The Personals

She points to the entrance to the large shopping centre. One day, when her daughter was just one, this woman was walking through a clothing store. Another woman passed her and as she did so, she stared at her child. She could see that this passer-by was visibly taken aback. This woman said the child reminded her of her own toddler, who had died a few years previously. In fact, she said, ‘She is the spitting image of her.’ It was an odd encounter, but both parents chatted away and when the stranger asked her the child’s father’s name, things took an incredible turn.

‘I told her my partner’s name,’ she says. ‘And to my utter shock, she said that was the name of her partner and the father of her child also.’ I repeat this slowly so I can process it. ‘So out of the blue a woman walked up to you in the shopping centre opposite and said that your child reminded her of her own who had died?’ She nods, sharing my incredulity. ‘And then it turned out that the children shared a father and you knew nothing about this second family?’

She again nods her head in agreement at the unlikely coincidence. ‘I was dumbstruck,’ she tells me. ‘In that moment, I would possibly have overlooked the fact that he had had a previous relationship that he hadn’t told me about. But the fact that he had a child that died, and he didn’t tell me about it – that’s hugely traumatic.’

The second woman produced a photo of herself, her daughter who had died and the child’s father – all three of them together. ‘She was like my daughter’s twin sister,’ she tells me, before adding angrily, ‘How could he keep it a secret?’ When confronted, his excuse was that he had put his previous family to the back of his mind because of the trauma of losing his child. ‘It was something he wanted to forget about as if it didn’t happen,’ she says.

Some people choose to bury trauma and loss in this way and not share it with those closest to them. But by doing that, they run the risk of the trauma contaminating the good in their lives. While the person opposite me is humane, caring and compassionate, when she realised that her husband had had a previous family she knew nothing about, her first thoughts were not about how deeply his daughter’s death must have hurt him if he felt that he had to hide it; she was more concerned that he may have been keeping something else from her. ‘So, then I just said, no, let’s go our separate ways. This is too bizarre. I was heartbroken at the time, but I’m over it now. I think I dodged a bullet, to be honest.’

She’s reluctant to tell me much about her former partner. There is little contact between them now and the fallout from the revelation and the subsequent breakdown of her marriage have made her wary of people. She couldn’t contemplate continuing with the relationship once her trust had been broken so fundamentally. The rings, like her former marriage, mean very little to her now. The break-up of her marriage has had other implications, and finding things tough financially, she decided to put the rings up for sale. Any money she receives will be invested in her children’s future.

Despite the fact that she has been open about much of the detail, I have a sense that she is holding back large portions of her story. Perhaps this is a coping mechanism to prevent herself from being re-traumatised – and who could blame her?

Her phone flashes, signalling that her children are ready to be collected. I wish her well. Before she gets out of the car she turns to me: ‘See, I told you there was a story, didn’t I?’ she says, before opening the car door and running to embrace her younger child.

A Long Engagement

Stunning wedding dress for sale, size 12–14, never worn. DoneDeal, September 2016

‘This is the one for sale,’ Betty Hornibrook tells me, through the sound of crumpling plastic wrapping, as she removes a large dress from the wardrobe of the spare bedroom in her mid-terrace house.

The front door opens downstairs and she gestures to me to lower my voice while spreading the dress on the bed and flattening it. ‘It’s a halter neck, right,’ she says, in a strong Cork city north side whisper. Carefully, she removes the wrapping to reveal a white dress embellished with beautiful beading. ‘You can see the way it falls and the back can be adjusted,’ she adds. ‘I got it custom made to flatter my figure a bit. When I tried it on – I am 52 years old – I realised I was too old for it. I was like mutton dressed as lamb.’

We’re whispering because Betty’s partner doesn’t know she has a dress for sale. He doesn’t know she bought it, and he definitely doesn’t know that it’s a wedding dress, complete with shoes.

