BEL MOONEY: My husband’s bad decisions almost destroyed our family. And I fear it’s only a matter of time till it happens again…

Dear Bel,

I have been married for 20 years and, when we tied the knot, I was madly in love with a gorgeous man I thought perfect in nearly every way. Now we are in our 40s, I’m afraid I’m not so sure.

Although my husband is very intelligent, he seems to be a serial ‘mucker-up’ of work situations. The worst was when he destroyed what could have been a comfortable life for us and our two lovely children by ruining a healthy business.

He did this by taking his eye off the ball and trusting someone else to take decisions that he should have made.

We had to borrow from relatives to get us out of trouble.

All the time this was happening, he pretended everything was going well, so the end came as a terrible shock. I cannot begin to tell you just how much strain, conflict and stress this caused.

We sort of moved on, he began working for good companies, but never seemed to reach his potential.

Then he persuaded me to start another business elsewhere. Because I love him I agreed. So we upped sticks, moving away from family and friends.

Lo and behold – history is repeating itself. He continues to make bad business decisions and will not listen to sound commercial advice, blustering to get his own way or going on the extreme defensive – so I am always the bad cop.

Once again, I find myself stressed, shaken about money and wondering how to pay all the bills.

My husband’s mistakes are always costly, but he can’t seem to acknowledge them. They are wholly avoidable and his excuses for making the same bad calls again and again are so feeble. I’ve come to suspect he must thrive in his self-created atmosphere of stress, conflict, worry, danger and negative drama.

He will go to bed and sleep like a baby while I pace up and down until the small hours. All this is ruining my sleep, so that as well as being worried, I’m exhausted.

I work hard at the business and feel I am carrying him as well as our handful of employees – plus all the troubles. It feels so unfair. He had a perfectly normal childhood, reasonably good parents and excellent education. He absolutely refused to get counselling when I once suggested it….  how dare I suggest he might have a mental illness?

Still handsome and popular, he’s happy-go-lucky and loves our social life. But it upsets me to realise he isn’t the man I thought he was and I’m not sure how to process that.

CHARLOTTE 

Bel Mooney replies: Once upon a time I had a close friend who married young after knowing her husband a matter of months. She was passionately in love with someone who seemed intellectually, socially and emotionally superior to anyone she had ever met.

She told me that even though he was in his 20s he was the most mature man she’d ever known, and she loved to feel ‘looked-after’ by him.

But a year after their wedding she did something that shouldn’t happen – she read the journal he’d started keeping when they met.

How desperately hurt she was to read juvenile remarks about other women, so that even on their wedding day he was fancying one of her bridesmaids. She confronted him. He shrugged it off. The marriage struggled on for longer than it should but was never in a healthy state.

My friend said in spite of everything she always loved her (now-ex) husband. We talked it through and concluded that although his stupid diary inflicted a wound on the new marriage, it was the fatal combination of her husband’s indifference and her disillusion that made that wound fester, until the disease in the blood infected everything.

When one partner feels contempt (or something very like it) for the other, a good relationship is doomed, even if the couple stay unhappily together for the rest of their lives.

I don’t sense that you and your husband are at that point, Charlotte, as you feel disillusioned rather than contemptuous, and saddened rather than maddened.

It can be a tremendous shock to realise how disappointed you feel with the person you married – and still love. The illusions have gone, the pedestal lies in pieces on the ground, the god is suddenly shown to be only human after all, with feet of clay.

It matters hugely that he seems not to accept culpability. If he were both honest and contrite, you could work together to salvage the business and restore your marriage. He must realise that, before it’s too late, and acknowledge that you are probably the one to take charge. But how?

I wonder if it might act as a useful shock to show him this page and reveal that you actually wrote to a stranger because it gives you such pain to feel so disillusioned – and what is he going to do about it?

If he gets cross, you can say that response proves how right you were to write.

The era of that blustering male ego has passed. Tell him you haven’t fallen out of love with him (yet), but you both need urgently to discuss what went wrong and how vital it is for him to admit how badly he messed up.

Tell him that would make you proud of him again. Couples counselling is surely needed.

Vile boast makes me want to escape

Dear Bel,

I live in a retirement community and have been finding it increasingly difficult to cope with a neighbour.

She recently told me, and others here, that when she was working as a teacher (she is now 84) in a school for pupils with learning disabilities, she groomed a 15-year-old boy, then had sex with him as a 16th birthday present.

