Any advice?
Katy S, Olympia
Dear Katy,
You are not alone in wondering why you bother going. Clearly, this family are just playing a nasty waiting game. Your boyfriend may love you, but his family obviously don’t like you much at all. That dog is only paying you attention because he recognises in you a kindred spirit. He’s probably shocked to see you sitting at the table rather than sniffing around the floor for scraps.
When a seven-year-old is trying to make small talk because she feels sorry for you, it really is time to move on. Not spending Friday nights with the Von Trapp family doesn’t mean your relationship with your boyfriend is over, but, if he can’t see why you hate it, then I would think long and hard about how much of a future you really want with this man. For most of us it’s bad enough that we have to spend time with our own families, never mind long swathes of quality time with our partner’s clan.
Be honest: you hate them, they hate you, then see where things go. You may lose your boyfriend, but on the plus side, you’ll never have to spend time with the Waltons of Radio 3 again.
I would never encourage anyone to do this, but I wonder if you might feel a little better if you dribbled the juice from a can of sardines inside their piano before you left for the last time? Just a thought.
Dear Graham,
I recently went out to dinner with a gay male friend and we both fancied the wildly attractive waiter, who seemed keen, although he went home with neither of us. We couldn’t tell whether he was gay or straight. Is there a clever way of finding such things out, while simultaneously eliminating the competition?
Penny S, London
Dear Penny,
I am deeply embarrassed for you. The sort of people who talk about picking up the waiter are the same ones who shriek about how naughty they are being when they order dessert, as if eating a bit of meringue was on a par with war crimes.
Thinking the waiter fancies you puts you in the same league as people who think a hairdresser finds their hair interesting, or that the lady at the check-out is admiring their choice of groceries. These people are doing a job, and if they do it well we all have a nicer life – nothing more or less.
Oh, and by the way – of course he was gay.
Dear Graham,
My parents refuse to help out with our children. So do my husband’s parents. This is despite the fact that they have reared six children between them and are comfortably set up in homes with plenty of spare room. I’m not talking about being regular unpaid childminders while I swan off to work, or even monthly baby-sitting. I just wish that once or twice a year they would offer to have the children for a day or even, dare I say it, a weekend from time to time.
As it is, if my husband and I want to have a night away by ourselves, we have to fork out vast quantities of cash to get our nanny to move in for the weekend. Meanwhile, all my friends seem to be beating their parents off with a big stick and refereeing arguments between various grandparently contingents all craving extra time with their clan.
Why have I got such a raw deal?
Sarah G, Devizes
Dear Sarah,
What a lot of self-pitying drivel! Luckily, any single parents out there probably don’t have time to read this column, but try to imagine for one moment how little sympathy you’d get from them.
Your parents and in-laws have already brought up six kids between them; there is no earthly reason why they should start bringing up yours as well.
Your children are precisely that – yours. No one owes you any childcare apart from the nanny that you are blessed to have. Raw deal? Millions of mothers up and down the land dream of having it as good as you.
I have only two suggestions for you. Try asking your parents to baby-sit once in a while, rather than waiting for them suddenly to turn into the grandparents from The Waltons.
If they refuse, that doesn’t make them evil people. It sounds as if you don’t enjoy spending that much time with your kids, so why would anyone else?
My other suggestion is to pack your kids into a large crate with some nice snacks and a bottle of Sunny D, then send them off to Angelina Jolie. Problem solved.
Dear Graham,
What do you do if you have a peeping tom? The other day I was doing my ironing in my undies and, to my utter horror, spotted a man in the building opposite looking at me through a pair of giant binoculars – the sort you’d see on a Benny Hill programme. I felt sick and disgusted and closed the curtains immediately, then rang the police. They arrived within minutes and were very helpful and sympathetic. They rang the bell of the flat opposite, but were told by the Portuguese woman who opened the door that they must have the wrong flat – no man lived there.
Imagine my dismay when, last weekend, I was spied on again. This time the man was pointing an enormous video camera directly at my bedroom window. My daughter says he’s probably planning to launch me on YouTube. It seems there is nothing I can do to stop this odious man, short of confronting him myself. I am too embarrassed to call the police again.
I am not, as you might think, a nubile beauty who prances about in Agent Provocateur, but an overweight 53-year-old housewife with varicose veins. My admirer is at least 70, bug-eyed and earth-shatteringly ugly.
Cynthia J, Edinburgh
Dear Cynthia,
This is how you deal with a peeping tom: stop wandering around your flat in a bra and knickers with the curtains open and he’ll get bored and train his sights on someone else’s window. Given that you are 53, I’m slightly surprised that you haven’t figured out what curtains are for or learned that standing around in your underwear in full view of your neighbours isn’t really the done thing.
Part of me suspects that you may enjoy all the attention. I notice his binoculars were ‘giant’ and his video camera was ‘enormous’. I wonder if you don’t really want any advice at all, but just enjoy retelling the story in all its gory detail (did we really need to know about your veins?). Your outrage can scarcely mask your thinly disguised delight.
