PicoBlog

A few weeks ago, I kept reading posts on Twitter that included top ten lists of “how to live your best life” that invariably included the suggestion to marry well.

Every time I read that imperative, my heart sank and it took me back to the bitter few years I lived in my early 30s when I thought I was in love and married a guy that was all wrong for me and for whom I was all wrong. This is the story of my brief marriage and the lessons I learned from that colossal failure.

In late May 2004, I found myself in the Kingdom of Bahrain, a small, beautiful archipelago in the Arabian Gulf. I was in Bahrain to start a job as a senior legal counsel at a pay-satellite TV company. It was a big and prestigious job and I finally felt like an adult, after spending my 20s in Scotland studying English Language and Literature at St. Andrews and Arabic and Law in London. I had had a very painful breakup in my mid-20s and then some meaningless relationships after that. As I approached 30, I felt increasing anxiety that I might be left on the shelf.

Despite my insecurities about being 30 going on 31 and alone, I was OK with being alone. The break-up I had in my 20s made me gun-shy; Craig e refused to let me go, stalked me, harassed me, and sabotaged me. I felt guilty but I couldn’t stay with him, he suffocated me and refused to socialize with me in true old-fashioned macho Scottish fashion. Going to the pub was off limits but behind closed doors, he was demanding and needy. When the boyfriend I had in my 20s wanted to marry me, I ran a mile. I was a wet blanket and my parents didn’t like him for a variety of reasons. The main reason was that, when my family came to St. Andrews to see me graduate, something my family could no longer afford as we had just lost our fortune a few years earlier, when my parents wanted to invite his parents to dinner, he refused to invite them - even though they only lived 30 minutes away. My father, an Egyptian, concluded that he was racist and he was probably right. How could I marry a guy who didn’t accept my family?

I had not yet learned the ability to heal quickly - emotions scared me and pain scared me even more. Now, I don’t like pain, but I’m better at handling emotional turbulence than I was in my 20s. Even though I wanted to break up with Craig, it hurt and it destabilized me for a while. But I enjoyed being free - free of a guy who neglected me and then kicked me in the shins when I had the audacity to leave him.

Still, I had hope. But landing in Bahrain, I had a lot to adapt to - a new country, new job, new people, new culture, new everything - and I had to start driving, too, which I had done exactly 5 times since I got my license 5 years earlier. I was lucky - people invited me places and showed me around. The guy who found me my apartment, Salih, invited me to the British Club, a small but lovely old vestige of Colonial times.

The second time Salih invited me to the British Club, exactly one month after I got to Bahrain, he tried to hit on me. I was not comfortable with it so I quickly decided to go chat up the guy who was swimming laps in the pool. That was Philip, the man I would end up marrying almost 2 years later to the date. The funny thing is, I had dreamt about Philip twice in the week before I met him - so when I studied his face as he later invited me to dinner, I recognized him and I placed too much significance on this fact for the duration of the relationship. I decided that the reason I dreamt about Philip meant that we were “meant to be” rather than it being merely an interesting coincidence.

Philip was Francophonic Belgian. And he was tanned. So I was under the impression that he was dashing. When our date happened a few days later, I was non-plussed during the date but also, turned off when he started asking me how much money I made when he was driving me home. I was disgusted. Despite this instant red flag, I continued to date him. Within a week, he told me he loved me. I felt deeply uncomfortable but I was not yet savvy enough to translate my emotions into words. As we got more serious, he made unreasonable and abusive demands on me. He would freak out if I gained 5 pounds and compare me with impossibly skinny girls. He would insist I wake up at 5 am to go to the gym before work. He moved in and he started drinking heavily, starting popping open beers at 10 am on Fridays, the common weekend day we shared. Philip became increasingly violent and abusive. Philip flattened me and I lost my voice.

Philip’s bad temper and xenophobia got him fired from his job in Saudi Arabia to which he commuted every day from Bahrain over the Causeway. Even though he had saved all of his money and was probably a millionaire by now, he freaked out. If he couldn’t get a job in the region, he would have to leave me. But, despite being a millionaire, he wanted me to come with him to London but only so long as I got a job. He asked me to marry him matter-of-factly and I, stupidly, said “yes.” Once Philip got me as a fiance, he got complacent. He told me indulgently to go choose my engagement ring, but when we went to the shops, he guilted me by saying, “Remember, I’m not working” even though he owned three apartments in Belgium and a secret bank account in Luxembourg.

