What have the Romans ever done for us? Divorce Italian style

In September last year, the high court overturned 180 divorces involving Italian nationals who had used a PO box address as proof of residence. That is 360 people pretty keen on being divorced and now consigned to the grindingly slow process that is the Italian divorce system.

Generally speaking, when one decides that enough is enough and the marriage vows are no longer worth the paper they are written on, most of us are pretty keen to get the paperwork stamped and get on with our lives.  The Italian divorce system is not known for making this process any easier, hence why so many tried to make use of a system in which allows couples that no longer want to be together, to be apart.

Except the Italian that my partner is married to. Being married to an Englishman gives a few advantages. Not only does it secure a few more options later in life for any offspring, but should the marriage fail, it affords the option of divorcing, legally - in the UK. Once agreed, within a short few months you can get on with perhaps the only commitment that is lifelong - parenting.

The alternative is grim, 3 years separation that only counts from the day you stand in front of the judge and only if you are in agreement. Any period that you weren't sharing the marital bed is discounted.  It can take months to get in front of the judge and the period up to this is defined by how long it takes to come to an agreement, or how long it takes you to make the other person give in to your demands. Failure to agree to consensual separation could see you still married a decade later.

So it came as a bit of a surprise that the woman that my partner is married to demanded an unnecessarily protracted route that causes upset all around. Not as one might assume, that she wants a husband - it was abundantly clear that she no longer wanted one of those. And clearly not because she wanted him to get on with his life, equally abundant that his feelings really never counted in this equation.  And it is nothing to do with having a child, since divorcing in the UK does not alter child access agreements being agreed in the Italian courts. And it's nothing to do with religion.

So I am left completely perplexed as to why an apparently intelligent Italian woman, with a moderately prominent role in the media, would dictate that a protracted Italian divorce must be pursued when the option of a UK filed divorce is available. Apparently, to do otherwise would result in a re-enactment of the War of the Roses.

When I first first found myself in a relationship with a man yet to be divorced but living in a different country to his estranged wife, I was happy to be obliging.  When the time came, happy in reassuring this woman that her daughter would always be her daughter, we would be an extension of her fathers life and when and if her daughter was in my company, that she would always be safe and cared for.

I was at the time, happy to meet, to show that I posed no emotional threat, no danger. And I would do this because I have been on the other side, of knowing that my children spend time with another woman and knowing that I have no say in what influence she has.  I know the fear of letting go and the just how hard it can be accepting that you do not have total control of a child's life. Particularly when you are no longer involved with the father. This of course, was on the assumption that this divorce would be perfectly civilised, since the man she is divorcing has been perfectly civilised.

And then she made it abundantly clear that she would make life hell if he filed for divorce in the UK. He, being a man that takes the path of least resistance, a man that has struggled to see how controlling this situation is, a man that has his daughter held as ransom on far too many occasions - was so petrified to the consequences of filing under threat, has gone along with an Italian divorce route that most sane Italians would bite his hand off to avoid.

So at this point, I an not interested in meeting this woman. I don't need to reassure her, what she thinks of me is not relevant to my existence and not relevant to my relationship. And I don't need to reassure of my ability to be around children because the only person that needs to be certain of that, is her daughters father. Since he is so involved in my own children's life - he can make his own mind up.

If you want your child to accept that you are no longer together, its far easier to do so when you are not married and have no ties other than co-parenting. If you want your child to understand that marriage is important then creating a situation in which parents are still married but one party is living with another family, makes it a pretty complex equation.

And the rub is that I believe in marriage. I absolutely believe in commitment and I totally believe in the concept that my children, having lived through and witnessed an unpleasant marriage and divorce should benefit from the chance of celebrating a newly formed family. So holding out for a longer divorce has created a situation that creates unnecessary tension, potentially unnecessarily confusion to one child, and preventing my children from what they would like. And that is not a situation that fills me with the warmth of sisterhood.

And this is all about children. Because children are the one thing that can be used for power and control. If you want to do the right thing by your child, you will die in a ditch to make sure that you do the right thing by them.

