Husband #1.

He was probably asexual not gay… but there’s a good chance he was gay.

It’s just easier to say he was gay though this is unverified. No one wants to be humorously self-depreciating about the first of their two failed marriages with an explanation on what the sexual preferences, or lack thereof, of an ‘asexual’ are.

And there was an incident on Clapham Common once that ended with the police coming round because he had turned up home late at night with his coat lining ripped and his belt all askew. Allegedly, he was frog-marched across the road to the Common by a black guy on one side and a white guy on the other and they had proceeded to rough him up a bit. The police took his clothes away in a big brown paper bag which we never got back.

Strangely, he couldn’t pick the culprits from that big book of mug shots the police have of repeat offenders down the station. The duo were never identified even though the police did say it was very rare for a white guy and a black guy to be working together in unison to commit crimes and thus you would have thought they would be familiar with this multi-ethnic criminal pairing, but it seems they teamed up opportunistically for one night only to beat up a random stranger.

Due to some recent online stalking; I know my first ex-husband has remarried a woman, has one child and has taken up photography which seems to be predominantly of animals and mainly what I assume is his dog, which is a little odd because he was always a cat person. Whilst I can’t say this gives concrete evidence to the gay claim; it’s only one kid and the dog photos all seem to be in wooded areas. Food for thought…

On our wedding night, aptly a rainy Monday because a) it was cheaper and b) I just didn’t really care that much, I filled the jacuzzi in our boutique hotel room hoping for the best. He awkwardly undressed and stepped in, averting his eyes, and for 15 mins, as I had my back to him, he removed bobby pins from my hair refusing to touch my naked body. That was as romantic as it got, there wasn’t any sex on my wedding night.

That sinking feeling that was already in germination stage started growing shoots and it didn’t stop until it was a mighty great tree flowering with resentment 5 years later.

Eventually I asked him to move out though I think he would have happily trudged along in that ridiculous marriage forever but I couldn’t go on anymore, I was only 24 and I had so much life left to live. 

Every week I cried for 5 years. Every week he would say he would try. Crying and trying.

He just couldn’t get it up and if he did it wouldn’t stay that way.

One day, a year or so in, he came home from one of his trips to Dublin where he was working away each week, and announced:

“So, I’ve been thinking about what’s wrong and I think the problem is that I am just not sexually attracted to you.”

Something is wounded deep down when you are told by someone you have just married that he doesn’t find you sexually attractive.

I was 20 and I needed a breather so flew home to Australia for a few weeks.

As if it wasn’t difficult enough trying to explain to my mum that my husband has rarely been able to gain an erection, loses his erection mid-way through and never instigates sex, she delivered these two helpful statements:

1.     “I’ll say to you what my mother said to me, ‘you can stay for a week or so but I will send you back because you need to make it work’.”

And, most helpful of all:

2.     “Oh! Your father has never had that problem!”

Thank you mum, mentally scarred for life.

I can’t say he wasn’t kind or even considerate, at one stage he even offered that I might wish to have an affair. I didn’t take him up on the offer.

We went to psycho-sexual counselling to see if we could find a work-around but despite the counsellors best effort all we achieved were new rules to have sex by. After 6 months of lessons, we could have step-by-step, highly unspontaneous, by-the-book sex. It was not the solution I was seeking nor the antidote to how I was feeling in my soul.

I recall him saying in one of our hideously uncomfortable sessions ‘it hurts when we have sex’ which resulted in him being told to ‘stretch it out’ in the shower. This was a lot to take in for a 20-year-old inexperienced girl raised in out-of-the-way Australia by conservative, evangelical Christians. I’m not even sure the word penis was even used in our home.

It was a fucking mess I wished I wasn’t in but there I was stoically pushing through like a good wife should, as per the 20 prior years of wife-modelling I had observed.