – and who could blame her?
Her phone flashes, signalling that her children are ready to be collected. I wish her well. Before she gets out of the car she turns to me: ‘See, I told you there was a story, didn’t I?’ she says, before opening the car door and running to embrace her younger child.
A Long Engagement (#litres_trial_promo)
Stunning wedding dress for sale, size 12–14, never worn. DoneDeal, September 2016
‘This is the one for sale,’ Betty Hornibrook tells me, through the sound of crumpling plastic wrapping, as she removes a large dress from the wardrobe of the spare bedroom in her mid-terrace house.
The front door opens downstairs and she gestures to me to lower my voice while spreading the dress on the bed and flattening it. ‘It’s a halter neck, right,’ she says, in a strong Cork city north side whisper. Carefully, she removes the wrapping to reveal a white dress embellished with beautiful beading. ‘You can see the way it falls and the back can be adjusted,’ she adds. ‘I got it custom made to flatter my figure a bit. When I tried it on – I am 52 years old – I realised I was too old for it. I was like mutton dressed as lamb.’
We’re whispering because Betty’s partner doesn’t know she has a dress for sale. He doesn’t know she bought it, and he definitely doesn’t know that it’s a wedding dress, complete with shoes.
And so I make an educated guess that he probably doesn’t know about my microphone either, or the fact that I’m upstairs in his home looking at dresses with his life partner. Suddenly I have visions of a six-foot two-inch man, perhaps a former Ford or Dunlop worker, walking up the stairs and seeing his partner and me rummaging through her sock drawer while fumbling for an explanation. In fact, he keeps himself to himself, while I silently try to work out how many bones I’d be likely to break if I had to hurl myself out of the spare bedroom window in a hurry.
Long before we met, Betty had spent hours admiring the dress when it was hanging in her local bridal shop, before finally choosing it, getting it altered and then taking it home and concealing it in the wardrobe. Some time afterwards, when she was on her own in the house, Betty took it out and decided to try it on again. All her wedding dreams, which I later learned had built up over more than three decades, were ruined in that moment when she looked at herself in the mirror. She experienced a flash of clarity when she saw how she looked and made the distinction between reality and fantasy.
‘This is a wedding dress to go with an image I had in my head when I was 20 or 30 years old,’ she says, reflecting on that moment. ‘So I think I am stuck in a time warp and that the mind is not living in the present.’ Pointing to her head, she says: ‘Up here I’m 30. But the body is 52 and there’s no getting away from that. When they are measuring you in the bridal shop, you feel like a million dollars, but then when you get home and you look at yourself properly in the mirror, well, it wasn’t me – you know what I mean? It’s going to be gorgeous on someone else, but it just wasn’t me, like.’
And that really sums up ageing, putting on clothing in your fifties that you would have worn in your twenties, and expecting to look and feel the same but realising that you can’t or won’t. When Betty looked at herself in the mirror wearing her newly-bought wedding dress, she didn’t see herself looking back at her. She saw three decades, two children and three grandchildren in her reflection. Many of us never get that insight, but Betty, who worked hard all her life, left school young and has only ever had one real boyfriend and partner, got all that insight in a split second. The problem was, that insight came at a cost – and a non-refundable one at that.
As with a lot of wedding dresses, because it was custom made, Betty can’t return the frock. When we met in late 2016, the wedding was planned for February 2017. The original price of the dress had been €1,600, but it had been reduced to €800 when Betty bought it, and now, weeks after taking it home, she was selling it for €250 or, as she said, ‘The best offer I can get.’ As I said, insight costs.
Have you had many calls I asked her? ‘You’re the first call I’ve got,’ she says. I’m not sure I have the hips for it, I joke, and Betty seems somewhat resigned to the fact that she’s stuck with this wedding dress she no longer wants.
There is a second part to this story, as there often is with unworn wedding dresses for sale. Betty did buy another dress, and it’s one that she feels more comfortable in. She dives into another wardrobe to retrieve it, like a heron on the Lee seizing its lunch, and she takes it out and shows it to me. Now, I’m no Vera Wang, but to my eye it did look more streamlined – classier, I would say – and although I’m really stretching my wedding attire knowledge to the limit here, not so typically bridal.
In terms of the backstory, you might be forgiven for thinking that at 52 perhaps Betty is on her second marriage, or maybe she just never found the right partner, or perhaps she is a widow. But her reason for getting married in her fifties is more complex. We’re still whispering as Betty continues to speak passionately about the dress on her bed. So much so, wide hips or no wide hips, I’m really coming round to the idea of buying it myself, I tell her. We both laugh and then she hushes me. We have to call a halt to the whispering, I tell her. I mean, what’s the big deal – surely her partner knows all by now?
‘No, he doesn’t even know I have two dresses, right? He. Doesn’t. Even. Know. I. Have. Two. Dresses,’ she says, emphasising each word the second time round.