And so I make an educated guess that he probably doesn’t know about my microphone either, or the fact that I’m upstairs in his home looking at dresses with his life partner. Suddenly I have visions of a six-foot two-inch man, perhaps a former Ford or Dunlop worker, walking up the stairs and seeing his partner and me rummaging through her sock drawer while fumbling for an explanation. In fact, he keeps himself to himself, while I silently try to work out how many bones I’d be likely to break if I had to hurl myself out of the spare bedroom window in a hurry.

Long before we met, Betty had spent hours admiring the dress when it was hanging in her local bridal shop, before finally choosing it, getting it altered and then taking it home and concealing it in the wardrobe. Some time afterwards, when she was on her own in the house, Betty took it out and decided to try it on again. All her wedding dreams, which I later learned had built up over more than three decades, were ruined in that moment when she looked at herself in the mirror. She experienced a flash of clarity when she saw how she looked and made the distinction between reality and fantasy.

‘This is a wedding dress to go with an image I had in my head when I was 20 or 30 years old,’ she says, reflecting on that moment. ‘So I think I am stuck in a time warp and that the mind is not living in the present.’ Pointing to her head, she says: ‘Up here I’m 30. But the body is 52 and there’s no getting away from that. When they are measuring you in the bridal shop, you feel like a million dollars, but then when you get home and you look at yourself properly in the mirror, well, it wasn’t me – you know what I mean? It’s going to be gorgeous on someone else, but it just wasn’t me, like.’

And that really sums up ageing, putting on clothing in your fifties that you would have worn in your twenties, and expecting to look and feel the same but realising that you can’t or won’t. When Betty looked at herself in the mirror wearing her newly-bought wedding dress, she didn’t see herself looking back at her. She saw three decades, two children and three grandchildren in her reflection. Many of us never get that insight, but Betty, who worked hard all her life, left school young and has only ever had one real boyfriend and partner, got all that insight in a split second. The problem was, that insight came at a cost – and a non-refundable one at that.

As with a lot of wedding dresses, because it was custom made, Betty can’t return the frock. When we met in late 2016, the wedding was planned for February 2017. The original price of the dress had been €1,600, but it had been reduced to €800 when Betty bought it, and now, weeks after taking it home, she was selling it for €250 or, as she said, ‘The best offer I can get.’ As I said, insight costs.

Have you had many calls I asked her? ‘You’re the first call I’ve got,’ she says. I’m not sure I have the hips for it, I joke, and Betty seems somewhat resigned to the fact that she’s stuck with this wedding dress she no longer wants.

There is a second part to this story, as there often is with unworn wedding dresses for sale. Betty did buy another dress, and it’s one that she feels more comfortable in. She dives into another wardrobe to retrieve it, like a heron on the Lee seizing its lunch, and she takes it out and shows it to me. Now, I’m no Vera Wang, but to my eye it did look more streamlined – classier, I would say – and although I’m really stretching my wedding attire knowledge to the limit here, not so typically bridal.

In terms of the backstory, you might be forgiven for thinking that at 52 perhaps Betty is on her second marriage, or maybe she just never found the right partner, or perhaps she is a widow. But her reason for getting married in her fifties is more complex. We’re still whispering as Betty continues to speak passionately about the dress on her bed. So much so, wide hips or no wide hips, I’m really coming round to the idea of buying it myself, I tell her. We both laugh and then she hushes me. We have to call a halt to the whispering, I tell her. I mean, what’s the big deal – surely her partner knows all by now?

‘No, he doesn’t even know I have two dresses, right? He. Doesn’t. Even. Know. I. Have. Two. Dresses,’ she says, emphasising each word the second time round.

‘You’re 52,’ I say, ‘and he’s what age?’

‘He’s 58.’

‘You’ve been engaged how long?’

‘For 35 years.’

Three and a half decades of an engagement. Fair enough, we all like to test out a product before buying it, but this is taking it a bit far, surely? Betty laughs. All round the house are photos of her family which she shows me with pride. She’s open and friendly, and happy to go into the story of what must be one of the longest engagements in Ireland.