When I look back at all these little details of my ill-fated relationship with Philip, I wish I had a time machine so I could go back in time and slap my younger self to wake up and run. Indeed, at some of the ugliest moments of that relationship, my intuition did yell at me and it ordered me to “run!” My flight or fight mechanism was now malfunctioning - I guess the byproduct of being repeatedly bullied by him. I was afraid of his temper and afraid of the unholy drama that always unfolded whenever we bickered. It was untenable either way but I was paralyzed by fear and cowardice so when I realized I was making the biggest mistake of my life, I did not know how to change my mind and say no. His family was already busy planning our big princess wedding that they were paying for in Namur, Belgium - including a party in a beautiful castle - that I didn’t have the balls to extract myself. I felt it was too late and it was easier to throw my life away in this bad marriage than to fight for myself - such was my level of cowardice and fear. EVEN THOUGH I had no problems at work as a lawyer, it was like Philip put a spell on me and I was unable to think or speak for myself.

Instinctively, I found a subject to fight with him over - my engagement ring - he had bought me a microscopic diamond that people laughed at me about. When I asked him to upgrade it, he became enraged and refused. We engaged in a battle of wills that found him bringing me a cheap, shitty diamond from the jewelry shop in Schipol after one of his trips back to Bahrain as we were long-distance for about a year before we got married.

We were to get married on July 6th, 2006. Everything went wrong. I had flown to Amsterdam a few days earlier to meet Philip first as he was now working in Groningen, Holland. My dress was too big (I hadn’t gone back to NYC to have it refitted and I had lost the 60 lbs I had gained emotionally eating between the first fitting and when the dress arrived.) FedEx wanted to charge me €1000 in taxes to deliver the dress and luckily my brother negotiated it down to €200. I had to find a tailor in Groningen to fix the dress. My sister, Laura, commented astutely that it was “the curse of the big wedding.©” Indeed, the wedding was a big, glamorous flop.

When we got to Belgium, chaos ensued. My friends arrived and nobody could understand what I was doing with Philip. It seems that desperation makes you blind and his chronic bullying had made me stop caring about myself.

We had two ceremonies - the civil and religious ceremonies. My mother told me after the fact that my sister, Laura, who passed in 2008 (and had better boundaries than I had despite having mental health issues), had wanted to get up and object to the marriage. My mother stopped her and told her, “This marriage will be over in 6 months.”

The religious wedding was a disaster - my dress kept falling down in the church (even though the seamstress had done a reasonable job by affixing snaps on the bodice so it would affix to my strapless bra - it was cotton and in the heat, the cotton expanded and kept falling off of me), the photographer was the morgue photographer in my father-in-law’s hospital, there were millions of strangers I didn’t know, and my own family and friends were ignored. Philip’s mother showed up in her house clothes and decided to use the hand towels in the bathroom in the castle to soak up her sweat, after which, she rinsed them out and hung them up in the bathroom! Philip got blind drunk and ignored me, choosing instead, to hang out with his friends, excluding me. The next day, we went to our honeymoon spot that he insisted on in Normandy, France - I wanted to go to Argentina, but this was too far for him.

It’s exhausting just writing these few paragraphs. It feels like another life altogether. It didn’t take long for our relationship to disintegrate. Christmas of 2006, my mother invited us and his family to a chalet in Galway that she had rented at considerable expense. Philip spent the entire few weeks drunk and belligerent. We fought non-stop. He ruined Christmas. My mother threw out him and his family. It was over. When he left, I hugged him coldly and told him, “You broke me.” He laughed.

I have no proof it happened, just my mother and brother who were there and who can confirm to me it happened when I start to wonder. I ripped up the pictures and I gave away my dress to the local church in Bahrain. It took me a very long time to recover my balance. Because I wanted the divorce, he made me pay for it. Luckily, in Belgium, the divorce laws had just changed so we only needed to be separated for 6 months before initiating proceedings. The church annulment took several years. The last time I saw Philip was in Belgium in 2008 for the finalization of the marriage. He looked like hell. I was free.

