Everything my grandparents taught me about love.
Men and Me #3
In my last instalment of men and me (yes, I am super proud of that subheading, thank you for asking) I revisited some pretty gross memories of Shaun the Spitter, as he has affectionately become known in my DMs. Shaun and all of his saliva led to the realisation that right from my first kiss, I’ve been willing to put up with A LOT when it comes to men. And if you think Shaun was wild, wait till I get some of my later relationships - that’s when the magic* really happened.
*and by magic obviously I mean that they were an absolute shower of shit.
Anyway, I digress. What I’m meant to be doing here is trying to figure out why I am the way that I am.
Why have I seen relationships as something to endure rather than enjoy?
Why have I always found it ridiculously so hard to walk away?
Trying to work out the answer to these questions is keeping me and my new counsellor extremely busy, but I think that going back to the beginning is as good a place to start as any.
And this story begins, as all good stories are want to do, in a two-bed council house in Hartlepool.
Not this house, but like this house.
It was 1986. The perm was in, shoulder pads were hot, and Chernobyl was turning the world radioactive when I was born. Like thousands of other people that decade, my parents took one look at me and thought, ‘she looks like Rebecca.’ (Incidentally Rebecca was the 4th most common name the year I was born. There are tens of thousands of thirty odd year-old Rebecca’s kicking about).
Now you’d probably think that my mum and dad’s relationship would have had a greater baring on my outlook than say my grandparents. And fear not, I’ll get to them at some point (basically once I’ve plucked up the courage to ask them if I can spill our family’s woes all over the internet) but I do, genuinely think that other relationships were as if not more formative. And on that note…
Enter stage right, my grandparents.
All four grandparents were alive and kicking when I was born, and though my mum’s dad died when I was two, he and my Nana (who I freaking loved, top tier Nana right there) had by all accounts a long and happy marriage. Long being the key word here. They’d got married when Nana was seventeen and had been together for five decades. That’s like half a century. Even my Dads’ parents (who I loved an awful lot less to be honest) managed to clock up something like 63 years in the end.
You serve less time for murdering someone these days.
And I think that’s the thing that really stuck with me. The time served. That is, the longevity of these relationships was mentioned a lot and as both sides of my family were Catholic (wait until I get to the nuns) I never actually knew anyone who had split up. Even my mum, who had been married before my dad kept it a secret. I found out by accident as an adult when it’s not really the stuff of decent family secrets is it? Was once married to some other bloke.
Leaving is something that the McCluskey/Ryan clan just did not do. And if we did do it, we hung our heads in shame and didn’t mention it again for decades.
Now, longevity is all fine and dandy, but neither of my grandparents were in particularly happy marriages. My dads’ parents openly hated each other’s guts. Literal visceral hatred. And my Nana (the gold star one) let slip a couple of things which make me think that my grandad did not treat her well at all.
A part of me gets it. Post war life was hard. Everyone was poor. And everyone drank a lot. And heavy drinking sometimes, though not always, leads to violence.
Yet despite all of this, these relationships endured. Clocking up the years one after another like an inmate etching lines to show the passage of time on their cell wall.
Happy days
Don’t get me wrong, longevity can be a determiner of a relationship’s success, of course it can, but surely it can’t and shouldn’t be the only factor.
Or so says me, a woman who has spent most of my adult life in long term relationships, sometimes happily but oftentimes not.
And what’s worse is that I didn’t even realise I wasn’t happy. Like my grandparents, leaving genuinely never occurred to me. It was only once they were all over that I realised how bad these relationships had been for me. I’ve spent chunks of the last few years saying, ‘I just don’t feel like myself,’ and it never once occurred to me that maybe my marriage was part of the reason why.
It’s always been about being in a relationship, whatever the cost. And for the love of god, I need to do things different in the future.
As usual, I am obliged to leave links to my books here. A tin of beans is expensive these days you know…
Time served vs happiness. Fair fair point. Loved it, those pesky beans though...