Our conversation was taking place 11 months after the break-up and while the wound is still not fully healed, she has moved on significantly. She shakes her head when she tells me about her attempts to bargain with him, and how she considered allowing her husband to have another wife in another country. She recognises this as a sign of her desperation to keep him and their marriage, whatever the cost. It’s totally understandable, I tell her – she’d told all her friends and family, had the big day, made life plans with someone and then, bang, it was all pulled from under her.
‘It was an enormous shock. I was definitely not able to eat for about three weeks,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t even talk about it, to be honest. There was a lot of shame because I should have known better. You read these things in magazines and you see these things on TV shows. And you are saying to yourself, that would never happen to me, how stupid could that person be? But, it’s not until you experience it and are drawn and pulled into it, in what appears to be a meaningful relationship. And then you have utter shame around falling for it. But it happens …’
‘Yes, it happens,’ I say reassuringly. Her vulnerability is clear, and while I can see she has thought long and hard about this whole episode, and has probably spent many nights looking at those log-sized candles flickering and filling the empty space on the couch beside her, the grief has not gone away; she has just learned to adapt to it most of the time.
What’s keeping her anchored to the sailed ship that was her marriage is the fact that she cannot legally divorce her husband, despite the fact that he is living with another woman in another country. ‘I’m not able to divorce him from here,’ she affirms. ‘I don’t want to go over there and get divorced. But I have made enquiries and the only choice I have is to hire a solicitor in his country to do the divorce or else go back to the mosque so he would have to grant it. I was advised not to go ...’
So, while she figures out how to remove herself from the marriage, she is faced with legal bills for the failed visa application, not to mention the costs associated with the wedding, most of which she has borne. The engagement and wedding rings were bought in Dubai. In total they cost €5,000, the majority of which she paid herself. She will sell them for €3,000. ‘They are stunning rings,’ she adds. ‘When they were on my hand, everyone would stop and pick them up and look at the weight of them and remark how stunning they were. You won’t get them on anyone else in Ireland.’
There’s obviously both an emotional and financial catharsis in getting rid of the rings as quickly as she can now. Anyone who has ever been in a failed relationship will tell you it has an impact long after the last tears have been shed. But in a situation like this, when there was no advance warning, and when one party feels they were duped into love, that impact is all the more magnified. ‘I am getting there now but immediately afterwards you do question what men say. You analyse them more now and I guess I’ve to be very careful I don’t bring this into a new relationship,’ she says candidly.
I tell her that her openness and insight and her inherent humanity (which she says is often interpreted as naivety) should not have to become a casualty of this. These are the things I tell her that will paradoxically give her the best chance of falling in love again. There is something likeable about my interviewee. She has warmth and oozes care, compassion and decency. I imagine she is the kind of person who sees a news bulletin about famine in Yemen or drought in Kenya and hits the donate button there and then. But I wonder how much the failed marriage has changed her; how much it has made her less receptive to love. ‘I would be more self-aware now,’ she says. ‘I know I was a little bit naive. But I would prefer this way than to be cynical. I would prefer to be able to fall in love than to always query and question. I think that’s a lonely life. I won’t be too cynical about it. I mean, there wasn’t ever a question of whether I loved him or not.’
Before I leave she carefully puts the rings back in their boxes, and as she’s doing so, I ask what is the biggest lesson she’s learned from the whole experience. ‘I think that it can happen anyone and I think, well, you can beat yourself up about it but I think you can in the future say to yourself, you need to step back from a situation and try to look at it from different perspectives. Some of my friends would have said, you know, are you sure about this? Without overtly coming out and saying I was being duped. I said, of course I’m sure; he loves me, he tells me it. Those same friends have never come back and said we told you so. If you’re hurt to that extent, then you have to reflect on what you have done, what would I have done differently – am I that vulnerable, naive and gullible? You ask yourself all those questions. You question yourself if a man says to you, “You look lovely.” I hate that it has changed me that way, but it’s to be expected, I suppose.’
Does she ever wear the rings now? ‘No. Not any more. They’re not mine now. I hope they go on someone’s finger that will have many years of happy marriage.’
We finish our tea. I tell her that I hope she’s talking to people about how she feels, and she says she has some very close friends and they share. She’s determined not to allow the whole experience to inhibit her or in any way reduce her chances of finding ‘the one’.
Somehow, I think she’s going to be OK and I leave thinking that selling the rings is the manifestation of a need to start again, of choosing deliberately to put what were once symbols of the future firmly into the past.
Vintage wedding and engagement ring for sale; €2,000 or nearest offer. Comes with valuation. DoneDeal, July 2018
I’m early and have parked outside a house in the west of Ireland. I’m sitting in my car waiting for the owner of the above rings to arrive home. Someone is knocking on my car window and wants to lead me into the house. As I follow, a large Alsatian appears and eyes me from inside the open front door. Just then a Land Rover pulls into the drive and a woman gets out, brushes past me and quickly closes the door before the Alsatian bolts. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says, before adding casually, ‘That dog bites.’ She half chides the man who let the dog out, before asking if I want tea or coffee and clearing a space at the kitchen table for us to sit.
I notice that the man is quite self-conscious and I also notice that she’s overseeing his tea making, or at least subtly checking each step while trying not to make it obvious that she is doing so. The kitchen is cluttered – managed clutter, I’d call it – and even though the house is on a main road in a village, outside are a collection of sheds and outbuildings, bales of hay and fields. I’m guessing that they grew up on farms, and this is their way of keeping one foot in the fields, living on the side of a busy road, yet constructing a mini farmyard out back.
There’s a nervousness in the room and some tension. I don’t sense that it’s caused by me or my microphone. I think it’s more the fact that their space is now shared with someone else and they’re very conscious of that. As cups of coffee are served the man gets closer to me without saying anything, as if he is afraid to say the wrong thing. And then I notice the box on the windowsill behind the sink. Every day of the month has a little window and some are open, advent calendar like, while others are unopened. Inside are red and white pills, and the day and date is printed on each little portal.
Something clicks, and I’m taken back to an interview I’d done years earlier beside a mountain in Tipperary, with a man and his mother, who was in the final stages of dementia. She kept pleading with me to take her away because she believed he was poisoning her. He wasn’t, of course. In reality he was keeping her alive, and had sacrificed much of his own life to ensure his mother could stay in her own home as long as possible. Her illness meant that she took her anger and frustration out on him every day. She kept saying to me over and over, pointing to imaginary marks on her body: ‘Look what he did