How does a book-smart young lawyer with several degrees end up in such a crappy situation? Although I was book-smart, I was not street-smart. And even though I had had boyfriends, I wasn’t very good at managing men or putting my boundaries in place.

What did I learn about marriage?

I learned:

• If your first or second date gives you a reason to pause, don’t continue - for me, Philip asking me about my salary was a huge faux-pas but I continued anyway - first impressions count;

• Talk about your future lives together - how do you want it to look? Are you on the same page? Can you even have a civil conversation without bickering?;

• It’s important to be spiritually compatible - Philip did not believe in God and I’m an ardent believer - we had no business getting married for this reason alone;

• Just because someone proposes to you, and just because you said “yes”, you don’t have to go through with it if things go awry before you say your “I do’s”;

• Take red flags seriously - they will only get worse after the wedding;

• If your intuition is yelling at you, maybe you should listen to it;

• Your friends and society will judge you for your choice of spouse. My mother tells me still that my friends couldn’t believe the choice I had made - and I lost several friends after my wedding;

• Your spouse should be your friend and biggest supporter, not your enemy - if your relationship is already on the rocks before you walk down the aisle, your marriage is probably doomed;

• You should only have kids with someone who is almost completely aligned with your values and who has the same ideas about raising kids as you - Philip and I did not have kids, thankfully, so I remained untethered to him, fortunately;

• Acting out of desperation (as I probably did when I met Philip - we both did) will only lead to disaster, as my ill-fated and short-lived marriage proved;

• You should have the courage to be really honest with your future spouse and yourself - if you can’t have a discussion about tough topics before the wedding, getting married isn’t going to change things;

• Are you on the same page about money? Money was the source of a lot of problems between Philip and me - and although he was generous to a certain point, he was stingy in a lot of ways that I didn’t understand - weren’t we planning to spend our lives together? The engagement ring saga and his demanding that I move to London (“But I will not support you!”) did my head in, as they say in Scotland, and I was too emotionally immature to understand that this marriage was a very bad idea indeed; and, finally,

• Are you all-weather friends? Love and marriage are easy when it’s smooth sailing. But what about when it’s stormy weather? Hurricane season? A tsunami hits? You need to be your best self and have the best possible teammate in case of disaster - otherwise, it will fall like a matchstick house.

Ironically, before the destruction of our relationship and while we still thought we were in love, Philip had a nightmare from which he woke up crying. He recounted that “I dreamt that our relationship was only for Bahrain.” In hindsight, the idea that I had dreamt about him before I even met him (twice no less!) and that he dreamt that our love story was only for Bahrain tells me, from a spiritual perspective, that perhaps Philip and I had a soul contract that was meant to teach each of us valuable lessons about love, marriage, self-respect and so much more.

I still had so many lessons to learn about love and relationships after Philip, but I learned about how difficult marriage is from Philip and that it is not an institution that should be entered into lightly. I have not yet married a second time, if there is ever a second time, I will enter it with the same caution and respect that I enter the ocean on a rough day. Marrying right can set up your life - I see evidence of this everywhere. Contrariwise, marrying wrong can destroy your life and destabilize you unnecessarily. You always have choices and options so long as you’re in the free world.

I heard something recently that really resonated with me - that is, your birthright is to be happy. The default position in any marital relationship should be joy. If your prospective partner inspires angst, discomfort, rage, humiliation, or any seriously negative emotion - or if your intuition is yelling at you to get the heck out of dodge - listen to those whispers from the ethers and save yourself time, pain, and money.

My parents had a turbulent marriage. But they had a true love story. Even now, 21 years after my father’s death, Mom still plays their Leonard Cohen love song and cries. Their love, common belief in God, zest for life, and similar values kept them together. Mom and Dad were the ultimate “power couple” who built a family, bought land in the Hamptons, and built a $120 million fund within the first decade of coming to America. Even though it was hard for them, especially after they lost everything, their love and loyalty kept them together. They married right.

Life is too short to marry wrong.

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