The story starts in 1982 when Betty and her partner first got engaged. She was 17 and her fiancé asked her father if they could get married. ‘My father chased him and said get out of it. You’re too old. She’s too young,’ Betty explains. ‘You see, my sister had got married the year before and so my father was after a big wedding, and he wasn’t going throwing more money at another one so that I would end up back home again, as he saw it. But I didn’t come home, did I? We just moved out then and got our own place and the story began from there.’

The 1980s were such a different time, when fathers still had that kind of control over their daughters and could refuse to bless a marriage. And now 35 years on Betty has two children with her fiancé. William is 32 and Scott is 22. She wants me to mention her lovely daughter-in-law, Audrey, and the fact that she also has three beautiful grandchildren.

From the age of 17 onwards, Betty had always had it in mind to get married, but life events got in the way. ‘The plan was we’ll do it this time, or we’ll do it that time, but something always came up. So, I think now it’s our time. Food is booked, music is booked and we’re going to have a lovely day.’ I can’t help wondering though, for a couple who have been together so long – for decades, in fact – what difference will it make getting married?

‘I’ll tell you now, he’s my best friend,’ she says, ‘and I’m quite sure I would be his best friend. He understands me and I understand him and we just adore the children and the grandchildren. It has been a lifelong dream of ours and we just want to fulfil it.’ If Betty doesn’t shift the dress, she says she will donate it to a charity. I meet her fiancé briefly as I’m leaving the house, and it’s endearing that he’s not afraid to show his affection for Betty in front of a stranger. She says she’ll tell him all later, as I scuttle towards the exit. Some weeks later I drop in and we laugh and chat about it.

A few months after that, Betty messaged me to say that on 10 February 2017, she and her partner walked to the GAA club opposite their home and had their wedding. All their family were there, including the grandkids, and the bride wore a simple yet classy evening dress. The kind of dress that is timeless. ‘It was,’ Betty says, ‘one of the greatest days of my life.’

Her first wedding dress, by the way, is still for sale.

Addicted to Love?

Hand-wrought platinum wedding and engagement rings for sale. Brilliant cut diamonds in a channel setting. Matching set. €7,500. DoneDeal, August 2018

As a single mother with a busy work life, Paula had originally planned that her brother would sell her two platinum diamond rings and that she would give him a commission in return.

She liked the distance this gave her from the transaction, and couldn’t face the thought of walking into one of those ‘cash for gold’ outlets and handing over her jewellery to be examined and valued. She lives in a small community, and felt doing that would make something deeply personal and traumatic become too public.

Thinking back, one of the signs of deepening recession in 2008 was that ‘cash for gold’ counters began appearing in shopping centres with little by way of screens to protect the privacy of customers. I remember seeing four women queueing up in Merchants Quay in Cork to get their rings valued in late 2009, as the recession was taking hold. Having ruled out that option, Paula’s brother persuaded her to put the rings on DoneDeal.

Initially in the months after her marriage ended, Paula spoke to the shop where the rings were bought, and floated the idea of the shop buying them back. Both rings had been custom made but she had thought she could get them turned into something else, or that the jewellers could recycle them into a ring for another person. These were Celtic Tiger-era rings bought for a significant sum so the materials carried value.

‘I had a fair idea of what they cost,’ she tells me. ‘I didn’t know the exact figure, but it was substantial. They meant much more to me than monetary value. I am not really into jewellery but I suppose they were particularly significant in what they symbolised. Now though, they are the opposite of that. They are just metal and stone and I wouldn’t want to even pass them on to my daughter. I just think now they were given to me under false pretences. People always say, “Love is blind”, but now I know what that means.’

Paula is in her early forties and had been in a relationship with her ex-husband for much of her adult life. When we spoke, the break-up was still quite raw. Her voice fragmented with emotion several times during our conversation. The primary aim for her in selling the rings wasn’t really financial gain, but more an emotional one. ‘My husband had an addiction. He had more than one actually,’ Paula tells me. ‘I discovered there was a lot of unfaithfulness before and during the marriage. I realised this early on into the marriage when I found another phone. He didn’t admit to it 100 per cent, but there was enough evidence to go for counselling. He still didn’t admit to it or anything, he just said it was a bit of texting and fun,’ she explains.

