Category Archives: Diary

Sex differences and their impact on relationships

In recent years there has been a concerted effort to pretend that differences between men and women are entirely the product of socialisation despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

The desire to see men and women as interchangeable pieces comes from the ideals of equality. If we accept that there are differences between the sexes, we have to accept that there may be differences in terms of choices, behaviours and outcomes. This has now led to it’s inevitable conclusion, the deconstruction of sex itself to the point where you have men identifying as female, on the basis that they like things women like or women identifying as men.

Our politicians don’t dare tell you what the definition of a woman is. We no longer have mothers, we have “birthing persons”. We can no longer say “mankind”, it’s “personkind” even though the epistemology of man in this context is actually human, rather than male. Wereman is the original word for man and woman means man with womb if you want to knit-pick language.

Sex differences shouldn’t be things we should be scared of. Different doesn’t mean better. Understanding, and in fact, embracing the differences should aid our ability to empathise with each other, not diminish it. We need to be able to look at the world as it is rather than trying to project onto it what we would like it to be.

However, as much as there are very clear differences in behaviour spread across an aggregate population, it is not cut and dry. Every single person has a combinations of characteristics and some of those characteristics are more common amongst men and some of those characteristics are more common amongst women.

The reason why we are a sex dimorphic species in the first place is because it allows diversity to be introduced into the gene pool. Variation is introduced via the Y chromosome and mutations that lead to an advantage for survival thrive and those that don’t recede amongst the population, be it chimps, fish, birds or humans.

It’s not a question of nature (our genetic code) versus nurture (our environment). It is both interacting with each other in a dance as old as time. There are reasons for the differences, some we understand, some we think we understand and others that we do not.

It shouldn’t be controversial for me to explain but the fundamental difference between men and women is that women have the gift to birth new life into this world and men do not. A gift can also be a curse, there are different pressures on men and women as a result. The pressures change through different phases of life too, from cradle to grave and there is also a great deal of overlap too.

I could talk about these differences all day, especially when it comes to dating choices and behaviour but I want to concentrate on something that is both controversial and important to grasp.

Have you ever heard people bemoan the sexism in women being judged harshly for sleeping around, aka slut shaming, whereas a male exhibiting the same behaviour is considered a stud?

It seems unfair, doesn’t it. A man can sleep with whoever he wants and be praised for it but a woman will be judged. It does sound unfair, until you understand the flip side of that coin and the reasons for it.

Firstly, I would like to point out that it is predominantly other women that will slut shame their peers. I find this true with a lot of the friction between the sexes, very often it’s people of the same sex that are responsible for the majority of the social shaming but it is projected onto the opposite sex. Another example of that is when a man is sexually assaulted or raped by a woman, it’s often other men that will come along with comments like “lucky boy”, “I wish she were my teacher” etc, etc.

Secondly, there is an equivalent of “slut shaming” for men. Have you ever heard comments like these: “he’s not a real man”, “he lives in his mothers basement”, “he’s an incel”.

It’s the same sex-shaming technique but there’s no point calling a man a slut because what you are essentially saying is this man is attractive to women. Instead they imply the opposite, that he is unattractive to women.

Calling a woman an incel, or suggesting no man would sleep with her just doesn’t work as an insult because the reality is, even a very unattractive woman could walk into any bar anywhere in the world and find a man willing to sleep with her. She might not be able to find a man willing to still be there the next morning, to have a relationship with her or to commit, but access to sex is not a problem for women, if they choose to seek it out.

It all comes back to the fact that if a woman has sex with a man, she risks getting pregnant. Pregnancy is a huge drain on a woman’s body, it can even be a threat to her life if it goes wrong. No man is taking that risk by having sex with a woman. He is still taking a risk, but it’s an indirect one.

It makes absolutely perfect sense that women would value their wombs and not want to risk getting pregnant with a man that is not committed to be part of that life journey of raising a child. Deep down, she knows that the best chance she has for her children to thrive is with a dedicated father helping her raise their children together. If you look at the statistics, there is at least a correlation between a strong family unit and positive outcomes for children. I know that’s not what people want to hear, but it is the truth.

This does not mean that single parents are useless and their children are doomed. Sometimes we don’t get a say. A father may die, a relationship might breakdown to the point where it’s worse to stay together than to live apart, he could run away. I am not criticising single parents here when I talk about this topic. There are many single parents that do an amazing job and put their children first all the time and it’s incredibly hard work. All I’m saying is that the optimal scenario for raising children is both a mother and a father heavily invested in their children, bringing the best of masculine and feminine energy to meet the different needs of the child.

Women will always be the gatekeepers when it comes to reproduction. Studies have shown through DNA analysis that 80% of women historically reproduced and only 40% of men did. A tiny minority of men have been incredibly successful in terms of reproduction, thing of historical figures like Genghis Khan. The majority of men become evolutionary dead ends and don’t reproduce at all.

To be clear, this is not a criticism of women or a call out for them to be less selective. There are very good reasons for women being selective. They should be selective. It’s not a good idea for a woman to sleep around, even with modern contraception that makes it possible to separate sex and pregnancy for the first time in human evolution. Our minds have been wired over millions of years for women to be selective and for men to prefer women that are “pure”, biology works on a very slow scale and although technology has changed the interaction between the sexes on a surface level, our mammalian cortex still controls our instinctive behaviour.

Both sexes have two mating strategies. The dominant mating strategy for women is the pair bonding strategy. Find a man that is willing to protect and provide for you. Not just any man but the best man you can find so that your children are higher places in the social ladder than you were. It’s the reason why we see so many relationships whereby the man has greater status than the woman he commits to. He really doesn’t care at all about her earnings or what she has achieved in life. There are always exceptions, sometimes people just fall in love, but when purposefully searching for love, women tend to default to this strategy.

The second strategy is a variation where she will find a man that’s secure and stable and gives her the environment she needs to raise children but she will secretly seek out a higher status male to mate with. It’s the best of both worlds. The higher status male won’t commit but has the best genes. The lower status man fulfils her basic needs but isn’t exciting. If she can convince the husband to bring up the children of the more exciting fling, either through past relationships or by deception, this seems like a pretty good strategy. It’s also known as cuckolding because it’s the default strategy for a lot of birds, such as cuckoos. It’s actually not a great idea long term because children are far safer with their biological fathers than another man that doesn’t have the same biological investment. Also, in the case of deception, it can completely destroy the lives of the child and the deceived partner when they discover their whole life was a lie.

The predominant strategy for men is the same as the one for women, pair bond. Preferably with a younger woman as fertility declines fast in women. Women have a limited number of eggs and the quality declines with age. It makes no sense for a man to seek out a woman in her late thirties or above if his goal is to have a family. If he already has a family or doesn’t want children at all, then that’s different, but most men will find younger women more attractive.

This is often made out to be some form of perversion or creepy but it really isn’t, just as it’s not creepy for a woman to prefer a man that earns more. The sexes value different things in each other, purely because of the pull of biology.

The secondary strategy for men when it comes to mating is the scattergun. Few men have the opportunity for this because women are selective but the men that do tick all the right boxes tend to find they tick the right boxes for the majority of women, therefore they have greater opportunity to sew their seed far and wide. They have little intention to commit, they don’t need to, they’re spread betting.

The fact that these men have slept with lots of women doesn’t diminish from their sexual attractiveness to women, it enhances it. From her point of view, if lots of women want to have sex with him then he has something valuable because she knows that women are more selective.

The opposite is true for men. The more men a woman has slept with, the less attractive she is to a man looking to pair bond. Why? Every man that has had sex with her has left behind his DNA. He’s not just sleeping with her, he’s sleeping with every man she’s ever slept with too. That’s how men see it. They don’t care if it’s just about sex but if it’s about a lasting relationship that he’s going to invest all his energy and resources into, it matters, a lot.

If a woman sleeps around a lot, he will be worrying that she’s going to continue doing that behind his back. He knows about the cuckolding strategy and that’s his worst nightmare, investing all that energy into a child that isn’t his own.

It’s not something that a woman can commonly experience. With the exception of a baby swap at birth or IVF, she knows any child developing in her womb is from one of her own eggs. A man doesn’t have that certainty, and it’s only since the 1980s that we have had the technology to confirm paternity at all.

I’ve heard women say things like “but it doesn’t matter who the biological father is, it takes more than just DNA to be a father”. Well, yes, that’s true to an extent but if you say to her ok, instead of having your own children, why don’t you adopt, suddenly there are more excuses.

There are lots of guys that fall in love with a woman and opt to take care of her children, and that’s fine, but it’s an informed choice and he will have had to think about that and what’s more important to him but when it happens through deception, it is absolutely devastating to find out a child isn’t yours that you believed was yours. Often men in that position lose everything. Suddenly they have no parental rights, but simultaneously can still be expected to have parental obligations.

For this reason, I strongly believe that all new-borns should be paternity tested by law. It takes away the doubt. There will be the odd case where there is some natural anomaly but I think it would save a lot of men from a lot of heartbreak and also keep women more honest. Not that all women are uniquely dishonest, we all tell white lies occasionally but the impact of this particular lie is life defining.

Earlier this month I had the devastating news that my wife of 20 years was unfaithful. It may just have been the one night and a big mistake and from what she tells me, she regretted it straight away but had something not triggered my suspicion, had I not forced the truth from her, I could be in a very different position now.

She says they used condoms but suppose the condom failed and she fell pregnant. It would have been slightly unexpected for me, but also not miraculous given that we are sexually active and don’t pay particular attention to her ovulation cycle, after a period where we were actively trying to conceive. Just a very slight twist of fate and I could be getting incredibly excited right now, looking forward to introducing my own child into this world and I may never have found out the truth that it was somebody else’s baby.

Suppose at some point in the child’s life there was a medical emergency and our blood types proved that he or she was not mine after all. My whole life would have unravelled into a lie. It already feels a bit like that anyway despite there being no children.

It’s not a harmless, little white lie. Cheating is always despicable in my eyes regardless of whether it’s a man or woman doing the cheating but the paternal uncertainty adds a dimension that only men can experience.

Honestly, now I can understand why so many men don’t trust women any more. Of course, there many lying, cheating men out there too but the opportunity to cheat isn’t the same for both sexes as there is a plentiful supply of men that will sleep with women regardless of their looks or personality. I used to think that the men that went from one car crash relationship to the next needed to take a look in the mirror to understand why that kept happening to them and I still think that is the case and the same with women too but you can choose someone that appears to be loyal, someone that you wouldn’t put down as the adulterous type. You can share everything with them, give them a good life with lots of affection and tenderness and still they can be doing things behind your back that put everything at risk.

I don’t think I could accept bringing up another man’s child given what we had been through with our miscarriage. It would have ended our marriage, and quite probably, my life. Thankfully that’s not where we are, my wife had her period but although I’ve forgiven her and we’re trying to move on, if by any chance we did get pregnant again, I will need that assurity from a paternity test. When that trust has been broken once, it can be broken again. My doubt is the price to pay for the absolute faith I had in her that she threw away.

WTF Just Happened – Part 2 – The Aftermath

So, you’ve just found out that the only person in the world that you could trust with your deepest fears and vulnerabilities has just cheated on you after 20 years of marriage, what do you do?

