Patterns · Relationships
Date: 14 March 2026
Riding the pity train.
When Nuala cheated with someone from Reuters, where she’d just started, I went full drama. I fell onto our bedroom floor in a heap while she sat on the bed, still in her work clothes.
“Why?” I asked from the floor.
“Because you’re always like this.” She sighed. “Melodramatic.”
I sobbed.
“You see?”
I could not give her what she wanted. It was fire. I gave her ash. I only got more pathetic; she got more distant, more professional, more gone. The marriage didn’t end because of whoever-it-was from Reuters. It ended because of my weakness. I mistook pity for intimacy.
Six years after the wedding, our marriage counselor asked us to think back to what had been good between us. I had loads. She had nothing.
“There must be something you recall fondly,” I said, my voice fraying. “The wedding. India. The—”
“I remember being young,” she cut in, her voice utterly flat. “I remember feeling inexperienced, overwhelmed.”
The counselor shifted in her chair. I looked at Nuala, and saw someone I’d never actually met. Or someone I had simply never tried to see.
“Did you ever love me?” It came out frail.
I looked at the ceiling. She left it too long.
“I loved the person I thought you were.”
Which was worse than a no. It meant she’d loved an expectation.
“Would you like to have another session?” the counselor asked.
“No.” Nuala reached for her coat.
Date: 14 March 2026
Nuala started a new job in London Town; she loved to call it that. Her new toy, her flip phone, came with the gig. She was not playing Snake.
I noticed the affair too late. Some nights she didn’t come home at all. I’d stand at the front window for hours, scanning the street for her. I kept vigil at the window until dawn, flicking the curtains. She was seeing someone from her office. She was thumbing through her flip phone.
“Someone from the office?”
“Yes.”
And that was all I got. I’d never met anyone she worked with. She kept that world to herself. Her new life of drinks after work, coming home late, and constrained without actors.
“Lots of omissions,” I told myself.
“Just colleagues from work,” she’d say. “You don’t know them.”
I pictured him, and it made my blood boil. Oxbridge, soon to get a foreign correspondent gig, the kind of “bloke” who could talk about Kosovo over a glass of wine without welling up.
And yet, somehow, I was in the wrong. She had lines for it. “Stop controlling me.” “You’re being insecure.” “There’s nothing to worry about.” “You’re needy.”
After one fight she said it with her back to me in bed. “Suffocating.” Cruelty or truth, I wondered.
Years after we split, she said it again across a restaurant table: “I couldn’t breathe, you suffocated me.”
Twenty years later, my second wife, the mother of my son, reached for the same word. She never met Nuala. They had nothing in common except me. I’d just checked whether her phone had gone with her behind the bathroom door.
“Suffocating.”
That was when I finally saw the shape. The only common factor in both marriages was me. Two wives, one word. And two phones.
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What pattern have you repeated in relationships that you would like to break?
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