Initially, Paula says her husband was very apologetic and reassured her that the phone messages meant nothing. He was proactive in terms of addressing the issues he had and he seemed genuine about doing whatever it took to keep the relationship going. ‘I thought, OK, we’ll go for counselling and it will be fine. Looking back, I was so stupid,’ she says.

Paula thinks her husband loved her for periods of the time they were together, but that commitment and monogamy weren’t a priority for him. ‘Maybe he didn’t want to continue the infidelity. I think actually, looking back, he probably had a sex addiction. That was just one more addiction to add to his list of them.’

Despite the issues she’d identified their relationship continued and Paula soon became pregnant with the couple’s first child. ‘He was so manipulative,’ she says. ‘I was busy and didn’t notice as much and I was easy-going, so I suppose I let things slide, but his drinking got worse, day by day. His addictions were much worse than the infidelity to deal with. Addiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever dealt with.’

This was something I could relate to personally. Fifteen years ago, I had gone into rehab, mainly for alcohol issues, and I subsequently wrote a book detailing both my relationship with alcohol – and Ireland’s too. My life had gone off-piste when I walked into a rehab centre in west Cork called Tabor Lodge. Through intensive counselling and with the help of some fellow addicts who shared some of their journey with me, I began to piece things back together bit by bit. I have been lucky. The closest I have come to a slip was a Baileys’ cheesecake at a wedding a few years ago, and in the decade and a half since rehab I’ve always been drawn to addicts and their stories. It’s tough being an addict anywhere, but it’s perhaps doubly tough in Ireland, a country which arguably stigmatises sobriety far more than active addiction. The bar is set incredibly high for someone to identify as an addict in Ireland. In fact, if anything, all the societal impulses are telling you that you’re not really that bad. As the writer Conor McPherson once told me, walk into a bar in Ireland and the guy at the counter drinking Ballygowan, that’s the alcoholic!

Since I went public about my fraught relationship with alcohol, many individuals and families have contacted me over the years, asking for advice or help with their own struggles. Many are fearful of the societal response to publicly acknowledging their issue and seeking help. This particularly applies to Irish men over a certain age, for whom a large part of their formative experiences may have been framed using alcohol as a buttress. The difficulty for loved ones around addicts is just how deceptive, manipulative and destructive the addicted person can be.

‘According to him, I was the only problem he had in his life,’ Paula says, reflecting on her ex-husband’s outlook. ‘He would probably sit you down and if you didn’t know he was my ex, you would believe everything he says. He is almost a split person. He can be an amazing, charming and really kind person, and then he is awful. So it’s the total ends of the scale, and unfortunately, there was more of the awful behaviour than the nice person as time went on.’

Paula says she tried everything to get her husband to face up to his addiction, even managing to persuade him to go to a rehab facility for an assessment. This did not end well as he wouldn’t accept the opinion of the professionals. ‘I remember his face,’ she says. ‘He was in complete disbelief and then afterwards, he said it was what I said before the assessment that made them decide he was an alcoholic. He was that much in denial about it. He would deny all the affairs, even when a woman came to me and confessed she was with him and she broke up with him because of the guilt. She confessed to everything and he was still denying it to me.’

Denial, not just a river in Egypt, as we used to say in rehab. But for Paula, it’s almost easier to accept her husband’s behaviour, knowing that he does have an addiction. ‘I think I would be very angry with him if he was behaving like this and he wasn’t an addict,’ she says. ‘I am more forgiving and understanding now, though, and it is easier to accept that he is not a completely black soul. I just think now that maybe it is the addiction that has made him the way he is.’

His drinking was becoming a daily problem and then, in addition to the emotional abuse, he was physically violent. Eventually she plucked up the courage to go to her solicitor and seek a separation. Any emotional ties she had had with him had long since been cut by this point, and physically, she and her ex-husband had been apart for some time. His actions from the day she told him she wanted a separation convinced her that she had done the right thing.