You were already down. You were already at a crisis point in your life where you were questioning your own existence and just at the point where you thought there might be a way forward, your whole life is flipped upside down. That one constant, one support, one piece of stability has crumbled to sand and you’re left in shock. What now?

My body was pumping with adrenaline. It would have been easy to fall back into a pattern of self medicating with alcohol. It would have been easy to allow suicidal thoughts to take over, to grab a belt and hang myself from the loft ladder but that wasn’t my reaction. It was the opposite. I was furiously angry and for once that anger was not aimed at myself.

I promised her I wasn’t going to harm myself in anyway and I meant it. I was going to find away to turn this around. I’m always at my best when I feel like I’m the underdog. Forged in flames, as strong as steal.

Contrasting 40ths

I might not have been a perfect husband at all times but I was worth more than this. I was loyal. I was loving. I was giving. I treated her like a Queen. She experienced things that many women would kill for. She had the most incredible, thoughtful 40th birthday celebration where I rebooked the same venue as our wedding reception. All her friends and family were there. There was even the same wedding singer as we had years earlier. It was so exciting making that happen. All the times I spent sneaking around behind her back with her family, finding the perfect dress for her to wear. She had given me so much, put up with me burning the midnight oil to get through uni and now finally this was my chance to repay her faith in me and show her how much I loved her.

Now, four years on and it’s my turn to hit the 40 milestone. I didn’t expect the kind of fuss I gave her, actually that kind of attention would have been my worst nightmare and she knew that but it would at least have been nice if she didn’t sleep with another man weeks before my birthday. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable minimum to me.

On the flip side

The good news for me was that she still loved me and wanted our marriage to work. There was hope there, she wasn’t bags packed with him waiting to pick her up outside. To an extent, the ball was back in my court.

She could have lied and continued gaslighting me as if nothing was going on. I wouldn’t have fell for it at that stage but I did give her credit for the confession. I had to think about what I wanted to do next.

I started making a list of demands

  1. Ring him in front of me without warning him and tell him it’s over on loudspeaker. They hurt me. I needed him to hurt. I needed her to hurt and feel uncomfortable after what they did. I wasn’t going to go after him or anything like that. After all, Mandy was the one that cheated, he wasn’t the cheat although he did know she was married.
  2. She had to block his number. I didn’t want any prospect of her going back to him if things got hard. I didn’t know at the time but she’d already cut off all contact with him, or so she says.
  3. We had to go to relationship counselling together.
  4. We had to do more stuff together. No screens, no distractions, no ear buds. We used to be so close but now we were neglecting each other. If the marriage was to survive, this needed to change. We had to remind ourselves why we were together in the first place.
  5. We had to tackle my situation with work and work out solutions together. I felt completely trapped to stay in a job that I no longer felt good enough to do because financially we couldn’t afford for me to lose my high wages. It made me feel suicidal. It made me feel like my death benefit was worth more than my presence. She needed to help relieve that burden so that it wasn’t just me doing all the financial worrying.
  6. We needed to change the way we communicated. This wasn’t just about her but both of us. She wouldn’t tell me her true feelings because she is extremely conflict averse and was scared of what I would say. I would shut down and not talk to her, cut her off completely when I was upset. We both needed to do better and that needed to start now.
  7. Both of us were drinking too much. She was drinking more frequently. I didn’t drink very often at all, only around New Year but when I did drink it was to dangerous levels. I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since the day she told me she slept with another man and I have no interest in starting again.
  8. She needed to help me lose weight as it was destroying my self esteem. Just going on short walks together
  9. No more late night phone calls
  10. Either she delete Snap Chat or she allows me to install parental controls so that I get notifications if there are any sexual messages. I just couldn’t be sure I could trust her again and for now she was going to have to do things I wouldn’t normally expect of her just to make me feel safe again. She had offered to share her location data but the thing is I knew where she was when she was cheating on me, I just didn’t know whom she was with and what she was doing and I didn’t like the idea of tracking her location either.
  11. She had to hand over her phone and show me all the messages. It transpires that she deleted every trace once she decided she had made a mistake and I told her I was angry about this because it denied me any closure and confirmation that what she said was the full truth
  12. That she answered the remaining questions I had with 100% honesty

She agreed to most of the terms. I told her in no uncertain terms how much of a betrayal this was with the things I had been through and what she knew about my own childhood. I was also very conscious that if I pushed her too far that it might just make her more likely to seek comfort elsewhere, and that was the last thing I wanted. I had the emotional maturity to know that if I just brought this up every time we had an argument, it would make it insufferable for her, and it would sabotage our relationship.

I told myself what we had was more important than a one-off mistake and that we’re all human. I told her I forgave her, and after hours of talking and cuddling, I felt better, but then I would wake up, and it would hit me again as if it was the first time I was hearing it. She understood I was angry and that it was only natural and, to an extent, she just needed to deal with that and accept it.

Intimacy issues

I would kiss her and hold her but then wake up and think that I was kissing a mouth that had someone else’s penis inside and it made me feel like I needed to wash my mouth out. I knew I had to get over this hang-up. It was really important that we were intimate again and quickly, or I might get to the point where I had a phobia of touching her body.

On the Sunday night we had sex again for the first time and it was the most passionate, primal sex we had ever had. It was slow. We kissed a lot but with our eyes wide open. It was like I was looking into her soul. It was a really strange experience for me because all the time I was thinking about what she had done with him. I was thinking about how excited she must have been when he touched her and whether what I was doing to her was better or worse.

It was like I was reclaiming her body. The two things that made me feel a bit better were that she said they used a condom, and I do believe her and that she didn’t orgasm from penetration or oral sex.

She’s never been able to orgasm through sex itself. Apparently 70% of women don’t but with my body issues if he had done that for her and I couldn’t, I would never be able to carry on. It would have ended our relationship immediately. There was one time I did make her orgasm that way but it’s never happened again since and I’m not quite sure how that happened. It doesn’t happen with fingers or toys either so I do know she’s not lying and that it’s just me.

It’s always been very important to me that she enjoys our intimacy and I’ve always enjoyed bringing her to orgasm orally, in fact, I prefer oral sex (both giving and receiving) to sex. Oral sex is very deliberate and intentional. All your focus is on making the other person feel good. I love having her scent on my face. I love feeling her vagina contracting around my fingers whilst I’m licking her. It’s an assault on all my senses. Hearing her moan with pleasure, feeling the warmth and wetness of her body, tasting her, smelling her.

Making love to her immediately afterwards so I can feel her still contracting around my body. It doesn’t get more intimate than that.

If he had given her an orgasm in the same way, it would have taken something from me that was ours and that I could never get back. Of course, she could be lying, she could be telling me what I want to hear. She has about other things and that’s what I have to live with now, there’s no going back. I was her first and now I’m no longer the only man she’s slept with.

Sex differences between men and women

When it comes to sex, men and women are quite different. It’s a big risk for a woman to have sex with a man because she could get pregnant and that makes her vulnerable. Some men will happily sleep with as many different women as they can and the sex is just like scratching an itch, it means very little and they regret it afterwards but because I’m so insecure about my weight, it’s never been like that for me. I have to trust someone explicitly. I can’t just go out and find another woman to level up the score and get revenge, not that I’d really want to but my heart is fully committed and now I know that she could easily just walk out and find another man to sleep with really easily. The risk for me of trusting her is higher now.

It’s not that I think she would do this again, I can see in her face that her remorse is genuine, but she still could do this to me at anytime. That’s not a nice feeling. It makes me very vulnerable and insecure.

Emotional investment

She’s not the type of person to easily jump into bed with someone either so that makes it worse. She wanted him. She was prepared to risk everything. It was exciting to her, there was planning. She’s admitted to me now that she had phone sex with him on at least three or four occasions between October and December and that she had initiated that at least once.

She said it was when I was out of the house, so that really only means either when I’ve been attending Andy’s Man Club or the Pub Quiz. Both these activities are for my own mental health and she was always encouraging me to go, now I know it wasn’t out of concern for me but for her own selfish reasons. She planned to have sex with him. She would have talked to him about it. It wasn’t just being caught up in emotions in a moment as she tried to make out and I don’t blame her for lying to down play what it meant to her, I would have done the same in her situation, but it does mean I can’t take anything she says at face value anymore and I don’t want to feel like that. I want to trust her.

The thought of her in the spare room, talking to him like that creeps me out. I can’t bear to go in that room now and going out to my safe havens provokes these difficult feelings too. I made her stay at her mums on Monday when I went to AMC just to make me feel safe. Long term, that’s not practical. I need to let it go, but it’s not that easy, hopefully relationship counselling will help.

Mental block

On my birthday, she gave me oral sex for the first time since, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her doing that to him, and it took ages. It was just a complete mental block. I don’t know why I now find that harder than sex itself. You would have thought I’d be thinking about him inside her when we have sex too, but I’m not, it’s a primal instinct that takes over that wants me to mark her as my territory, to know that my DNA is inside her body. That’s always meant a lot to me. Knowing that the next day, as she’s walking about that she still has part of me inside her body, it used to be a special feeling for both of us.

I know how crude that sounds but we are mammals after all and many of the things we do, we do on pure survival instinct.

Love or revenge?

My mind keeps flip-flopping from an urge to look after her and wanting her to suffer. It felt very unfair that I had to keep it to myself. Everyone loves Mandy, even my own family hold her in higher affection than me. Part of me wanted everyone to know what she had done and take her down a few pegs from Mrs perfect.

I got angry with myself that I’d made it so easy for her. From all the screwed up relationships that I’d seen, when a partner allows a cheater back into their lives it normally ends up badly for the person doing the forgiving and here I was trying to comfort her and protect her from the consequences of her own actions. I wanted everyone to know what she had done.

Divorce not off the table

On Thursday 12th January, I handed her completed divorce papers and a copy of some of the emails I sent her in August trying to save our relationship. I had no intention of sending them off and I told her that too but I just wanted her to see how easy it would be for me to completely change her life forever. I was very disappointed with the form to be honest, there wasn’t even an option for a fault divorce, no box to tick to list adultery as the reason, just irreparable breakdown. It felt good to hand her the forms. It felt like I was taking back control and asserting myself.

Space to heal

I told her that I had been thinking about kicking her out of the house. In the end, we both decided that some time apart to think and process things would do us good so we arranged for her to stay at her sisters, at least until the weekend. I wanted her to show me that she was genuinely sorry. I mean, she said the words enough, but I needed her to show me a vulnerable side to her. Having the space apart gave her time to write a letter to me and at the same time, I wrote a letter to her with all my remaining questions and also to go through all the stuff related to the miscarriage etc. We had both been through a lot of trauma and although I was angry with her, I did recognise that it wasn’t just a one way street and I had made things hard for her too.

To be honest, I really missed her and was glad to pick her up on the Saturday. I wasn’t cross with her by that point, I just wanted to sort things out. I told her to take some time off work, with the heightened emotions and stress we were both going through it would have been very difficult for her to work and we needed to spend some couple time together to rebuild.

Since this all happened we’ve had more intimacy than at any other time during our marriage, even compared to when we were trying for a baby.

Telling close family

She told me that one or two of our close family had been asking if she was ok. They’d twigged that she wasn’t sleeping at home and then it’s not difficult for people to put things together so I decided it would be better all round if I wrote something to let them know. It wasn’t about revenge any more, and the message I wrote was as non-judgemental as possible, it had the bare facts but also just asked for space. Again, I felt like I was taking back the assertively, which released some of the pressure.