Invest in a dressing-gown, Cynthia, and spare a thought for the poor Portuguese woman who has a man break into her flat on a regular basis just to get a better view of your wobbly bits.
Dear Graham,
When I broke up with my boyfriend at the age of 37, he told me gleefully that, if I ended things with him, I’d never have a child and was unlikely to find another man. Three years on, I am still single and childless. So is he.
What I’d like to know is, should we try to revive things? We bumped into each other recently at a friend’s 40th birthday and ended up talking late into the night. His view is that, although things weren’t perfect between us – the sex, in particular, wasn’t quite right (his words, not mine) – given that we haven’t found anyone else, we should get back together again.
I can’t pretend life hasn’t been a struggle on my own and part of me feels this incredible joy at the prospect of being in a couple again. The other part feels really downhearted about the offer. Is this all I can get: a lukewarm male who doesn’t love me properly and wants me back only because he hasn’t found anyone else?
Ruby Wax would tell me that at 40 I am gathering dust so quickly that I’m practically a museum exhibit. No single, solvent male should be turned away, even if he’s an ex-boyfriend. What’s your opinion? Should I go for it? Am I crazy to go on waiting for some mythical figure to come charging in on a white stallion?
Emily S, Gloucestershire
Dear Emily,
I understand that you would like a baby and a partner, but getting back together with this guy is like someone who is so desperate to be a home owner that she moves into a cardboard box. This man wasn’t good enough for you once and he won’t be again. Imagine the years of staring at him across dinner tables, the Christmases, the holidays – all with this man who will slowly but surely become a living, breathing symbol of your life as a failure.
Yes, you want a kid, but do you really want that child
to grow up in a house devoid of love and full of compromise and regret? You are 40 years old, Emily, and, without trying to be controversial, may I suggest that you have probably lived half of your life? Isn’t it time to stop dreaming and get on with accepting and enjoying the life that you have?
Having a baby and a partner might be the ideal way you would like to live, but not getting them doesn’t mean you can’t share your life with others in a thousand different ways. We get only one life, Emily. Don’t waste it in a fog of fruitless yearning.
Dear Graham,
I came back early from work one day and found my husband in bed at 4pm with a female colleague. I threw him out and only just managed to resist the temptation to cut up his suits and put petrol into his much-loved, diesel-run convertible Merc. Now, a month later, he’s begging me to take him back, saying it was all a terrible mistake and it’s me he really loves. Why do men betray us like this? And how can I ever trust him again?
Zara P, Kent
“Love is like a tame tiger, beautiful and awesome. But in the blink of an eye, and without warning, it can rip your heart out.”
Dear Zara,
Love is like a tame tiger, beautiful and awesome. But in the blink of an eye, and without warning, it can rip your heart out. I can tell from your letter that against all your better judgement you are about to get back in the cage with the beast. Don’t worry. If we all went through life being sensible, we’d probably never feel pure joy – and no one would buy any of Stella McCartney’s clothes.
The questions you ask go to the very root of what separates the sexes. Your husband wasn’t betraying you, he was satisfying himself. The fact that he probably never gave your feelings a second thought will doubtless sound depressing but it could help when it comes to your second question. You can trust him only if he knows that he will suffer as a direct result of his afternoon delight. My advice is to stay strong and don’t just let him buy you a few dinners and forget what he did. I’m thinking here of his love for his convertible Merc. It has to go. Somewhere in his subconscious, that car says he has not accepted being married. If he refuses to get rid of it, then your decision is made: get rid of him.
Dear Graham,
I had a miscarriage a couple of weeks ago at four months. It was my first child and a shattering experience. My husband has been really distant since it happened, burying his sorrow in frantic DIY projects. Most weekends he charges off to Ikea, Homebase and B&Q, and I don’t see him all day. In the evenings, he builds shelves and walks about the house muttering about how the floor needs revarnishing or the bathroom needs retiling. He isn’t a builder and didn’t show any particular inclination for DIY before we lost the baby.
I really want to share my grief with him and talk about it, rather than pretend nothing happened, but I can’t seem to communicate with him any more. He’s developed a ridiculous cheery whistle, which sounds completely fake and is designed, I think, to keep me at bay. I feel alone and grief-stricken.
Laura S, Bristol
Dear Laura,
My heart goes out to you both. What a miserable situation. Grief is never a welcome guest and we all deal with it in different ways.
It sounds as if your husband thinks his gorgeous wife and beautiful family are broken and he needs to fix them. If he makes everything else perfect, maybe the pieces will fall into place and you can be happy again. It sounds crazy, but that poor man is searching the shelves of Homebase for something to help him mend his broken heart. I doubt it is you that he is trying to keep at bay, it’s the pain.