‘I didn’t have to open my mouth; the truth all came out and not from me. I am a very private person,’ she says. ‘While all this was happening, a woman told me about the affair she had been having with my husband for two and a half years. She then wrote me a letter and said if I ever needed it for anything legal to use it. What she did was so courageous. I know her quite well. I thought we were kind of friends. She didn’t really get on with other mothers and the irony is I used to make an extra effort with her. Little did I know ...’

To anyone looking in from the outside, Paula’s husband seemed a highly functioning individual. He was careful only to drink at night but it became apparent after several years that he had lost a lot of work opportunities. He could have done so well, she says, but his dependence on alcohol held him back hugely. Despite all his faults, her son still very much looks up to her ex-husband. She hasn’t tried to influence his opinion of his father; she says he will figure that out for himself some day.

After all she has gone through, including emerging from an abusive relationship, I’m curious as to why Paula has decided that this is the right time to put her rings online and try to sell them. The break-up is still relatively recent. ‘If I don’t, I’m afraid I will lose them, or they could get stolen,’ she says. ‘He could also take them back, and I thought if I do sell them, it will provide a fund for the kids’ education. It would be something positive, and I’m a big believer in turning negatives into positives.’

The whole experience and ongoing fallout from the break-up of her relationship has impacted on Paula’s ability to make future connections and relationships. ‘I don’t think I ever want to get into a relationship again,’ she tells me. ‘I think he would have to be extraordinary for me to even look at him twice! I feel like I wasted many years, but I learned so much and I am proud of myself for coming out of it. I question everything now when people talk to me. My eyes have been opened and I can’t believe how gullible I was. My faith helped me. When I was outside the door, crying into my hands after a bout of abuse, I would cry out, “Please God, help me” and He did, and along the way, I found groups like Al Anon really useful, to be honest.’

At her worst, Paula was afraid her husband’s drinking would drag her down with him, and depression would become an issue for her. She says she came from a very happy family: both parents were non-drinkers and theirs was an open house in the country. It was the kind of childhood home where they drank tea five or six times a day and everyone was open and honest with each other. ‘I often wonder how I did not see that these traits were missing in the person I married. How did I miss that? If by me going through this though, I prevent my kids falling into addiction, then maybe it will have been worth it.’

We’ve been talking for almost an hour, and Paula tells me she has to do the school run and needs to go. I thank her for her time, openness and honesty.

I came away from our phone call thinking that it was relatively soon after her break-up for her to be selling the rings online and that in my experience most people travel a few years down the road before they take that step.

A few days after our chat, when I noticed the ad had expired, I texted, asking whether she’d had any luck with a buyer. ‘I decided to take the ad down,’ she tells me. ‘I just thought, maybe I should think about this more. I didn’t want total strangers contacting me and then having to explain the backstory. I’m just not ready to face all that right now.’

A Marriage Worth Waiting For

For sale: beautiful NEW ivory wedding dress. NEVER WORN or altered. Size 18. Seeing this dress is a must. Will sell half price: was €1,400, sell for €800. No time-wasters. Evening Echo, October 2018

It had been a while since I’d come across a wedding dress ad in the free ads section of the Evening Echo. There had been a time when bridal wear had a whole section to itself. However, online ads allow sellers to post pictures of items for sale and many online classified sections allow more control, as you don’t have to use your real name or publish your phone number if you choose not to. And this can be very important when someone is selling a dress for a wedding that never happened. So the fact this ad was in the Echo at all caught my eye straight away, and then when the words ‘NEW’ and ‘NEVER WORN’ also appeared in the advert, I knew there was likely to be a story.

The seller, Jean, tells me that this is the second time she’s put this ad in the newspaper. The dress cost her €1,400 and she’s letting it go for €800, or the nearest offer. ‘Myself and my husband planned to get married,’ she tells me. ‘But I was already married and I thought the divorce would be through by then. But the divorce didn’t come through until [years after]. It actually went on for about 14 years whereas normally divorces should only take five years.’