Doing stuff together again

On Tuesday 17th January, we had a really good day. We were going to go for a walk but it was cold and icy so we went for a drive to a garden centre with a cafe. It felt like old times. I showed her a nice email that one of our family sent me. It was a really beautiful message, not attacking Mandy in anyway but showing support.

Whilst we were eating, she started crying. Seeing the message affected her emotionally and it triggered my protective instincts. I just wanted to reassure her that everything was going to be ok and that we would get through it together. It really meant a lot to me to see her cry like that. It was something that I needed to see from her. She’d seen me doing a lot of crying since the whole thing happened.

In the car on the way home, I drove with one hand, holding her hand. I always used to tell her I loved her and she would say “I love you more” but since the event, she would just say “I love you” back. I totally understand why she did that and yes, if she said she loved me more right after what happened, I’d probably have told her that if she loved me more she wouldn’t have slept with another man but in the car she reverted to the normal exchange. It was probably by mistake, but it made my heart melt, and when we got home, I asked her what she was upset about, and I felt connected to her again. She was scared about what other people thought about her and that she felt isolated, but also that she deserved to be isolated for what she had done.

I told her how much it meant to me for her to open up like that and also told her how much it meant to me to hear her say “I love you more” again. It was a big step forward.

Unstable mood

I still feel angry with her every now and again. She tried to initiate oral sex on me this morning and I just didn’t want that. I didn’t want the thoughts of him back in my head. I was also annoyed that she’s essentially made me dislike something that always used to make me feel really happy. Hopefully with time, the dust will settle and I’ll stop feeling like I’m in competition with another man I’ve never met. Especially someone whose 6 ft tall and a regular build. I can’t compete with that.

I will get over it, we just need to spend a lot more time together doing things that we both enjoy, talking, cuddling each other and loving each other because deep down that bond is very strong and if we can get through this, we can get through anything but there will be hiccups along the way.

Forgiveness is a choice

It’s very difficult to forgive but it’s a choice and you don’t do it for the person you’re forgiving, you do it for yourself because the alternative will rob you of your peace and eat you up from the inside. I’m ready to let go. I want my wife back. I want my spark back. I want to show the world what I can do and how beautiful a soul is within me underneath it all.

WTF Just Happened – Part 1 – The Lead Up

If you (single imaginary reader) have been reading any posts on this blog for a while, you’ll probably know I suffer from body issues and depression and I’ve used this site as a way to get my feelings off my chest candidly.

Just when I thought I’d hit rock bottom with the suicidal ideation, anxiety and depression, I was hit with another bombshell.

First, you need the backstory. I am a married man, I met my wife, Mandy for the first time on 21 September 2002. On 23rd September 2006 we got engaged, shortly before living together from October 2006. we got married on 6th August 2011 and although we’ve had our share of ups and downs, with my mental health often contributing to the downs, it’s been a wonderful life together full of happiness, adventures and a really strong bond. I was just about a teenager when we met (19) and she was 23 so now we’ve crossed the threshold whereby I’ve been her partner for a longer amount of time than I have been on this earth without her. I’m going to write up our full story in a separate piece but that’s enough to establish the background.

The miscarriage

In May 2021, we had a miscarriage. Prior to the covid situation I never really wanted children and I made that very clear up front when courting my now wife, Mandy. I didn’t want to become less important to my wife than a child. That broke my parents relationship and I found it very traumatic when they broke up when I was about 13.

My feelings changed when my sister in law and her three kids came to live with us at a time of crisis. I suddenly discovered this untapped paternal side of me that I never knew existed so we decided to try, and to be honest, I wasn’t really expecting for it to work. I just thought I’d have a fun time trying, but we got pregnant within three months and it transformed me psychologically very quickly. It was only a month later when all that hope and excitement disappeared when we were told our baby had no heartbeat at an early scan.

Then we had to wait for the actual miscarriage. It was such a difficult time having to watch Mandy essentially go into labour with our unborn child. Seeing her in so much pain and being so totally helpless was unbearable.

Afterwards, I felt like it was my fault. That it was the universes way of saying you’re not good enough to be a father.

Trying again

We did try again but with every passing month where she didn’t get pregnant, it just got harder and harder to deal with. There was one occasion when she was a few days late and I was absolutely convinced that this was going to be it. In the end I just couldn’t keep going through that process.

The sex wasn’t enjoyable, in fact I was faking orgasm more often than I was actually having one, which kind of defeats the point for making a baby. I eventually put two and two together and worked out that it was the anti-depressants that were doing it to me and that I essentially had a choice between being mentally more stable or physically able to at least give us a chance of conceiving. It made me feel like a total failure as a man, the very least I should be able to do is have sex with my wife.

By April 2022 I asked to stop trying for a baby. The truth is she resented me for giving her that hope and taking it away again but pretended that she was ok with it and my mood was all over the place, flip-flopping between relief and a yearning to have that sense of purpose and meaning from having a family. I would focus on other things like planning holidays or cars to distract myself and in the back of her mind she felt like I didn’t care.

Drifting apart

Following on from this we started drifting apart a bit. She would be sat on the sofa glued to her phone using tiktok and snapchat and I’d be glued to my laptop using facebook and youtube. We were in the same room but we weren’t present for each other. Neither of us intended to neglect each other but that was what was happening.

By August 2022 I felt really lonely in our relationship. She was spending a lot of time with her ear buds in and her hearing isn’t the best anyway so she wouldn’t hear me when I tried to speak to her so I just gave up trying. Her behaviour was changing with late night group chats that would sometimes go on until the early hours of the morning. It made me feel uneasy but at the same time I still trusted her with her new friendship group. Sometimes I’d overhear the way she would talk and she’d sound quite flirty, and that wasn’t like her but it was a mixed group.

Her new clique

Our communication got worse and she sent me an email to explain what was going on. She told me that she had been fundraising with friends from tiktok for the baby loss charity SANDS but it turned out the ring leader of their little club wasn’t actually sending the money on and was pocketing it for himself. She had given a couple of hundred quid to it. As a result of this, the other members of the group became even closer and were doing karaoke streams to raise money. She listed a bunch of people and they were all people with partners or far away. I didn’t really like it but it would have been hypercritical of me to complain because I would have late night calls with my friends too but they were both male and she’d met them in person.

Bereavement

Later that month my aunty became seriously ill and in hospital. My aunty was living with my mum and had been for the last three years and she provided companionship and support for her along with her carers, which released the pressure off of me in terms of worrying about my mum.

It came out of the blue when she ended up in hospital with covid and a perforated bowel. We had to watch her die slowly over a week. At the time I found some strength from somewhere and just did whatever I could to support my other relatives but I felt very unsupported by Mandy emotionally. She wouldn’t come with me to the hospital or to say goodbye. On top of this I was very stressed and unhappy in my job, we had a lot of financial pressures and it felt like it was always left up to me to sort those kinds of problems out.

By the end of the month I lashed out asking if we were done, spelling out how I felt we had become strangers and I felt she was just playing lip service with her responses, making more excuses for all the late night stuff, saying that we’ll try to do more but nothing really changed. I ended up off sick from work, although I didn’t tell her and she didn’t ask.

Resentment

She would resent me for being in bed all the time whilst she was going out to work and coming home and having to cook tea and I think I was suffering from a form of post traumatic stress from my aunties death. To be honest I’d given up on things getting any better and was resigned to taking my own life. It felt like I was on a slow countdown. It’s not fun being around someone that depressed and she continued to seek escape with her new social circle.

Signs of improvement

It wasn’t all bad though. I was socialising more through Andy’s Man Club and quiz nights. My mood did improve just by being off work and most of the time it did feel like Mandy and I were ok. We were being intimate more often and in my mind it felt like things were improving. We might not have directly dealt with the difficulties from the summer but it felt like we were both making an effort.

Making an effort

Every Friday, we hosted my mum and Mandy’s parents for an evening meal to get them out of the house and to make sure they had a decent home prepared meal. Normally, Mandy would cook, and I would wash up, but a couple of times, I would surprise her so that when she got home with her parents, there was already food on the go. Beef goulash was one of my specialities. It was my way of showing appreciation and recognising all the things she did for me.

Admittedly, it didn’t always go to plan and I managed to burn a mark into the kitchen lino with an overly full pot of goulash and to make matters worse, the pot managed to break in two in the oven when I opened the door after cooking. The food survived and we still had a nice meal but it was a bit of a clean up operation with the oven.

I was also trying to help out a bit more by feeding the cats. We have four of them and traditionally Mandy did it as she was first up and first home. That’s why she did the bulk of the cooking too, I used to work late so it just made more sense. She also did the laundry. I handled everything financial and the bulk of decision making. We both contributed but in different ways, we delegated to the things we were most comfortable with. Mandy hated ringing people up, whether it was the doctors or sorting out a phone contract or whatever and I had a bad back that meant anything involving a lot of bending was very difficult for me. I drove, Mandy doesn’t so I’d offer her lifts whenever she was going out, it made me feel useful.

There was friction from time to time. I’d sometimes leave the washing up for a few days if I was busy and it didn’t bother me. To me, as long as we had enough plates and cutlery, it didn’t matter if there were a couple of plates waiting in the sink. I would do them, but on my terms. The way she was viewing it was I was at home all day and could have done it and she was out working and came home and still had to cook and I hadn’t done anything. That’s why I started trying to do more to help her.

Depression robs you of energy and motivation. Some days I could sleep for 20 hours and still wake up tired. It’s hard to understand if you haven’t had that. How could she understand it when I didn’t myself. I didn’t know whether it was “just depression” or whether there is something physically wrong with me causing the chronic fatigue. I noticed my heart would sometimes be irregular at rest. Mum has had very similar cardio issues too.

An egalitarian relationship

Our relationship has never been one where I expected her to do everything or vice versa. We always looked after each other in different ways and at one point when I was at Uni, it was me doing the laundry. She is a primary school teacher, I’m a software engineer. Her job is very hard but predictable, my job can change frequently, sometimes working incredibly late to meet a deadline, I’ve worked a 24 hour shift before, and other times more 9-5. We both have pressures, but different pressures.

I’ve always enjoyed cooking for Mandy at the weekends. It was easier for me because it wasn’t after the working day and so I’d make things more from scratch. There are a few different recipes we both enjoyed, chicken jalfrezi, spicy pork rice, a dish I called beansprout surprise that was a cross over between spaghetti bolognaise and a stir fry, cottage pie.

I honestly didn’t see what happened coming. It’s not like we were bickering or fighting. Things seemed on an upward trajectory.

First warning signs

In the October half term holidays she mentioned meeting up with a friend called Kim and that it was going to be a late one. It wasn’t unusual for her in the holidays to go out and see different friends, although that name didn’t really ring any bells. I thought very little of it at the time. She was out a lot that week and I didn’t mind. We’ve never been a clingy couple, we both would do our own things. Absence makes the heart grow fonder after all.