And it's not easy, I know. My ex-husbands girlfriend is high on my list of women that I do not want to influence my children. I am no fan of infidelity, no fan of women that have affairs with married men and since she is one, we will never share anything in common. But I accept that I do not have the right to dictate who, how and where he spends time with the children.

Now I could be bloody minded and try, but if I want my children to respect me and grow up emotionally balanced, I need to make sure that they see him with regularity, free of emotional blackmail and manipulation from me, because children see everything.  So this is what I do. It might be through gritted teeth at times but since it is in their best interest, it is what I will continue to do.  But how I wish that my children were around someone that they felt safe with. Someone that I knew would look out for their emotional and physical wellbeing in my absence.

And this divorce, this long horrid journey that is dictating my choices, impacting on the values that I raised my children with, challenging my morals and my patience at every turn - is all about control. It seems that almost every interaction in a failed relationship is ultimately about control. Right at this moment, all I see is a situation in which one person dictates the future of everyone around. And all because control is more important than the bigger picture.

Children are not owned, they are on their own journey. Your job is to give them the love and confidence that they need to be on that path. Children are not confused by circumstances, they are confused by the messages you give them, by the atmosphere they sense. And when you divorce, you do not get to own your child, you get to co-parent. When you seek to to own a child, you end up causing pain, unhappiness and resentment. When you prevent a child from benefitting from as much love around as is available you restrict their ability to grow self esteem and confidence. When you prevent a child from freedom, they ultimately resent you.

In my happy head, I met the man I love and he was divorced. His daughter benefits from an extended family because we all know that the more children are loved, the more happy and confident that grow up to be. In my happy head, his wife, having chosen to not be married, would wish him the opportunity to be free of a failed marriage, to be happy in the next stage of his life because when a child has a happy parent, they have a happy life.

How I wish that the man I divorced had never been unfaithful, had always been financially supportive, responsible and emotionally supportive to his children. How I wish his girlfriend understood children and cared for mine in my absence. How I wish that he was in a relationship with a woman that when my children were feeling poorly, I could call her and check that they had their favourite bedtime story. Yet despite not having any of this, I accept that they when they see their Father, it is their time with him. It is their right.

So do I understand a women that does not see how fortunate she is, how lucky her daughter is to have a father that loves her and how much her need to be in control of everything impacts on the lives of so many. Do I understand a woman that thinks that a consensual divorce is one in which she got her own way?

Do I hell.

Watching hastiness unfold

I find myself in a perfectly imperfect situation. I am in love with a man that is in an imperfect situation, which means I am potentially in an imperfect situation independantly and as a result of his.
And the only way someone can do what is right for them is to think about what is right for them. The minute what is right for me comes into it, then what is right for them is influenced by it and then it becomes all wrong.

So I sit and see, watching a story unfold at a painfully slow pace, and knowing that this is not a scenario I ever planned on being in.  And I guess none us know what the future brings and how we will deal with it. Least of all me. and so I silently play out the scenarios.

My head hurts.

Badly

Past imperfect

Over along period of time I have figured that there is only one way to get over a realationship and that is not to date anyone for a very long time. With a bad experience it is not so much getting over the person, it's getting to a place in which you have sufficiently recovered from the pain caused or at least, getting to a place in which you realise that you will never find the answer in anyone else. You cannot fully commit to another person whilst you have unresolved issues with another person.

There are times when you need to accept that you will never understand another person and no amount of understanding will make the carnage they inflict acceptable. The best place to be is to recognise that whatever the issues of another, there is no place for them in your life.

And this is where I got to a few months ago, the understanding that whilst I may have taken a disproprotionate amount of time trying to understand the issues of others, they were irrelevant. If I wasn't good for me it was time for a complete emotional disconnect.

And it's taken a long time to get here. To get to a place where I have no unresolved issues with a past partner. They don't need to be resolved since as relationships went, they sucked. None of them provided a feeling that I would ever want to feel again. All of them have served to warn me of the things I do not want to feel in a relationship. And to have them would make being single the only viable option.