‘You’re 52,’ I say, ‘and he’s what age?’
‘He’s 58.’
‘You’ve been engaged how long?’
‘For 35 years.’
Three and a half decades of an engagement. Fair enough, we all like to test out a product before buying it, but this is taking it a bit far, surely? Betty laughs. All round the house are photos of her family which she shows me with pride. She’s open and friendly, and happy to go into the story of what must be one of the longest engagements in Ireland.
The story starts in 1982 when Betty and her partner first got engaged. She was 17 and her fiancé asked her father if they could get married. ‘My father chased him and said get out of it. You’re too old. She’s too young,’ Betty explains. ‘You see, my sister had got married the year before and so my father was after a big wedding, and he wasn’t going throwing more money at another one so that I would end up back home again, as he saw it. But I didn’t come home, did I? We just moved out then and got our own place and the story began from there.’
The 1980s were such a different time, when fathers still had that kind of control over their daughters and could refuse to bless a marriage. And now 35 years on Betty has two children with her fiancé. William is 32 and Scott is 22. She wants me to mention her lovely daughter-in-law, Audrey, and the fact that she also has three beautiful grandchildren.
From the age of 17 onwards, Betty had always had it in mind to get married, but life events got in the way. ‘The plan was we’ll do it this time, or we’ll do it that time, but something always came up. So, I think now it’s our time. Food is booked, music is booked and we’re going to have a lovely day.’ I can’t help wondering though, for a couple who have been together so long – for decades, in fact – what difference will it make getting married?
‘I’ll tell you now, he’s my best friend,’ she says, ‘and I’m quite sure I would be his best friend. He understands me and I understand him and we just adore the children and the grandchildren. It has been a lifelong dream of ours and we just want to fulfil it.’ If Betty doesn’t shift the dress, she says she will donate it to a charity. I meet her fiancé briefly as I’m leaving the house, and it’s endearing that he’s not afraid to show his affection for Betty in front of a stranger. She says she’ll tell him all later, as I scuttle towards the exit. Some weeks later I drop in and we laugh and chat about it.
A few months after that, Betty messaged me to say that on 10 February 2017, she and her partner walked to the GAA club opposite their home and had their wedding. All their family were there, including the grandkids, and the bride wore a simple yet classy evening dress. The kind of dress that is timeless. ‘It was,’ Betty says, ‘one of the greatest days of my life.’
Her first wedding dress, by the way, is still for sale.
Addicted to Love? (#litres_trial_promo)
Hand-wrought platinum wedding and engagement rings for sale. Brilliant cut diamonds in a channel setting. Matching set. €7,500. DoneDeal, August 2018
As a single mother with a busy work life, Paula had originally planned that her brother would sell her two platinum diamond rings and that she would give him a commission in return.
She liked the distance this gave her from the transaction, and couldn’t face the thought of walking into one of those ‘cash for gold’ outlets and handing over her jewellery to be examined and valued. She lives in a small community, and felt doing that would make something deeply personal and traumatic become too public.
Thinking back, one of the signs of deepening recession in 2008 was that ‘cash for gold’ counters began appearing in shopping centres with little by way of screens to protect the privacy of customers. I remember seeing four women queueing up in Merchants Quay in Cork to get their rings valued in late 2009, as the recession was taking hold. Having ruled out that option, Paula’s brother persuaded her to put the rings on DoneDeal.
Initially in the months after her marriage ended, Paula spoke to the shop where the rings were bought, and floated the idea of the shop buying them back. Both rings had been custom made but she had thought she could get them turned into something else, or that the jewellers could recycle them into a ring for another person. These were Celtic Tiger-era rings bought for a significant sum so the materials carried value.
‘I had a fair idea of what they cost,’ she tells me. ‘I didn’t know the exact figure, but it was substantial. They meant much more to me than monetary value. I am not really into jewellery but I suppose they were particularly significant in what they symbolised. Now though, they are the opposite of that. They are just metal and stone and I wouldn’t want to even pass them on to my daughter. I just think now they were given to me under false pretences. People always say, “Love is blind”, but now I know what that means.’
Paula is in her early forties and had been in a relationship with her ex-husband for much of her adult life. When we spoke, the break-up was still quite raw. Her voice fragmented with emotion several times during our conversation. The primary aim for her in selling the rings wasn’t really financial gain, but more an emotional one. ‘My husband had an addiction. He had more than one actually,’ Paula tells me. ‘I discovered there was a lot of unfaithfulness before and during the marriage. I realised this early on into the marriage when I found another phone. He didn’t admit to it 100 per cent, but there was enough evidence to go for counselling. He still didn’t admit to it or anything, he just said it was a bit of texting and fun,’ she explains.