Finally ready to make a change

By the end of November I’d actually reached a point where the suicidal thoughts surrounding my 40th birthday in January weren’t going to come to anything. I knew I had to do something about work and on the 1st December I reached out to work, explaining what had been going on with my mental health and asking for help. I just wanted to get through December and my birthday, which were always tricky periods for me, then try a change in role or scenery. I still had suicidal thoughts but also an acceptance that I couldn’t bring myself to act on them.

Christmas stress

That time of year was always tricky for me. I loved buying presents for people and having some time off work to see friends and family but I also find Christmas stressful. We used to alternate Christmas day, one year at home with my mum for dinner before going to Mandy’s parents in the evening, the next year spending the whole day at Mandy’s parents. I actually got on better with her family than my own so this was no hardship but since the first covid lockdown things have been a little different.

During the locked down Christmas, 2020, we had Mandy’s sister and three kids living with us. It was an intense period but really nice to have the little family things like thinking of different things to do with the Elf on the shelf. It was the best Christmas I ever had, spending it like that as an extended family, even though my mood at the time was very low, it was a really happy time.

Christmas 2021 should have been introducing our new baby into the world, he or she (I always thought of the baby as a little boy, a mini Jon but Mandy thought of the baby as a girl) but instead we had to focus on different things.

Mandy’s mums health had deteriorated rapidly over lockdown, her memory was getting worse and she lost a lot of weight so we had Christmas dinner at her parents. My mum had my aunty Mary with her and my brother and brother-in-law cooking so she was ok and we saw her on Christmas Eve. Mandy managed to scold her ankle cooking Christmas dinner due to a faulty oven cover and a pan of boiling vegetables. We spent Boxing Day with her sister, which has become the new tradition and I was very excited as we got the kids some great presents and for Mandy and her sister I’d paid for a holiday to New York, just for the two of them. I felt they deserved it after both going through so much the previous year and I knew it was something they wouldn’t have been able to do themselves.

Christmas 2022 was different. I was torn between my mum and Mandy’s parents. My aunty Mary passed away in the last three months so mum was living alone now. My brother and brother in law had been living with them whilst searching for a flat but they had found a new place and wanted to spend Christmas with just the two of them, understandably but they were pressuring me to take mum.

I knew Mandy really needed to be with her mum. With her condition, we don’t know how many more she will have that she can remember. I offered to take mum with us to Mandy’s mums but that’s 15 people, including 7 kids. It’s lovely but it can also be overwhelming and I knew mum wouldn’t be comfortable there. She doesn’t like lots of people. She will make excuses to get out of family events, even her own family. I got quite annoyed with her as Mary was dying because she kept asking to be taken home and I just felt she owed it to Mary to be there for her after all Mary did, plus it was taking me away too and I wanted to be there for my cousins.

I was trying to weigh up whether I should split the day between Mandy’s parents house and my mums but mum was making out to people that she was going to be on her own on Christmas day, which would never have been the case, so she went to her sisters instead.

Boxing day was still lovely with our extended “Gregbert” (an amalgamation of Mandy’s sisters surname and ours) family but this year there was no big exciting surprises, I had to slash my budget dramatically due to financial worries. I know that the kids and my sister in law just valued me and us as family, we had gotten very close and it wasn’t just money and presents they were interested in but I still felt guilty for not being able to do the things I wanted to do for them. I get my generous nature from my mum. I tell her off for doing the same things, but I can’t help it. When I see someone in need, I want to help.

Alarm bells ring

Out of the blue Mandy mentioned that she was going to be meeting up with her friend Kim again but this time stay overnight in town for a couple of nights in December. I told myself it was fine but it niggled at the back of my mind and for the first time ever in our relationship, I began to have doubts about whether she was telling the truth.

It was unusual for her to see a friend again that she saw a couple of months earlier. Mandy didn’t really have any close friends, other than her sister who was also her best friend and I could understand staying over in town for one night, but two? I put it to one side and convinced myself I was just being paranoid and got on with things.

It was very unusual for us to spend two nights apart. It used to happen when she was on a school trip to euro Disney in Paris with work, but other than that it was quite rare and I felt lonely.

Keeping myself busy

To keep myself occupied on the Friday night she was away, I decided to try making some new recipes I’d done before. It was cucumber riata, tomato salsa, baked onion bhaje’s, lamb rogan josh and garlic naans. I made enough for 3 portions so she could try some when she was home. It took all night to do but it was nice cooking everything from fresh, raw ingredients and it distracted me but I still had those niggling doubts in the back of my mind.

Paranoia or instinct?

So, I did something I had never done before. I logged onto her laptop and went through her sent emails and browser history for any sign of something dodgy going on. I even sent her a WhatsApp message at one point saying “How’s your secret affair going?” jokingly, to which her reply was just “????”. I didn’t find anything to be honest and thought to myself, “You’re just being paranoid.” I felt bad for looking. It was an invasion of her privacy.

It didn’t get rid of the doubt entirely though, I knew she used SnapChat a lot. I did consider getting hold of her phone, even installing a hidden key logger so I would be able to see what she was sending without her knowing but it was only a fleeting thought.

The next night was the England vs France world cup game so I stayed home on my own again and watched that. I had a bit of a cold. I don’t get them very often and this was the first time since covid really. She also had the sniffles so I think I must have caught it from her.

We were messaging each other, not all the time but I was asking what she was up to and if she was watching the football and I was still getting the usual “love you” messages from her. Everything seemed normal.

We were both feeling unwell at the start of the week from 12th December. I took her to work to make life easier but I thought she should be off sick and I told her on Tuesday evening that she needed to call in sick. I look back in hindsight and wonder how much of her feeling crap then was down to her cold and how much of it was due to what I would later find out.

New Years Eve

I was much more excited by New Year than Christmas. I love making cocktails, I love karaoke (even though I can’t sing). It brings back memories from my childhood of everyone being together. It’s ironic really because as a child I was very shy so I hated New Year. Lots of my relatives smoked, but smoking would trigger my asthma and itchy eyes but the older I got, the more New Year became important to me as our thing.

I remember the very first New Year I spent with Mandy. We went to my aunty Mary’s and stayed in her caravan over night. It was the first time she met my wider family. I got so drunk on cheap alcopops that I decided to “spin” to make myself sick to feel better. The fact that she was there with me and I could show her off to my family made me feel so proud and so happy. She was the one!

This year I decided to go all out so I bought lots of decorations, helium balloons, banners, a smoke machine and new karaoke machine. To me this was my tribute to my aunty. It was a really good night. The Gregory’s were staying over just like old times, as did my friend Chris, and it was nice to spend New Years Day together just chilling.

Feeling unwell again

However, by the evening I started to feel quite feverish. I’m convinced it was covid. It was a really bad cold that meant I hardly slept for 3-4 nights and a cough and I lost my taste and smell afterwards.

Mandy decided to sleep in the spare bedroom that whole week, partially because my coughing and sneezing was keeping her up and to give me more space. I like to lie diagonally when I’m ill. I know, it’s weird but that’s me.

The way that the Christmas holidays had fallen this year meant she broke up quite close to Christmas and had the whole week after New Year off. She did tell me before Christmas that she was planning to use that week to visit some friends but she was out from early to late every day and when she came home, she wasn’t going up to see me, she was sitting downstairs on her own then going straight to the spare room.

The doubts become a realisation

By Thursday I was still sick and fed up with being abandoned. Those niggling doubts were festering. Was she really with a different female friend every day? It just felt very odd and convenient.

Her response to me asking what time she would be home or if she was abandoning me all night again was defensive, “It will prob be late again. I’m going to Sonyas for tea after our walk. I’ll keep you posted. I did say I was busy this week. Its the only time in the hols I can see ppl as everyone’s busy between Xmas and New year x”.

That felt like a very cold, defensive response. There was no “I love you”, no sense that she wanted to spend any time with me. I was getting the same vibes I used to get from my previous girlfriend Charlotte, when she started to ghost me. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

The conversation that changed everything

I started drinking. I know I shouldn’t but I didn’t care anymore. I drank over a litre of whiskey between Thursday 5th January and Friday 6th January. It was my 40th birthday on 10th January and we had plans to go out to a nice restaurant with her sister Jo and the kids on the Saturday and for family to come round on the Sunday for the usual presents and cards.

By 0215 on Friday, I cancelled the booking and sent her an email saying Saturday is off and to cancel family coming round on Sunday.

Her response was just “OK x”. No concern for my well being, no asking why, she just accepted it and wasn’t bothered. It told me everything.

Again, in the morning, she left the house without checking on me or saying anything. There was no morning message and she is normally very consistent with those messages regardless. I told her My heart was broken.

All I got back was question marks again. I told her that I thought she didn’t love me anymore and her response wasn’t to reassure or to deny it, it was just “What do you mean? Where’s this come from?”

I replied with “it’s the truth, you’re not even trying to deny it! you don’t care”. I was very drunk and full of anxiety and felt like I’d already lost her. I know it sounds melodramatic, but it was how I felt, and it was intense. My instincts were correct, and the denial I had, the belief that Mandy would never do that to me, had gone. I didn’t know the extent. I didn’t know whether she’d fallen for another woman or whether it was a man or just that she didn’t love me anymore, but something had shifted, and it was terrifying.

Her response to that direct challenge? “I’m nit [sp] getting into this in a WA conversation that’s why x.

That was the arrow right through my heart. Up until that point, it was still conceivable that I was wrong, that I was being paranoid but I knew she would have reassured me there and then if there wasn’t anything to worry about.

So I asked her directly, is there someone else? be honest. 29 minutes later no answer but I can see she got the message, I can see she’s online and she’s not responding. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach and it wasn’t just the alcohol.

By this stage I’d already got in touch with her sister to see if she knew anything. She hadn’t but she offered to talk with her and see what’s going on.

I messaged Mandy again telling her that by not answering, she was essentially confirming it and she just replied again saying she wasn’t going to get into it over WhatsApp.

I asked when she would be home and where was she.

She said “I will be home when I’m done. Mum and dad are round for tea later x”

I told her that wasn’t a good idea, that we needed to talk and that I needed the truth. I was physically shaking.

By 4pm she replied saying she would be home in about half an hour. Do you want to talk at home or somewhere else.

I told her I couldn’t go anywhere. At 1626 she was home. I asked her to come up and be honest. I saw enough lies with my own parents.

Hearing it in person

I couldn’t look at her. I didn’t really want to hear what she had to say. It was like an out of body experience, watching your own car crash right in front of your eyes. She admitted she had seen someone else. The rest of that night was a bit of a blur. I was in floods of tears. I wanted to know everything. Who was he? How long had it been going on? Did she want to leave me for him? She said she didn’t and she still loved me but I was just so confused, I didn’t understand it at all. To be honest, I still don’t. Just reliving those memories is terribly painful.

At one point I tried to hold her and begged her to fuck me and she reacted as if I was going to rape her, which made me feel sick. That’s what she thinks of me? I’ve never laid hands on her. I was so sensitive to her consent that I wouldn’t even have sex with her if I felt she was only doing it to please me. I could never force her into anything.

Why was I the one pleading?

The next few hours felt like I was the one that had cheated, not her. I was begging her to give me another chance for the sake of the 20 years we spent together, everything we’d been through, everything I’d given her. It just felt so wrong. She should have been the one in floods of tears pleading with me not to kick her out.