And the irony is that this is the time that you meet someone, the time in which you are ready to love another wholeheartedly without any 'what if's' about anyone else. And for them to be in a place where they can truly love back. That said, it's not an easy path. People are frequently not conscious of their own emotional reactions, they don't necessarily have a full awareness of their own learned behaviour. I know without question that my emotional barriers can come up in an instant. My fight or flight mode is pitched higher than most people and with a history of relationships in which what people say being out of kilter with my gut instinct, it's going to be hard work for anyone to engender sufficient trust in me that I will commit whole heartedly.

And how do you ever really know if your gut instinct is telling you something you don't want to hear or if you are simply on red alert? It's an impossible question. And that's the thing about the future, you can only walk it with your eyes open and hope it's going in the direction you want it to. And you can only really do that when you have stopped looking back.

Oh Lord, I have seen the light - lay your hands upon me

This weekend I shall be going away with a man that a barely know.

I am good at spontaneous but I rarely do rash. This man is utterly out of my comfort zone.

He's happy. Which means he's kind and that I have little experience of such traits. It's a fairly accurate rule of thumb that when people are unkind, they are generally unhappy.  And I have had too much of that in my life.

I'm not worried about the future for at this present moment, nice is good.

So I am going to go away with a man that is happy, kind, cooks, sings and is physically and emotionally confident.

The fact that he is in a three month deadline to the full abs look helps, but his qualification as a massage therapist has nothing to do with it.

Nothing you hear. Nothing

When having a Tempur is a pain in the neck.

I recently did some extensive damage to my deltoid muscle and the knock on effect caused further strain to adjoining areas. Before I knew it, a planking competition with a teenager had reignited an old whiplash injury and I found myself in ongoing and considerable pain. The cause wasn't the planking, it was my ego. I intended to win, no matter the cost.

And so far, the cost has been £200 at the local Osteopath. Since my shoulder is attached to my neck, which is attached to my spine, which in turn is attached to my pelvis, I am - apparently, buggered and will need extensive healing. My body is like Newtons cradle - except it's not bouncing back.

It was an enlightening experience and with hand cupping my sacrum, he asked how my back had faired post twin delivery. "Perfectly fine"  I  exclaimed smugly, explaining that the purchase of a Tempur mattress had seen to it that I could jump out of bed in the morning with all the glee of a 10 year old.

"You have solved nothing' said the Osteopath "You have merely masked the problem"

And he is right, any more than two nights on a mattress not given the thumbs up by NASA sees me whimpering for all of the wrong reasons. My miracle cure only works as long as I don't venture too far from home or only stay in the very best in accommodation.  Since I live my life by the art of the tenuous link, it struck me that the tale of the Tempur mattress and the deltoid injury was just another of life's lessons on the journey to understanding the bigger picture.

And the bigger picture appeared when idly scrolling through my Facebook friends. Spotting a couple that had hurt me recently, my finger was itching to delete them forever and eradicate the things I wasn't prepared tp face. Yet pressing delete doesn't work, it's no more effective than sticking your fingers in your ears and humming when someone says something you don't want to hear.

Pressing delete would make these my Tempur friends. Get get rid of them and I would only have people around me that hadn't hurt me, yet. And there is no guarantee they won't so that list could just keep on growing. But you don't get rid of hurt by pretending it never happened, by looking the other way. You don't move on with your life when you leave things unaddressed and you do not grow as a person unless you choose to handle situations differently. Rather like the planking episode, turning your head from issues of discomfort is no more than an attack of ego.

When you cannot bear to face something, cannot bear to listen to something - so much easier to shelve the issue, to avert your gaze or pretend it didn't happen - but the things we do not wish to deal with are the things that create that annoying knock on effect.

So someone hurts me. I stop speaking to them, not because I want to but because I cannot verbalise hurt. Sure, it gets rid of the immediate pain but long term I feel guilty that I have avoided them and remain hurt that they didn't see how much they wounded me. Hardly a win win situation. And so I feel guilty and guilt is corrosive. So I feel bad about myself and the next time someone is horrid, I think I deserved it. And if not guilt, then shame or anger or some other pointless emotion until we learn that the only time that anything changes, is the time that we do something different.

