Reflections on an important personal milestone

Indulge me please, dear reader, for I have reached a personal milestone that means a great deal to me and, well, this Substack is personal politics, after all.

Today, October 8th, marks ten years since I met Brian, my husband. For any couple, a decade of togetherness is an achievement. But for us in particular, the odds of us making it to this point were — at the time of our meeting — slim to none. 

As I wrote about Brian in this Substack right after we got married 18 months ago, “we are living proof that two people with more baggage than a cruise liner, from vastly different worlds, can not just see eye-to-eye, but cooperate and cohabit and love each other.”

Our baggage was heavy. When we met we were in our late 30’s. He had four teenage boys, and a demanding but not well-paid job. I had a little boy who had spent most of his life witnessing terrible fights between his father and me, and heard his father tell me to get out and take him with me, just six weeks before. My son had just started school in a brand new city. He was all of four years old. I had zero financial prospects and we were living out of two suitcases, in a home I had only because I had a friend whose landlord father was willing to let me live there, and a welfare state that paid him on my behalf every month. When I think back on how vulnerable my son and I were at that moment in time, when Brian came into our lives, I take a sharp breath.

Photo taken by my mother, four days before I met Brian.

All the things, like the house and the school, that came together to present me with good fortune in the midst of my life collapsing, I took to be signs that I was on the right path, as hard as it was for me, my son and his father. But few believed that my launching into a new relationship before I had even moved the boxes of my belongings from the apartment my then-husband was living, in half a continent away, was anything other than folly. As my cousin described it at the time, thinking that it would work out between me and Brian was ‘a fairy tale.’ She had every reason in the world to think that. 

Brian and I knew that, of course, and we repeatedly tried to keep it light. We (well, really he) thought of reasons that we shouldn’t be together, and those reasons were myriad and blindingly obvious. He tried to get away at least once. Yet the magnetic force field that had sprung up around us the minute we locked eyes in Belfast’s Crown Bar on 8 October, 2013, was stronger than all rational, valid, and sensible arguments. No man had ever looked at me the way Brian looked at me. I had loved other men, and other men had loved me. But none of that came close to the heat that filled the room when he sat across from me at the table, or the profoundly sweet ease I felt when I placed my head on his chest. I felt bonded to him on a chemical level, owned by him but in the most empowering of ways. Being someone who tends to live in my head and rationalise everything, it was a melding of physical and emotional connection that I had not ever experienced before. 

The ten years between that day and today, on balance, have been more hard than easy. We both had to sacrifice dreams we had held dear, in order to accept the other. One of the most interesting things about this relationship is how it has stayed buoyant even as its two participants had to work through some very dark shit. This has been my first experience in which individual emotional turmoil has not has not brought about the demise of the bond. We both, separately and carrying differing griefs, walked alone through the valley of shadows and the vale of tears — and found the other one waiting on the other side. 

This is the true achievement of a long-term relationship. Building a life together is great, and important, and something to be proud of. But how you manage that life when things around you fall apart, when the person you love is swallowed up by sadness or facing down their own demons, that’s truly impressive. And in my experience, rare. 

When I hear the oft-quoted terrible statistics of children being raised with men who are not their fathers, I feel a profound gratitude that my child is not one of that number. Close as my son and I are, my son loves to see me walk out the door of an evening, if it means that he and Brian are going to have some bro time to bond over violent movies and eat crap food. They have long philosophical discussions in the mornings on the way to school. My son has sharpened his wit verbally sparring with Brian, and when something bad has happened, he goes to Brian for help. When my son was really small, Brian’s boisterous masculinity was just boyish enough to be fun, and grown up enough to be safe. When Daniel was five, Brian taught him to ride a bike without training wheels, a job I had not managed to do successfully. Brian stayed relaxed and upbeat and patient when my son wobbled and fell off, whereas I would fret that he would hurt himself. Brian’s natural ease around children and his enjoyment of their company was immediately picked up on by a little boy who had not experienced that from men before. 

I’ve had three formative, long-term relationships in my life, the kind of relationships that change a person. The first two did a lot of damage but they also provided me with valuable information about myself that was positive as well as negative. These men functioned as sign posts along the way, in the darkness and confusion of youth, that eventually lead to an understanding of myself, and for that I often say a silent prayer of thanks to both of them. All the way back in the late 1990’s, my university boyfriend (with whom I spent the better part of four emotionally torturous years), told me in a letter that I had the ability to “think things through with clarity and a kind of moral accuracy.” Chris, my son’s father and my first husband, showed me where my boundaries were, and in so doing led me away from co-dependency. These are lessons that I rely upon to this day to guide me forward. 

But Brian has taught me what it means to be an adult, to hold yourself responsible for your life, and no one else. He did so not with words or lectures, but by engaging in that same process for himself, which I witnessed, then took note of, and then did for myself. He is not the same man I met, and I am not the same woman he met. We are both so, so, so much better. And that, my friends, is a grown up, middle aged, fairy tale.

He also showed me how much safer you are with an alpha versus a beta male. Like many women raised in a feminist and feminised society, I had absorbed the notion that what I wanted was a ‘sensitive’ man. Turns out, the definition we commonly understood was not at all applicable to men’s emotional health, so we were reading men all wrong. What us ladies had translated into our emotional language as sensitivity, was actually a man suppressing and restricting a whole lot of himself, in ways that (in my experience anyway) tended to rebound on us as resentment and discontent. 

This reflection on the greatest love of my life is overly serious. Because, although you wouldn’t know if from this essay, the greatest joy Brian and I bring to each other is laughter. We make each other laugh every day. Short of building your own fortified island colony, I can think of no better defence against the ever-encroaching, sinister, madness of the world than that.