She eventually agreed and we talked and I told her she needed to be honest with me. I’d never been someone that found it easy to talk about my feelings, to hear the words actually come out of my own voice. I would bottle things up until the point I could no longer cope then I would shut down then I’d write it all down. That’s how I dealt with my problems. I have never talked so much and so honestly as I did over those next couple of nights.

The story she told

She told me that it was a guy she met through the baby loss stuff and that they first met up in October to have a ceremony where they released some balloons to honour the babies they had lost.

The thought of her grieving over our baby with another man was really hard. Why couldn’t she have done that with me? It was my child too.

She said there was no intention for anything romantic to happen but that it was emotional and they ended up kissing. I still don’t believe her about the intentions. He was from London, it’s a long way to travel to meet up with someone who is just a friend and to stay over in a different city over night. I told her that I thought she was in denial and not telling the full truth.

She told me that they met up again over that 3 day period in December and that she wasn’t planning to sleep with him. They went out for meals and to explore the Christmas markets, they visited media city, that they both had booked separate hotel rooms and that the first night they slept in their separate rooms and nothing happened, other than kissing that she admitted to.

She tried to downplay it as something that just happened, caught away in a moment. She said they were sat in her room on the bed, watching the football and just chilling and then were kissing and stroking each other, that they had sex with a condom and stayed together. She admitted that he gave her an orgasm with his fingers and that she gave him oral sex over a condom.

She said that she regretted it afterwards and blocked him a few days later.

The questions in my head

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The whole thing just kept replaying in my mind. It wasn’t the things that she said so much as the things that sounded too convenient where I thought she was lying.

I asked her how she felt when I sent her the message about the secret affair? If that was me and I got that message I’d have had to have got out of there but she didn’t. That was the first night. She could have left, come back to me and apologised for what she’d done or said nothing and although she’d essentially already had an emotional affair with him, she could have avoided the sexual one but she clearly didn’t feel guilty enough to stop. She must have really wanted him.

I kept thinking what would have happened if I didn’t confront her? Did she have future hotel rooms booked? If she could get away with it would this have been a regular, exciting booty call? Was she in love with him? Was he in love with her?

All these questions run through your head and it doesn’t really matter what she says because she’s lied through her teeth to get to this point so how can I believe a word she says without evidence to back it up.

Whilst she slept, I started writing down questions. I noticed that she had started shaving her genitals again recently. She hadn’t done that for years because I told her she didn’t have to do anything for my benefit and that I loved her body no matter what. Was she shaving for him? I remember seeing her wearing a pair of underwear I hadn’t seen before. Was she buying special underwear ready for her trip?

Was she having phone sex with him? Suddenly all those very late night calls where she’d be on her own in the spare bedroom, were they with him? Were they sexual?

What about other previous times she said she was seeing “Kim”. Was Kim a real person? Was that him every time? There was another date in August she was with “Kim”. What about the proceeding week and all the different female friends? Were they real or was her carrying on with him? How did I know she wasn’t going to do it again?

I wanted to see her phone. I wanted to see all her messages with him. I started looking up ways to access her deleted SnapChats. I wanted her to ring him in front of me on loud speaker and tell him it was over. I needed to hear his voice and find out how deep this went and whether he loved her.

At one point I was even thinking if she wanted one last time with him to get it out of her system. I quickly realised that this was probably not a good idea but my head was all over the place. Everything I ever thought I knew about my wife was in question

Heartbroken

The genie’s out of the bottle and you let him rub your lamp

Now you’re second hand goods and you’ve just gone down a major army rank

You can’t take it back, that was a one way street

That wasn’t just a conquest, it was a fait accompli

I’m left here with train wreck and a broken heart

You should have thought of the consequences before you embraced him in your arms

Everytime I’m inside you he’s inside of my head too, this isn’t a ticket system, I won’t join the back of the queue

You want forgiveness, I want listerine

You put him in your mouth and now I’ll never get mine clean

20 years of life together, all poured down the drain

Now you’re battling to salvage however little still remains

A mistake can be forgiven but an affair cannot be forgotten.

You used to smell of roses now the stench is much more rotten

Unto death do us part but I didn’t want his aids, you stabbed me in the heart and the wound never fades

What would have been the last post

DISCLAIMER

I wrote the following post back in November in preparation for suicide but since changed my mind and I’ve written a few pieces on the topic since.

Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before things can get any better and I think I am slowly turning the corner but I still wanted to release this post to show the state of my mind at the time.

It’s not going to be easy, there is a long way to go and a lot that has to change but whereas when I wrote the post above I felt trapped and unable to make the changes I need to, now it feels like I’ve been given permission to recover.

When a plane crashes, it’s normally the culmination of a number of factors coinciding at the wrong time that caused the disaster, take out one of the factors and it’s just a regular flight like any other.

Not that the single death of a middle aged man can be compared to a fatal plane crash, for a start, a plane crash is tragic because it’s so rare. You have to be really unlucky to die in such circumstances, it’s not the same for suicide, a man takes his own life every 2 hours in the UK, and in some age brackets it is the leading cause of death.

If things have gone as planned, by the time this post is published I will have already joined that statistic just one day before the 40th anniversary of my birth. This comes as absolutely no shock to me but I accept that it may cause distress to a fairly small number of people that my existence coalesced with and I want to answer the questions people usually ask when these kind of events unfold, why.

This was not an impulsive act, it was not a knee jerk reaction or permanent solution to a temporary problem. It was a planned decision. In fact, this piece itself was written around six weeks prior to the event.

It was not fuelled by alcohol. Alcohol is often blamed as a factor in these things and I may well have drank the weekend prior to my death but I was stone cold sober when I purchased the equipment needed for a dignified and peaceful exit strategy. Nor was it caused by stopping taking anti-depressants, there seems little point in taking ineffective medication with nasty side effects.

There are many factors at play and I’ve written about many of them on this blog before.

My weight had a chilling effect on my quality of life and the decision to take “early retirement”. Being obese is not fun. I was very conscious of its life limiting impact. People my size do not get to live to old age. If you’re lucky, you get cardiovascular disease and die from a sudden heart attack so there is little suffering in death, for you at least.

If you’re not lucky, you might have multiple strokes that take away your dignity and ability to take care of yourself. Old age is not something that has ever appealed to me. What is the point of extending life if the extra years you gain are spent in a care home, being prodded by strangers and becoming a burden on your family? I’d rather go out close to my peak than experience the slow decline of ageing but each to their own. Perhaps my attitude would be different if my quality of life was better.

I’ve watched my mum going in and out of hospital on regular occasions over the last 20 years. Mum lost both her parents, one of her brothers to suicide and a friend whom died very suddenly and unexpectedly in her early 30s. At the same time her marriage collapse and I suffered depression in my teens. She went from being a busy nursing sister looking after children with infectious diseases to losing everything very quickly.

I have always felt a great deal of guilt that I was the straw that broke the camels back. She ended up under section at Park House, North Manchester General Hospital and took up chain smoking. Mum had smoked in her teens but not in my lifetime until a CPN convinced her that it would be good for her nerves, just because she wanted to smoke in front of her.

At the time I was working and would go straight from work to the hospital to see her and it just tore me to pieces inside seeing her in such a distressed state. It felt like I was constantly having to battle the doctors that were treating her as some sort of human guinea pig.

They were frying her brain with ECT against her will and ignoring my protests. There is no clinical evidence for this Victorian barbarism, it is banned in most sane countries, but in the UK, twisted psychiatrists that spent more time off sick than in work themselves dished it out because the brain damage they caused made patients more docile. She has suffered from memory problems ever since.

Then there was the Lithium fiasco. They released her to stay at my auntys house and put her on a high dose of lithium without monitoring. Her hands were trembling all the time. She kept falling asleep with lit cigarettes in her mouth, often causing small burns but they ignored it and acted like it was part of her mental health problems.

One day, I was looking after her and she was so totally out of it, I decided to call an ambulance. This just wasn’t right, it wasn’t my mum. It turned out she had very serious lithium poisoning. We could easily have sued the NHS for the way she had been treated.

Whilst in Park House my father decided to divorce her. It turned out he had been having an affair with two separate women at the same time, one that we treated like an aunty. It made my skin crawl at the thought of the way she stroke my head as I lay on her lap whilst she was secretly destroying my family.

In fact, because my mum was so ill at the time, it was left to me and my aunty to respond to the divorce petition whereby my father blamed her “unreasonable behaviour” of favouritism towards me as his grounds for divorce. I was livid at the time. I very rarely refer to him as “dad” anymore. I would cut up every card and destroy any Christmas presents he bought for a long time. She may not have held animosity towards him for the way he behaved, but I sure as hell did.

I was lucky in one way, I had already moved out of home by then and had my own flat, my younger brother and sister were left to fend for themselves with the exception of help from my aunty and uncle. I was a young adult, but they were still school kids.

Over the years I’ve spent more time in different hospitals and wards than I care to remember visiting mum. There was the day I was supposed to register for Uni when mum took an overdose. A&E was full of drunken freshers students that had banged their heads and there was I with mum again. I felt quite sorry for myself. After managing to pull myself out of my own depression, it felt very unfair that I was back in carer mode but then again, I felt guilty for feeling that way too.

Every time mum has been in hospital, she’s ended up with worse problems before she’s got out. I can’t even count the number of chest infections and falls she’s had. Everytime, that same sense of foreboding, not again.

So you see, me and hospitals, we don’t get along. I know nobody likes hospitals, nobody wants to be ill. I don’t want to put Mandy through that, visiting me and wishing she was somewhere else.

Earlier this year, my aunty, who was living with my mum as part carer, part company unexpectedly died at the age of 64. She caught covid and ended up in hospital but whilst she was in hospital, her bowels perforated. Too sick for the emergency surgery she needed to deal with her bowels, we had to watch her die slowly over several days, vomiting up her own faeces and unable to eat. It has to be the most traumatic thing I’ve ever seen. The hospital were great but it was a horrible, undignified way to die and I can still see her last breaths when I close my eyes.

I didn’t want that. I wanted to go peacefully and in control, free from pain, at least in a physical sense. The thought of being hospital and catheterised was something I could not bare.

My sense of history repeating with mums career collapsing at its peak was unnerving. I couldn’t be a failure, there was no room for me to be weak when I felt such a strong burden of responsibility for mum. I had to be the dependable one, but what happens when the dependable one can no longer be depended on?

Before I started writing on this blog I opened up on facebook about the fact I was struggling and the pressure I felt to provide. There were a few people that were openly supportive and I was very grateful for just getting some kind of recognition of what was going on inside my skull. I can sometimes be a bit abrasive on facebook when it comes to issues I feel passionately about but this wasn’t about principles or injustices, it was venting a side of me that nobody saw and I was very careful to word it so as not to make it appear like I was associating blame because it wasn’t about right or wrong, it wasn’t about anything other than how I was feeling at that time.

I’m a fairly typical man. I never talked about my feelings, I bottled them up and just kept going to the point where I could contain them no more. It just feels painfully uncomfortable to talk about this stuff, hearing it come out of my own vocal chords just makes the denial impossible and I needed to be strong. I needed to hold it back because the reality is nobody wants to hear your problems. It makes people feel uncomfortable.

One of my wife’s cousins decided that the idea that men could be under pressure to provide was an offence to her and couldn’t possibly be reality. She actively denied my own “lived experience” with the façade of pretending to care.