It's the Tempur effect. Simply masks the problem.

Sexual frustration starts with a mobile phone

I have written before about my lack of flirting skills and they rose their head again this weekend. Except, I am beginning to wonder if it is not my flirting skills that are the issue but everyone else's.

Flirting in 2013 seems to be more about sexual explicitness than any meaningful titalation and I am fairly certain that it is not a skill I have much wish to learn. It is no longer about seduction and nor is it necessarily specific to the person receiving it, but seemingly just another string to the bow of porn.

I entered into some texting with a man that I simply have never understood but to be fair, he is  attractive and someone you would certainly consider worth flirting with. It moved from a bit of flirting to overtly sexual pretty rapidly and I was simply not comfortable with where it was going. Had I already slept with him, I would have enjoyed it for he wasn't without good word skills and to be fair, nothing he said was crude. But we haven't slept together, we probably never will and since he only makes contact when he is away,  I suspect that in a moment of boredem - he thought he would just make use of the mobile phone for a bit of fun.

And so now I am sexually frustrated. Indeed, he wrote such that I couldn't help but think "That would be very nice, thank you very much" and had he been here, I'd have been pretty pleased to know he was thinking in such manner. But that isn't what it was about and now I am frustrated. I had got quite used to the sexual desert but now frankly, I am feeling a little robbed. So why do men text women with things they would like to do, that they have no intention of doing?

And there are so many men that use mobile phones for meaningless sexual pleasure. I should imagine that the printed porn industry has seen a decline in profit in the last few years. Fertility units will no longer have to produce magazines for men to produce, they will simply need to make sure they have 3G in a private room.

So how did we get to place in which people text each other sexual suggestion that they have absolutely no intention of seeing through. Phone sex is nothing new, when I was younger and couldn't see my boyfriend, it was the way to go but it involved actually knowing the person because you had to speak with them. Unless of course, you were paying for a service. And perhaps this is the change, texting dismisses the need for personal contact and makes sexting with just about anyone a free service, giving you access to a multitude of contacts that may be willing to play ball. So to speak.

Yet its more than that, we have become a society in which meaningless encounters are more common than anyone actually getting to know each other. Someone being attracted to you doesn't mean anything any more. It simply means they probably just want sex. And its all a little insulting, that a man that is clearly not interested, feels free to get sexual by text. Seriously, how sad is it than in a society where self gratification is so easy and sex so freely given that we appear to have anaesthetised ourselves to needing to know someone. Sex with someone who's body and mind you actually like - is so much better

A close friend regularly benefits from text images of mens pride and joys in her inbox, which may be pretty amusing to see but really, I know few women that are genuinely turned on by a picture of someones penis. Women don't tremble in excitement, they simply assess it and there are few things men like less than being compared. These are invariably not men interested in a relationship, they are just men that want someone to help them through a moment of self gratification.  And as men get off to the 'mmmmmmm' in reply, they should know the truth. Women are not moaning when they tap in mmmmm, the are simply speechless and bored. The same can be said of ummmmmm.

I love my mobile phone, at times I love social media but I do not love it enough for send pictures of me baring all. The truth is, I love my reputation more. In a relationship or someone I am dating, I'd happily be as suggestive and since I excel at innuendo, a lot of fun could be had, but sending men I don't really know overtly sexual texts, is just a little weird. Particularly when it is pretty clear that the only contact they want is when they are bored.

So my reputation remains in tact but I am more sexually frustrated than ever before.

Great. Thanks

F****ed off with the F****ed up

I have missed writing so very much. Too many of the people I find myself surrounded by are so driven by their oddness that I find it impossible to write about them. And really, do they ever change?

Perhaps I have just reached the stage where behind the smile, the hello or the nod of acknowledgement - is the voice in my head that screams

"Oh for fuck sake, just bloody grow up"

I feel better for writing that.