When I told her I found this shocking, especially as she was effectively the pupil’s guardian and that his learning disabilities made the issue of consent more complex, she told me she was proud of her behaviour.

She is one of those who is very fit for her age. I have stopped being friendly with her because of this but, unfortunately, have to see her daily because she lives so near.

She is also friends with some of my friends here, too – so to keep away from her I’ve had to break off contact with them also.

My neighbours think it is a joke – even one who actually has grandchildren who have learning disabilities. It’s impossible to understand that.

I find it really hard to stomach it when I see the woman who made that shocking confession and I’m beginning to think the only thing I can do is move away from here because I find it so distressing.

I would really like your view.

HILARY 

Bel Mooney replies: I am sure I won’t be the only one who finds the idea of an 84-year-old, of either sex, preening about long-ago sex horribly distasteful. Does that make me a prude?

No – I just believe the older we get, the more we should be aware of (a) what’s dignified and what isn’t and (b) that people don’t really want to know what we got up to when dinosaurs roamed.

Anyway, boasting about sexual conquests is unacceptable at any age from 18 to 80. It’s an ick.

All of which leaves out the particular moral dimension of your email. Nobody in their right mind would disagree that it is vile for a teacher to exploit his or her position to gain sexual advantage over a younger person; what’s more, to do so when the ‘victim’ has learning disabilities… well, it’s hard to find the words for the revulsion.

I applaud you for calling her out and understand why you feel so upset by having to see her every day.

You mention that this woman is ‘one of those who is very fit for her age’, which makes me suspect (and this is my only gut feeling) that she not only keeps herself trim, but is quite proud of the fact.

I’m wondering if she has narcissistic tendencies, which might help to explain the extraordinary boasting about forbidden sex with a vulnerable young man. As if she’s saying: ‘Oh, I was really hot stuff when I was young, you oldies!’

Of course, she could be lying, too – because people do, especially about sex. It can mask a fruitless despair over the loss of looks: a desperate clinging to a self-image of irresistible sexual appeal in one who always set great store by such things. Which is actually pathetic.

It upsets you that people you counted as friends are not bothered by the woman’s disturbing story, true or not. Let’s assume they were all in their 20s/early 30s at the end of the 1960s, imbibing that liberal culture of ‘anything goes’ and a dislike of allegedly-puritanical judgments.

That might go some way towards explaining their lack of response to something you consider shocking. Or, of course, they might be rolling their eyes in private and thinking her a sad, lying creep. Who knows?

Since you don’t wish to endure the sight of this woman and can’t accept the laissez-faire attitude of your erstwhile friends, then moving to another retirement community would offer you a fresh start. But it would also be an upheaval.

I just advise you to think very hard before you decide to move. Perhaps reflect that, while you can do nothing about something that may or may not have happened decades ago, you can and must look after your own future wellbeing. Which might, in the end, mean you stay.

And finally… the pain of neglecting the elderly

Last weekend I published a letter from an elderly gentleman, Edward, about moving to live nearer his adult children. Reader J took issue with me:

‘He’s 86 for Pete’s sake! Why are you advising him to up sticks and move at his age, when his children couldn’t apparently care less about him and are too blinking lazy to visit him. It happens with my extended family…’

Similarly, Janet wrote: ‘My daughter lives 20 miles away but I see very little of her, although she goes to see my grandson who lives ten minutes from me.

‘My son I’ve only seen twice since my husband died three years ago. Many families are like this, but it doesn’t make it any easier. Can anyone tell us why?’

Those readers are unhappy with good reason. Apart from the angry hurt about the lack of attention from family, J’s opinion on moving was echoed by two more male readers.

Here I admit my own error. As you’ll realise, I usually have to edit letters and that time I was over-zealous, omitting Edward’s statement about how much he wants to move and how he thinks about it a lot.

So I wasn’t so much urging him, but attempting to think of ways to ameliorate the situation. Like not fretting over a shed.

I agree with everybody that moving at his age is not really to be desired. But Edward’s wish is to be near his family, so they jolly well have to help.

Seriously, the feelings of neglect shared by so many elderly people are indeed terribly sad. Other cultures take better care of their old.

Janet’s ‘why?’ encompasses many possible situations, from ancient misunderstandings, even parental mistakes to the selfishness of adults who allow being ‘busy’ to justify their neglect.

I see no easy solutions.

Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 9 Derry Street, London W8 5HY, or email [email protected]. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.