You can’t criticise men for not talking about their feelings when the second they do, and say something you might not like to admit, that people slap us down. If we don’t talk, it’s “toxic masculinity”, if we do talk, it’s misogyny just to suggest that there are situations where men feel under pressure.

I wasn’t even talking about an external pressure. It’s not that my wife has said to me if you’re not earning, I’m off. On the contrary, for the first fourteen years of our relationship she was the higher earner and she paid all our bills and looked after me for the six months I was a student and not also working.

That doesn’t mean that the pressure is any less real. I feel a strong need to be the one that can look after my friends and family and anytime where I’ve felt insecure about my job, it causes a huge amount of anxiety. Being the Jon that looks after people when they need help, being the one that will give people lifts, pay for family meals or just the one who can be a shoulder to cry on is central to my identity. I was cut from the same cloth as my mum and she was very much the kind of person that would give you the coat from off her back.

The biggest contributor to my death was this feeling of helplessness and threat to that identity.

I was in a lot of debt, £5000 on credit cards, £1000 on an overdraft, a £25,000 loan, a £28,000 loan and a £10,000 loan, a lease car costing over £350 per month. I know that this sounds like a lot and like it was reckless to get into so much debt, and there is some truth to that. I was a high earner and the debt was serviceable when I took it out.

Most of the debt came from the covid period and was spent on home improvements. I should have spent less, I admit that, it was a gamble but it was still affordable at the time with the income I had and the money borrowed wasn’t for selfish reasons. I could and would have been able to service the debt fully, albeit living more frugally, which I had been anyway but the sudden increases in energy and fuel bills exacerbated the problem at the wrong time.

The real problem was that needing to service these debts left me in a position where I needed to continue to earn a high wage but my working life was pretty much turned upside down by covid.

I’d gone from working in an office environment where I knew everybody and had physical contact with colleagues on a daily basis to working mainly from home at a time of great change within the company and it triggered my insecurities, and led to three major bouts of severe depression and suicidal ideation, with periods of coping in between.

I had gone from being someone that was dependable, reliable, enthusiastic and passionate to a dead weight and it wasn’t fair on my colleagues, many of whom had far worse problems than I did but were able to handle them in a much more positive way. I had colleagues in Ukraine that had literally lost their homes and faced the threat of war everyday.

It got to the point where even thinking about work would fill me with a sense of dread and foreboding. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t sleep properly. I just felt like a massive failure.

I want to be clear that my employers are not to blame for what has happened. Change is a natural part of working life and my bosses have gone far beyond in terms of trying to support me to get through this. I am particularly grateful to Jarrod Martin, Richard Kennaugh and Scott Brown. All three have been a tremendous support and it is thanks to them that I have gone on for so long. I’ve never been put under unreasonable pressure or treated unfairly as a result of my mental health problems. They did everything they could.

Despite all the support, I feel jaded and burnt out. My energy levels have just been really low. Therapy hasn’t helped. Antidepressants may have numbed the lows but they didn’t get rid of the suicidal thoughts and the side effects, particularly a sexual desensitivity did not help with my inability to sleep and self esteem.

I don’t suit working from home. I’m better when I can bounce ideas of people and work on things with my colleagues, especially when my confidence is low and I need reassurance. At home I feel isolated and panic can sometimes creep in.

At the same time, working in the office is not what it used to be. As a big guy, I need a strong office chair. At the old office, all our chairs just so happened to be good for my needs but at the new office, the majority of the seats are poor quality plastic seats. I’ve been in a situation before where a seat has collapsed on me at work. It’s humiliating. When I first moved over to the new office, I brought my chair from the old office with me but now we don’t have dedicated desks, it’s hotdesking. I’ve been lucky so far in that I’ve managed to grab my old seat when I was in the office but it is a cause of anxiety.

On the occasions I attended the office it has been very quiet and I haven’t known the people there so there isn’t the same kind of atmosphere. I felt a bit left behind.

There was a temporary reprieve and period where I felt I got back my passion and my confidence returned for a short while but the feeling of being out of my depth and an imposter returned. I can’t keep going through these spells where I fall apart completely. There have been lots of triggers, the past few years there’s been the turmoil of covid and a family situation, there’s been a miscarriage and then the death of my aunty. All hit me hard and I just lacked the resilience to cope.

I’m just not sure that this career is what I should be doing but I was trapped. I considered taking a chance and moving somewhere new to rebuild my confidence but what If I did that and it didn’t go well? My energy levels were so low, my confidence on the floor and my sleep pattern completely screwed. A new job can be very tiring and I might just have discovered that I’m completely burnt out.

I was on a good wage for a senior developer but with that comes high expectations, and rightly so. If I went for a less senior role, I’m sure it would have rang alarm bells at any company looking to hire me and financially, I just can’t afford to take a pay cut. I was only just staying above water as it was. If I could have got through to 2025, the financial pressures would have eased, as all three loans would be paid of by the end of that year but that’s still three years away and in the meantime, all the bills are still going up and there’s no safety gap left. There’s no fat I can really trim, I’d already cut my spending down as much as I could.

I had this internal sense that this isn’t what I should be doing any more. Writing is really what I wanted to do but there’s no money in that, especially for someone unproven like I was. I wasn’t particularly talented as a writer either.

At the same time I could sense my wife getting more annoyed that I was just lying here depressed and not working whilst she was going out and working everyday. If I took a paycut somewhere else or even took unpaid time off to try and write and re-find myself, the financial pressure would have led to arguments. She is much more conservative than I was money wise, and that’s a good thing. She would worry about money and rather save up than spend.

Me having to go begging to her would have been intolerable for both of us. I didn’t enjoy my job anymore but felt too depressed to find a new one. I couldn’t afford to take a paycut but the expectation for the sort of salary I was on comes with pressure that I couldn’t handle.

I didn’t want to just see my life decline right before my eyes, letting down all the people I care about in the process. It felt like a complete no win situation and the only other way out was the permanent one.

This wasn’t a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It was an end to suffering that has plagued most of my life, adult and child. My death would at least secure a death benefit to pay off my creditors and the mortgage. I know people will say that I’m being selfish and not thinking about how much it would hurt my wife and people around me but the way I see it, there’s a good chance I would have lost everything we have anyway. This at least means something can come of the whole mess.

Believe me, I had thought about the consequences for the people that matter to me over and over again. Most nights were filled with incredibly vivid thoughts about exactly what would happen in the aftermath as if presented by the ghost of Christmas future. I just didn’t have the energy to keep fighting. I knew what it felt like to have to look after someone with severe depression. It was exhausting and the unsavoury truth is that you are a burden on the people that love you and no matter how devastating a blow suicide is, at least it can bring closure and an end to the secondary suffering caused by mental illness. It’s a tortuous thought to think that your partner will be happier without you long term but that does not mean there’s not an element of truth to it. Life can be cruel.

I just couldn’t see another way out of this that ends well. The world didn’t owe me a living and I didn’t deserve the job I had based on my performance for the last couple of years. In many other careers, I would already have had lost my job. I don’t know if there was something else going on, a physical reason for my energy malaise.

I’d been grieving for my own life for sometime, the inevitable turned out to be inevitable. It’s nobody else’s fault. I don’t want people thinking what if they did x or y, the problems were too big to solve and maybe I didn’t want a different solution enough.

I went out in control, on my own terms and seemingly on top. Had I allowed the drift to continue, that sense of “why” would have been replaced with that of relief and a sad end to a sad life.

I go out having lived a little, I had adventures, I had successes and triumphs, I had happy times and I hope I was able to bring a little light to the lives of a few people. Death comes to us all.

I regret the hurt that it will cause people that I loved and loved me back. I tried to hold on for the sake of others but eventually the pull of gravity was just too strong to resist. I don’t want people to feel sad or blame themselves but I know that guilt is a natural part of the grieving process. I want you to remember the good times. I was never perfect. I made mistakes but I liked to think that I at least tried to be a kind person, a caring person and a good person. I had a big heart, perhaps sometimes too big for my own good.

Thank you for sharing your lives with me. I wish you happiness, prosperity and above all else, love. Look after each other and keep me in your hearts and share those happy memories!

Betrayed

You left me on my own
Now you’re all alone
Hope you enjoy all
the silence and the pieces

You weren’t honest
I wasn’t easy
But we made a promise
And now you’ve deceived me

Say those three words
Pretend that you loved me
Pretend that it’s the sky, not soil above me

Say that you meant it
Pretend that you cared
The love that we had
The hope that we shared

How could something so good
Turn so quickly this rotten
Nothing lasts forever
Soon be forgotten

But those tears are crocodiles
And I have been bitten
Never had courage to write
What should have been written

New Year, Same Problems

It’s Thursday, 5th January 2023, just 5 days before my 40th Birthday and I feel like crap. It really hasn’t helped that I’ve been ill since New Years Day, with a fever, a cold and cough. I think everyone I know has had it at some point over the holiday period, it’s the second virus I’ve picked up in quick succession over the period although I can’t complain, it didn’t interfere with Christmas or New Year’s Eve so I can count myself lucky.

I’ve been off sick since October with depression, the third time in the last couple of years I’ve had a long spell off. I don’t know what’s going to happen with my job. I’ve emailed them and been as completely honest as I can about the way I feel and I had hoped to have some kind of face to face meeting with them after my birthday to discuss a return to work and maybe a different role for a while as my confidence is shattered and my concentration fleeting. I’ve had no response at all though so who knows what will happen.

To be honest, I’m all out of plans and ideas. Back in November I was pretty sure I was going to end this shit on Monday 9th January, the day before my 40th. I was going to buy a rebreather mask, pure nitrogen tank and regulator then I’d drive away somewhere quiet and asphyxiate myself with the gas but I got confused about which was the right kind of regulator to release the gas at the right flow rate. Gas canisters are threaded so you can’t fit an oxygen regulator on a nitrogen canister, or maybe that was just the excuse I gave myself for my own cowardice. I’d already written my suicide note but stopped before all the other planning I needed to do.

I still have that same suicidal urge every day. I lack energy. I lack will to do anything. I lack drive. I wish I had the guts it takes to commit suicide. People don’t realise how hard it is, how many instincts you have to override to make it happen. It’s not easy. Perhaps if I lived in a different country with easy access to lethal weapons it would be different. Perhaps I need to learn how to be more impulsive. I don’t really see much point in prolonging this existence anymore right now. I don’t want to hurt people that care about me but you can’t just live for other people, you have to have a reason to live yourself.

My auntie’s death knocked me over. It was the way she died, it really wasn’t pleasant and I don’t want that for myself. I don’t want to die slowly in a hospital. I mean, it wouldn’t be the same for me anyway, I have no children that will mourn me and that’s a good thing.

My marriage lies in ruins. We’re both pretending it isn’t but it’s dead. Neither of us even acknowledged our 20 year anniversary. I felt abandoned when my aunty was dying, just like my mum was when her parents died. I tried to tell her but she either doesn’t care or just doesn’t know how to deal with it.

Since then she’s just got more and more distant, filling up her time with tiktok, friends, anyone so long as it’s not me. I don’t blame her, I’m not exactly fun to be with anymore. I’m not the same confident, intelligent, funny and kind man she married.

