Early Married Life with Michel: Realising my Mistake

I did not know what to expect when I married Michel. We had been having sex, however I had never slept overnight with him, nor had I spent time with him in a domestic situation. I had no idea of his personal habits. Before we married, he boarded with a Lebanese widow in Brighton. I did know that he did not bathe every day, nor did he change his clothes everyday as we Australians prefer to do, because a comment from me made him change his habits, so that he always bathed before he came to see me. He commented that it was nice to shower daily, quite a luxury.

We went out together for about 18 months before we married. A few months of this, two months before we married, he went back to Lebanon, I am not sure why, and I can only suppose it was to inform his family he was getting married.

When we were courting, Michel would take me to Pizza Hut or we would buy a hamburger. We would visit his friends, Lebanese people, and we would sit in a formal salon and he would talk to his friends in Arabic and I would sit there, bored. He liked to boast about my high HSC results and my IQ. He was attentive. He would talk to my parents and generally make himself liked. We would make love in the car in the night at the “parking area” at Ramsgate Beach, which was where a lot of couples congregated to have sex. It was considered fairly safe as there were always several cars doing the same thing as we were. Sex with him was good and satisfying. He was no Lothario; however I managed, despite my own inexperience, to teach him a few things. We were both exploring.

After we married, things changed dramatically. The nice polite considerate man I knew before the wedding disappeared and was replaced by a jealous possessive and demanding monster. Almost overnight he became a different person. Later in a fight I commented on this and his reply was that he needed to be what I wanted him to be in order to get me, and that after that there was no need to behave well, so he didn’t. In other words the man I married didn’t exist, and when we married I saw the real person. As well, he began a campaign of criticising everything about me: my face was too “long” in repose, I looked too quiet, my bottom was too flat, I was not gregarious enough, I was too forward … everything about me was not good enough, pretty enough, or was just plain wrong. I could do nothing right. Several years later I asked why he had married me if everything about me was wrong, and he told me he had thought that since he was marrying an 18 year old, he could mould me into what he wanted. So he married me not because of who or what I was but because he saw a young person whom he could change. What a fool he was to think he could change a grown person. All he did was make me miserable.

This person I married would have liked to slap me around, but he only did that once – my reaction was so severe he realised I really meant it when I said I would just go back to my mother – he realised he had gone too far. He apparently did not like my parents at all, and as soon as we were married started a campaign to detach me from them. My parents had a policy of not interfering in their children’s lives, however since Michel would interfere in anyone’s life if he could get the chance, he projected what he would do onto others and suspected my parents would, as he put it, “whisper in your ear” and influence me against him. Why he had this conspiracy theory, or why he thought my parents would try to influence me against my own husband I don’t know and have never found out. It was a great strain in our marriage, that he felt this way about my parents.

Within a month of being married I was obliged to visit my parents in my own time while Michel was working. As I was working as well, this meant I saw them at infrequent intervals. Michel was doing his hardest to make it hard for me to see them. Since I did not drive, it took at least 90 minutes to get from my place to theirs, so it was difficult to do. In the months I was home and pregnant and after the baby was born, I was able to visit a little more frequently, but each time I did go it caused Michel to become more upset and his conspiracy theory became more obvious and he would rant against my parents with accusations that were difficult to refute. His accusations were along the lines of the old question: “When did you stop beating your wife?” That is, not a matter of if, but a foregone conclusion to the issue that made it difficult for me to defend my visits to my parents.

At home in the evenings, Michel would bathe, eat the meal I prepared and then watch several news and current affairs programs – all the news and current affairs he could watch, over 2 hours each night. We would then watch something like No. 96 and then go to bed. Sex settled down to once every few days. He originally demanded that I make his sandwiches for his lunch the next day, but after a while I jacked up over it and he made his own. To this day, I cannot eat the combination he favoured - vegemite with cheese in a Lebanese bread roll. I have never been able to eat sandwiches made the day before and even making them for someone else made me feel sick. He was put out by this, but despite my fairly “rosy” attitude as a new wife, I refused and stuck to it. I had won a small victory.

On the weekend we would do the shopping and visit his friends. One thing stands out in this period – my white jumper. I had a white nylon jumper, knitted in plain stocking stitch. It was a close fit and Michel loved me in it, and he thought I looked very attractive in it. So he demanded, very firmly demanded that I wear it every time we went out together. This may sound harmless, but he demanded this regardless of the weather – he would ask me to wear it in the middle of summer! I had to put my foot down about it eventually, but it remained a sore point for both of us – for him because I would not wear it, and from me because he would ask me to wear it regardless of my comfort.

It took only a few weeks for me to realise I had made a mistake and should not have married Michel, that he was not as he had put himself out to be, and that the marriage was going to be, at least from my point of view, a difficult one that would need all my wits and concentration to make it succeed. I was determined, however. I was brought up a catholic, and had a vestigial respect for the sanctity of marriage, and also my own pride came into it – this was my choice, taken over counselling from others that he would not suit me. I thought that culture had a large part to play in his attitude and that time would make it easier. I was wrong about that. So my own pride, and the fact I was pregnant, carried me on.