It must be incredibly difficult for you, but don’t try to rush him. In strange ways, it might be easier for you to cope with all of this because at least it happened to you, whereas no matter how much you reach out to him, he feels like he’s on the outside looking in. In the days of cooking by candlelight and drinking warm milk, you’d have simply tried to get pregnant again as quickly as possible. While there is much to recommend that solution, in the end I think you need to be ready to move on and clearly neither of you is.
I would urge you both to get some professional counselling before things become too deep-rooted. The only good thing about grief is that it does eventually leave; when it does, take a moment to look around your house and admire all the home improvements it has left in its wake.
Dear Graham,
I can’t cook, my flat is a tip and I find myself in the awkward position of owing an awful lot of people dinner. Even though I’m pretty good at singing for my supper, various friends have started to drop heavy hints that they have yet to clap eyes on my place. It’s rude, I know, not to reciprocate, but I would rather eat a live cobra than host a dinner party of my own.
I fear that New York-style decamping to a restaurant would be seen as lazy and inhospitable, even if I did pick up the bill at the end.
My ex-girlfriend has refused to step in with her fish pie. And to be honest, I fancy one of the girls I owe dinner to so it wouldn’t be a good idea to have my ex there, creating an atmosphere.
How can I get around this problem while ensuring I remain on everybody’s party lists?
Ben L, Edinburgh
Dear Ben,
A letter? You had to sit down and write a letter? Pick up a rag and some spray that says ‘shine’ on the bottle somewhere and clean your flat. Your friends are justified in being irked by you because you are a lazy lump.
No one expects your apartment to be something from Grand Designs and the meal need be nothing more than a selection of the easy-cook ranges that all the supermarket chains do now – they just want you to go to the effort of breaking bread with them in your home.
Cooking isn’t some sort of medieval witchcraft – even Delia has discovered the joy of the microwave – and if the food is less than marvellous then at least people won’t be so keen for a second invitation.
If your home really is something from a Channel Five documentary – I’m thinking two-seater leather sofa and a dead plant – then why not hire a Landmark Trust property or a cottage and invite everyone away for the weekend? Your chances with the prospective girlfriend are also increased unless you happen to be in love with Kim or Aggie from How Clean is your House? Do you think I watch too much television?
Dear Graham,
My husband’s parting shot to me when I returned to work recently after 10 years at home bringing up children was: ‘This had better not interfere with family life.’ Even though I still manage to get everything done, he misses no opportunity to have a go at me. Last thing at night, when he’s checking his BlackBerry and setting his alarm, he will say something to me like, ‘Don’t expect me to go to Tesco at the weekend’ or ‘Don’t think I’m going to organise our holiday this year’.
It’s true that there’s no economic reason for me to be back at work. My husband – all alpha-male machismo – earns big money in the City and we have more than enough. It’s really about me striking out on my own and pursuing my ambitions, rather than just being a mum and wife for the rest of my life. Our daughters are seven and nine, busy and happy at school, and I do feel that there’s more to life than walking the dog, doing Pilates and looking decorative at corporate dinners.
Am I being selfish? And if I’m not, how do I soothe my husband’s huge and very fragile ego, and keep our marriage on an even keel?
Samantha H, London
Dear Samantha,
You are right to assume this is all about your husband’s ego. No self-respecting bread-winner wants to come home and discover the family eating cake. Presumably one of your husband’s major sources of job satisfaction is simply derived from providing for you and his little princesses. In fairness, it does sound like he is being very thin-skinned about it all, so tread carefully.
A man might understand your desire to work more if you gave him a financial reason, or goal. Obviously, your contribution isn’t required for the day-to-day running expenses of your lives, but perhaps you could put your wages towards a spectacular family holiday that you organ
ise. If you don’t have a country house for weekends, perhaps that’s where your money might go. If your wages don’t quite stretch to that, then a simple trust fund for your children’s education might ease his anxiety.
Of course, all this advice may soon be redundant, like your husband and all his friends. In a world of cutbacks, Mummy going to work might seem like a very good idea. Not wanting to go to Tesco is very different from not being able to.
Dear Graham,
I have a work colleague who is driving me crazy. As the newest person in the company, I have been put next to the office PA, a competent but brassy woman, who never stops talking in between frantic bouts of nail-painting, internet shopping and crisp-eating.
Every day I have to listen to her tittle-tattle to her builder boyfriend, Kevin, who is always up to no good. Typically, the conversation goes like this: ‘Did ya?’ (Gasps of disbelief.) ‘Could ya?’ (More gasps.) ‘Why did ya?’ (Fascinated horror.)
It is incredibly distracting. How can I get her to pipe down without alienating her completely?
Ian S, Hemel Hempstead
Dear Ian,
Tread very carefully. Fall out with the brassy, competent PA and you might as well resign the same day. An obvious solution would be to pop on your iPod and get through the day in a haze of Genesis and 10cc, blissfully unaware of the marathon monologue in the cubicle next door… but then you’ll also fail to notice your boss trying to get your attention, or your phone ringing.
Ask Graham Page 13