Every holiday she gets, she fills up everyday to spend as little time with me as possible. I know this sounds like I’m some kind of controlling arsehole not wanting her to have friends or a life of her own but it’s not like that. I’ve never stopped her or even wanted to stop her from doing things with her friends, in fact I’ve always been willing to support her, give her lifts, pick her up and she has been the same with me but this is different now. It’s been every night this week and even when she gets in she doesn’t come up to see me, it’s like she’s waiting, hoping I’m going to be asleep already. It’s not a marriage anymore, it’s a sham. There’s no love. There’s no genuine affection. She just goes through the motions pretending but I know the difference.

It’s not all her fault. I’m not easy to deal with when I’m down and I think she’s just got to the point where she doesn’t care anymore and is planning for a life without me. Her mum isn’t well either and that isn’t easy for her, they’re quite close. I know what that feels like.

I just don’t know what to do or how to confront her about it. The miscarriage changed everything. That’s when the drift started to happen. Before that we were as close as we had ever been. She just grieved in her own way and made new friends and I dealt with it in my way but now we’re just just strangers that happen to live in the same house, not married partners. Even when she’s with me I still feel lonely because she’s never really there, she always has her headphones in, she never watches anything with me, she never does anything with me and it feels like we’re only together for convenience because neither of us can afford to separate.

I don’t want to lose her, 20 years is an awful long time to throw away. I’ve been with her for more of my life than I haven’t. I don’t know how to salvage any of this or even if it is salvageable. I can’t be the rescuer anymore. I can’t be the one picking up the pieces of other people. This time I need rescuing. I’m out of answers and out of hope. My shattered heart lies in a thousand pieces. I can’t put it back together myself.

Low on festive cheer this year

When you are a young kid, Christmas is a magical time of year filled with fairy lights, presents, too many sweets, chocolate, and family time.

The older you get, the less exciting the period becomes. As an adult, the excitement can sometimes turn into a sense of foreboding. Christmas is not a great time of year if you’re struggling. The memories of previous happier times as a child only act as the ghost of Christmas past in your very own Christmas Carol.

Sometimes you can be surrounded by people yet still feel lonely. Other times, as much as you love spending time with your family, you can feel completely physically and emotionally drained by the whole experience.

There’s so much pressure to participate, to buy, to consume. If you don’t have a lot of money it’s easy to feel like a failure, especially when you see articles about others that have spent thousands on gifts, people that have nice clean houses, perfectly decorated and more lights than Blackpool illuminations. Is this really what it’s all about?

Don’t get me started on the food. I’ve never been a fan of Turkey, especially the nauseating smell of a fresh raw turkey. Vegetables that nobody likes but everyone feels compelled to cook, using up every pot and pan in the house. The sheer quantity of food is enough to give you indigestion just thinking about it.

Does anybody ever have a Christmas where nothing goes wrong? Whether it be the cooker breaking on Christmas Eve, a car crash in the snow or an accident involving a pan of boiling water? There always has to be something? I’m with the Grinch on this one.

These are all first world problems, I know. The hardest times are reserved for those that will be putting out one less stocking this year, one less place mat and cracker at the table. Grief is a cruel mistress at any time of year but it’s those occasions when normally everyone would be together, celebrating the passing of another year that really bring it home that you’re never going to see that person again, never going to be able to give them a big hug and say I love you. It turns out that the only meaningful present is presence, yet it’s a gift we only truly know the value of when it has gone.

The price of happiness and joy is that one day those things will be taken away from you. All the things that went wrong, the incinerated turkey, the pink cauliflower, the presents without batteries, the tummy bugs, the broken trifle bowls, the flaming tea towels, the plastic frog in the gravy boat, the dog that ate the tinsel. It’s all those little mini disasters that stick in the memory and become part of our family stories. They may have brought us to tears at the time, but then they bring us to tears of laughter as we recall the stories then comes the tears of sadness as the memories fade and there are no new happy memories to replace them.

I want to dedicate this piece to all those people that are missing someone they loved and lost. be it the bereaved or heartbroken. I know it’s not a feeling that goes away, you just learn to live with it and the only comfort we can offer is to acknowledge the pain and offer the hand of friendship and compassion.

Flying Fat

A former colleague of mine posted a screenshot of an article today (see above). The article was headlined “37st man forced to pay for two seats on jet finds they are rows apart”. There was no link to the article itself for context but it wasn’t difficult to find that the original article was this one but that is behind a paywall so there’s also another copy-paste gutter press article on the same story here.

The headlines on articles like this are deliberately designed to be provocative and induce a particular response. That’s the way newspapers work. Headlines like “everything was fine today” aren’t going to draw readers interest to buy the paper or click on the story so unfortunately, we get the press we deserve.

Should obese people pay for two seats?

First I want to explain that when you’re using any sort of public service that you need to be aware of the needs of other people, it’s not just about you. Whenever I fly, I am either flying business class, first class or with my wife or I buy two seats because it’s not fair to a passenger sat next to me if I do not fit in the seat properly and take up some of their upper body room.

I have seen articles of single passengers that have complained about being forced to sit sandwiched between two obese strangers, and I don’t think that’s fair but I do think the airlines need to take some responsibility here too.

From a luxury for the few to the herding of the many

Back in the halcyon period of air travel, only the super rich could afford to fly. Flying was a luxury. The seats were like armchairs, smoking was allowed. From the minute you boarded, you could indulge in the finest wines and food. It’s not like that today.

Todays flights are actually slower than flights from the 1960s, the seats are much smaller and gone are all the freebies and luxuries from years yonder. On the flip side of that coin, transporting people like cattle and charging for any service that you used to get for free has meant that it has expanded the franchise of travel to people that previously would have been heading to the nearest seaside resort, not sunnier climates.

Smaller seats, bigger passengers equals conflict

The seats are getting smaller (no, it’s not your imagination, they actually are), the passengers are getting bigger and it’s inevitable that this creates conflict. The airlines need a better way to deal with things so some of their customers aren’t squashed in like pasta and so that those that need more space can be catered for fairly, and without humiliation.

My experience with trying to book two seats for one person

Let me share with you my own experience of booking flights In 2018, I wanted to book a holiday of a lifetime for myself and my wife as her 40th Birthday present.

Back in December 2002, I went to New York with my best friend and I had always dreamed of going back to experience the magic of New York with my wife.

We had set up a savings pot to save up to go there. That plan changed when we bought a house together instead. So the opportunity hadn’t presented itself until 2018.

For those of you that don’t know me, I’m a bit of an aviation enthusiast. I’ve been fascinated by planes since my aunty took me on my flight to Belfast when I was just 10 years old. The ultimate dream was to fly on the world’s only full double decker passenger plane, the A380 super jumbo, on the upper deck.

So, I did what I do best, an awful lot of detailed research and found out that we could fly a Singapore Airlines A380 from Frankfurt to New York, and we could do it in Business class. Business class isn’t cheap, but I found out that there are a few heavily discounted “saver” tickets on each flight if I booked a full year in advanced, so that’s what I did.

I actually managed to upgrade the return leg to first class, imagine having a double bed on a plane and having more crew than passengers in your cabin, it was quite an experience for someone normally sated with a Travelodge and Greggs.

Flying Business/First class in a 1-2-1 layout cabin meant I didn’t need to book myself an extra seat but when you’re flying short haul, it’s a different story. So, we had the tickets from Frankfurt to New York but we needed to book flights to and from Frankfurt.

Two seats, one passenger fun

I tried to book online via the Lufthansa website and I looked everywhere for information on how to book what they call “a comfort seat” but there was no information anywhere. Not even in the obscure aviation forums or TripAdvisor.

So, I decided to ring them for advice instead. The first time I rang, they didn’t understand and thought I was just looking to book two seats for my wife and I. The price they quoted was three times higher than the online price. I was hardly going to accept those prices.

After several attempts trying to explain the situation, they just hung up on me. I tried again, this time calling the online help department rather than sales. They didn’t know either, they just told me to “ask at the airport”!

In the end, bereft of any other options and with no other airline that flew to Frankfurt to make the connections work, I just took a gamble and booked three tickets, two using my same name and passport number for two of them. Not only was I paying for the seats, but an additional charge to guarantee that the three seats were together, adding an extra £100 each way to an already obscenely expensive trip. It’s annoying but if you want to guarantee good seats then, that’s just par for the course these days.

Experience at the airport

We got to the airport nice and early for our flight. We had checked in online and had our boarding passes but I still went up to the desk to check that everything would be ok. It turned out it wasn’t that simple and that it would affect the plane’s manifest. The lady at the airport was lovely, she told me that I should have just been told to put the surname “AdditionalSeat” in for the third ticket, not that there was anyway I could have known this. She had to cancel and reissue our tickets and reassign the seats. It took a while, but at least it was sorted and we were on our way.

On the way back, it was even more awkward. The staff at Frankfurt didn’t know what to do. The queues were very long and they had to call central office twice. At one point it looked like we were going to have to buy new tickets, it was an incredibly frustrating situation, especially as I had tried my best to do everything right, it just seems the system wasn’t designed to cater for that situation and nobody really seemed to know what to do.

Flying your patience

Flying is a nightmare when you’re my size. I know that some airlines won’t let you fly business class if you need a seatbelt extender because they use special seatbelts with pointless built in airbags.

Some airlines have seats with armrests that can’t be moved so even if you pay for two seats, it can be uncomfortable. When I buy tickets, I have to find our the variation of aircraft they use for the route, then I look up the seating layouts, the leg space, pitch and width of the seats. I go find photos of the seating (that’s actually the hard part) so that I can be relatively confident that I will be comfortable and my fellow passengers will be too. I carry my own seatbelt adapter so I don’t have to deal with the embarrassment of asking for one, although cabin crew are usually incredibly polite and discrete about it.

You also have to be really careful not to book an emergency exit row seats because to sit in those seats, you need to be able to open the doors very quickly in the event of a crash and quite rightly, some airlines feel that if you need a seatbelt adapter, you’re probably not mobile enough to handle that situation.

A privilege, not a right

I appreciate flying is a privilege, not a right and the purpose of this article isn’t a woe is me, compo face sob story, I just think it would be nice if the airlines could get together and come up with some sort of consistent policy and make it easier to accommodate larger passengers in a way that is fair to other passengers too. Hell, just having an extra seat checkbox and info popup to say when they expect customers to use it would avoid a lot of embarrassment and annoyance at the airport.

It should be as simple as if you need to use a seatbelt extender, then you need to buy an extra seat, and they should make it easy to buy that extra seat.

There is a lot of animosity towards obese passengers and I can understand that if you’ve been forced to sit next to someone my size. It would be nice if the kind of people that make comments suggesting obese people should just stay at home and never fly actually thought about what they’re saying before opening their mouths.

Some people genuinely believe that having obese passengers on a jetliner will make it crash or burn more fuel. You might want to consider the tonnes of fuel in the wings of a jet, or the cargo beneath your feet. Unless you’re in a small private jet or a helicopter, the size of a passenger is no threat whatsoever and although overall weight does affect fuel burn, passenger weight makes little difference.

Yes, I know airlines like to charge you by the kilogram for hold luggage, but this is more to do with maximising the unexpected charges so they can advertise a £29.99 flight to you that will really cost a lot more. It’s not about safety.