Initially, Paula says her husband was very apologetic and reassured her that the phone messages meant nothing. He was proactive in terms of addressing the issues he had and he seemed genuine about doing whatever it took to keep the relationship going. ‘I thought, OK, we’ll go for counselling and it will be fine. Looking back, I was so stupid,’ she says.
Paula thinks her husband loved her for periods of the time they were together, but that commitment and monogamy weren’t a priority for him. ‘Maybe he didn’t want to continue the infidelity. I think actually, looking back, he probably had a sex addiction. That was just one more addiction to add to his list of them.’
Despite the issues she’d identified their relationship continued and Paula soon became pregnant with the couple’s first child. ‘He was so manipulative,’ she says. ‘I was busy and didn’t notice as much and I was easy-going, so I suppose I let things slide, but his drinking got worse, day by day. His addictions were much worse than the infidelity to deal with. Addiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever dealt with.’
This was something I could relate to personally. Fifteen years ago, I had gone into rehab, mainly for alcohol issues, and I subsequently wrote a book detailing both my relationship with alcohol – and Ireland’s too. My life had gone off-piste when I walked into a rehab centre in west Cork called Tabor Lodge. Through intensive counselling and with the help of some fellow addicts who shared some of their journey with me, I began to piece things back together bit by bit. I have been lucky. The closest I have come to a slip was a Baileys’ cheesecake at a wedding a few years ago, and in the decade and a half since rehab I’ve always been drawn to addicts and their stories. It’s tough being an addict anywhere, but it’s perhaps doubly tough in Ireland, a country which arguably stigmatises sobriety far more than active addiction. The bar is set incredibly high for someone to identify as an addict in Ireland. In fact, if anything, all the societal impulses are telling you that you’re not really that bad. As the writer Conor McPherson once told me, walk into a bar in Ireland and the guy at the counter drinking Ballygowan, that’s the alcoholic!
Since I went public about my fraught relationship with alcohol, many individuals and families have contacted me over the years, asking for advice or help with their own struggles. Many are fearful of the societal response to publicly acknowledging their issue and seeking help. This particularly applies to Irish men over a certain age, for whom a large part of their formative experiences may have been framed using alcohol as a buttress. The difficulty for loved ones around addicts is just how deceptive, manipulative and destructive the addicted person can be.
‘According to him, I was the only problem he had in his life,’ Paula says, reflecting on her ex-husband’s outlook. ‘He would probably sit you down and if you didn’t know he was my ex, you would believe everything he says. He is almost a split person. He can be an amazing, charming and really kind person, and then he is awful. So it’s the total ends of the scale, and unfortunately, there was more of the awful behaviour than the nice person as time went on.’
Paula says she tried everything to get her husband to face up to his addiction, even managing to persuade him to go to a rehab facility for an assessment. This did not end well as he wouldn’t accept the opinion of the professionals. ‘I remember his face,’ she says. ‘He was in complete disbelief and then afterwards, he said it was what I said before the assessment that made them decide he was an alcoholic. He was that much in denial about it. He would deny all the affairs, even when a woman came to me and confessed she was with him and she broke up with him because of the guilt. She confessed to everything and he was still denying it to me.’
Denial, 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.’
A Marriage Worth Waiting For (#litres_trial_promo)
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 don’t know what’s going to happen,’ Jean tells me. ‘We’ve been paying half what we should be paying. We can’t do any more than that. It has had a huge impact on our lives. We don’t go out socially and in terms of holidays, we go camping for a week every year. I have a tent I bring with us and that’s our holiday. Financially, we are so much worse off since the recession, but thankfully my kids have grown up so it’s just us and the dog to look after.’
With money tight, and having lived together for quite a while, the big spectacular wedding was not going to work out. So what did they do? ‘We flew to [the Caribbean] and got married there,’ Jean tells me. ‘We took one suitcase and the whole thing cost us €3,800 for two weeks. I left the wedding dress I bought behind and ended up buying another dress for €400 – one that I could wear on the beach because I had outgrown the first one. It was absolutely magical.’
Feck off recession, in other words.
By the time Jean got married for the second time, she was well over 40. Her first marriage had lasted over a decade, and while she and her current husband have been married for several years, they have been together a lot longer. There’s a reason they had to wait so long to get married which I’ll come to, but looking back, Jean is now able to see clearly why her first marriage failed. ‘I was very young when I got married first time,’ she tells me. ‘Too young, to be honest. I was 19 years of age going on 20. I only knew him about eight months. My own mother got married at 17, so it was the done thing back then. I was in love and he was my first serious boyfriend.’
Jean’s father had died when she was 17. He had still been a young man. Looking back on it she says she endured a very controlled upbringing in which her father had a strong hand in her personal life, something that’s probably totally alien to today’s teenagers. This meant she had to be in bed most nights at 9 p.m. and had very little choice to do anything socially. So when her father died, she naturally responded to her newfound freedom.
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