Opinions and arseholes

Don’t get me wrong, everyone is entitled to an opinion and I also think people shouldn’t be constantly looking to get offended or protected from hearing opinions they don’t like, life is like that. It doesn’t matter who you are, there are always going to be people that dislike you, whether it’s the woman with long hair covering the screen of the passenger behind her’s seat, the person that reclines their seat the whole flight (probably because they’re tall and economy seats give very little leg room), or the family that brings their screaming toddler on a plane. Should alcoholics be banned, because some of them will cause a problem for others on a flight?

I don’t think we should tell people that they shouldn’t fly just because it’s inconvenient for us. I think we should all think about other passengers and remember they are human too. Perhaps we aught to go back to the days where flying was a little bit more of a treat than an entitlement so the airlines stop trying to cram in as many human beings as possible and perhaps make the journeys a bit more pleasant.

I love aviation and I love travelling. I don’t think that having a weight problem should preclude anyone from enjoying what the world has to offer. Yes, it makes certain things more difficult. So does smoking, so does drinking, so does over-exercising, nobody is perfect.

Love Actually: It’s about Love, actually

It feels like every Christmas a bunch of opinion pieces decrying the sins of 2003 classic Love Actually crawl out of the pipe works. A cynic may even suggest that the aim of such publicity is the equivalent of pantomime designed to get the film back in the public consciousness? Given that such articles led me to rekindle my warm memories of the stories involved and watch the film again, if that was the real goal, then it has been successful.

This year, even the films brilliant producer, Richard Curtis has been getting in on the self flagellation and repudiation of the film, claiming that the film was not diverse enough. I beg to differ. In fact, I think you will be hard pressed to find an equal in terms of the diversity of characters and human emotions on display in a single 2 hour and 15 minute masterpiece.

It’s unusual for me to be singing the praises a film in the category of “Romantic comedy”, a category of such insipid and predictable storylines, completely devoid of depth, that a precipitously place vomit bag may be in order. It’s always the same, insecure woman meets flawed man who becomes besotted with her and falls all over himself to win the fair maiden. She resists until his persistent charm avails and Rapunzel doth let down her hair for her prince. Said prince’s rough edges, remoulded as he changes for her.

Many of Richard Curtis’s other films follow said path, especially Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but I’ll forgive him this indulgence for the brilliant observational comedy he has blessed upon us in the form of Blackadder, Mr Bean and the Vicar of Dibley.

Love Actually reminds me of the work of another British screen write, Jimmy McGovern and his gritty northern drama series, The Street. In The Street, each episode focused on a specific story of a certain character and the tribulations they faced. Each character, relatable, human, flawed. The other characters dovetail around each other as minor actors in each others story. It creates this sense of a community rather than just individual tails of love and misfortune.

The same can be said of Love Actually, as there is a connection between each of the characters. There is a voyeuristic quality to it, particularly with the final airport scene that sees the various characters reuniting with there loved ones, something that rings authentic with how our modern lives intertwine. Sometimes we are the minor characters in the stories of others and sometimes we play the supporting role. We all have a story, hopes, dreams, the agony and the angst, the joys and the laughter, a shared human experience that unites all despite the unique flavours of our experiences.

If you haven’t watched the film, I’m going to unveil it for you but I won’t be able to do it justice so I recommend you watch it for yourself and make your own mind up. Perhaps you won’t be impressed with the sizable dose of cheesiness, the adolescent humour or quintessential Britishness of the film, and that’s perfectly ok, diversity is not about everybody being the same or equal even, it’s about differences of opinion and mine is no more deferential than anyone else’s, just don’t watch it through the lens of ideology. The Bechdel test is not a measure of the quality of a film, it’s a measure of pretentious ideological purity masquerading as something of value. If all you do is look for sexism, racism, “heteronormativity” etc, then that is all you will find, regardless of whether it is tangible or sword fighting a fart.

I’m going to quote verbatim the opening narration of the film as I think it’s very poignant.

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that. 

The narration is read over the scenes of an airport arrival haul, with people hugging and kissing as they are reunited.

The first character we meet is Billy Mack, a washed up popstar has been trying to rejuvenate his flagging career with that very British tradition of a Christmas pop song. The song is a cheesy reincarnation of a 90s classic pop song “Love is all around” by Wet Wet Wet, albeit with the word Christmas replacing Love.

Bill Nighy’s character manages to achieve a Christmas number one despite several comedic promotional appearances where he is a little bit to honest for his own good. At the end of his story, he rejects the superficial celebrity of an Elton John party in order to spend time with his long suffering chubby manager Joe, played by Gregor Fisher. The bromance between the pair is sweet and resonates a lot with the kind of male mutual appreciation I recognise from my own friendships.

Next comes Liam Neeson’s character, Daniel, a recently widowed step father. To me this nod to the heartbreak of losing the ones we love is very important. For some Christmas is a joyous time of year but for the broken hearted and lonely, it can be a very difficult period filled with memories of loved ones that are no longer there.

There is the poignancy of the funeral and his attempts to connect with his young step son, who himself turns out to have a crush on a girl from his school, who is also a singer. In his attempts to woo the young lady, the boy decides to learn how to play the drums and by the end of the film, plucks up the courage to evade airport security in order to tell her how he feels, encouraged by his step dad to seize the day.

I’m sure many of us can relate to those early feelings of love and the fear of rejection. In the end, the boy gets a kiss before the older girl gives him a peck on the cheek before flying away to America.

Then there is the rogue, Colin Frissell, played by Kris Marshall. His character is full of confidence but lacking in success finding a girlfriend. Always in the background and invisible to the main characters, he still optimistically comes to the conclusion that he’s just living in the wrong country and that his English accent would bring him better luck in the United States.

Much to the surprise of his friends, Colin does head for the states and finds three girls at the first American bar he enters, all of whom are enthralled by his accent and offer to accommodate him for his trip, but being desperately poor, they only have one bed to share and can’t afford pyjamas so sleep naked.

Critics of the film see this as sexist and objectification of women. They will tell you it’s all about the “Male Gaze” but they’re entirely missing the point. The comedy is in the ridiculousness of the situation. It would not be a heart warming end for Colin if he just disappeared into the duvets at his parents dwellings. In fact, I think we can all learn from the optimism of such a character, not willing to let other people’s negativity win, he bought his lottery ticket and he won. Rather than sexist or objectifying, I think its a heart warming tail of persistence.

The story of John and Judy, played by Martin Freeman and Joanna Page is equally comedic in nature, the pair meet as stunt doubles for adult film scenes and make polite chitchat about the weather and traffic. Despite the context, the pair are quite sweet and innocent. There is a kindness to John’s character, caring about the welfare of his female colleague. It goes to show that love can be found in the places we least expect it. In the modern age of swiping for love on a smartphone, there is a lot to be said for the lost art of just meeting people at work or whilst out and about socialising.

Speaking of work colleagues, the darker side of human relationships is evident in the case of the character played by Alan Rickman. Rickman plays a middle aged father of two and company boss that allows himself to be seduced by an employee that should have known better. He’s a character designed to be the pantomime villain as his wife, played by Emma Thompson has her heart broken, firstly watching him dance with his seductress at the office Christmas party, then with the realisation that the expensive jewellery she catches him buying at a department store wasn’t actually for her but for the mistress.

By the end of the film, the pair are reunited but we do not know whether Rickman’s character will get a second chance after realising the foolishness of his behaviour or whether the couple will go their own separate ways. It’s a classic warning tail to be grateful for what you have and not chase the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in exchange for the sunshine and showers that are much more tangible.

In the same office, we meet another lovestruck pair, designer Karl, played by Rodrigo Santoro and Sarah, played by Laura Linney. On this occassion, the boss attempts to play matchmaker by bringing the two together given the obvious attraction between the pair.

Unfortunately, things don’t go smoothly as when the pair do eventually pair up, Sarah’s brother, whom has learning and mental health issues takes priority. This story is not just about the romantic love between a man and a woman but about the familial love between two siblings and Sarah’s self sacrifice, putting the needs of her brother and his condition above her own. Perhaps one day the pair will be able to move past the hurdles involved and integrate Karl into the mix alongside her brother? Perhaps fate is a cruel master that will keep the pair apart? We don’t know. It’s the kind of dilemma that happens in real life, the course to love seldom runs smooth.

The film does a good job of exposing nuance and complexity and the love triangle between newly wed characters Peter (Chiwetal Ejofor) and Juliet (Kiera Knightly), and Peter’s best friend Mark (Andrew Lincoln) is a good example. Juliet thinks that Mark disapproves of her as he doesn’t engage with her much. Some of Mark’s family think he is secretly gay and in love with Peter. The truth is that Mark is secretly in love with Juliet but keeps himself a way because of his friendship with Peter. Sometimes we can fall in love with the wrong person or the right person at the wrong time.

The scene where Mark confesses his love in the form of written cards, whilst pretending to be a carol singer is so iconic it has even been covered by Owl Kitty.

I have seen critics describe this behaviour as stalking, which is absurd. Despite his feelings, the character sacrificed his own heart for the benefit of his friend and the woman he loved. I think that’s a very beautiful thing.

The penultimate couple from the film is that of Jamie, played by English heartthrob Colin Firth and Aurelia, played by Lucia Moniz. It’s easy to miss, but Jamie’s character begins in a relationship with another woman, whom he discovers cheating with his friend. He then spends a few weeks with hired help in the form of Aurelia, but there is just one problem. She can’t speak English, only Portuguese and his attempts to speak French are not perhaps the most useful.

The story unfolds like a two ronnies sketch where the pair each attempt to talk to each other, often saying the same thing in their native tongues but despite the linguistic barrier, a bond develops. It speaks to the idea of love enduring and being able to overcome barriers, whether that be language or culture or the acceptance of others.

After Aurelia returns home, Jamie spends his evenings learning Portuguese. He flies out to her homeland, asks her father for permission to ask her to marry him, which initially causes confusion, as there are two daughters, before a very public proposal in broken Portuguese, followed by an acceptance in English, it turns out Aurelia had been learning English too, “just in cases”.

The final couple is single British Prime Minister, David, played by Hugh Grant whom becomes infatuated with one of his staff, personal assistant Natalie, played by Martine McCutcheon who persistently ends up swearing in front of him. I can imagine the authenticity of someone like Natalie would appeal to and ground the sort of person that is used to being treated with deference.

Anyway, after a meeting with the United States President, whom attempted to use his position to seduce Natalie despite being married, the British Prime Minister stood up to the more powerful bully, and publicly humiliate him at a press conference. It’s the kind of Prime Minister us Brits can only dream of, someone whom is humble yet not prudish, principled yet honest, strong yet relatable.

The Prime Minister ends up searching the street where Natalie lives to find her after reallocating her duties, ending up sharing his car with a child dressed as an Octopus, whilst trying to apologise, as you do.

The couple are then caught kissing after their backstage view of the children’s nativity performance becomes a somewhat more public affair.

I really like the format of the film and the fact that the characters aren’t perfect. I can’t relate to some of the films made today where characters are either perfect in every way or completely clueless and devoid of depth. I’ve always preferred real life stories for this reason. Real life often writes more interesting characters than pretentious Hollywood directors or cookie cutter film studies that make films like they’re making a burger. Give me humour. Give me sadness. Give me quirky and peculiar. Give me Love, actually.