The process

If I was like so many of the people I see around me, willing and able to discard relationships at the first sign of trouble, I'd have ditched him after a week.

But I'd invested a week, so let's see where this is going.

I'd not have married him if I'd been some doe-eyed teenager thinking of an extravagant dress with all the elaborate paraphernalia of a 'big' wedding and endless connubial bliss to follow. No, I was a bit older and a bit more realistic. I already knew he wasn't perfect.

I never realised that I'd married someone who had absolutely no intention ever of shifting, adapting, accommodating or at the end of the day showing me any respect whatsoever. When he realised that I required things of him he had no willingness provide he resorted to lies and other forms of deceit and subterfuge.

For the last few years things have been moderately stable under this roof because I've effectively disentangled our lives. He does his thing with his money and I do my bit with mine. He gives me a proportion of his pay packet which goes toward the mortgage and the insurance and the utilities which I am responsible for (because when they're left to him they're not paid).

Because we've largely separated our lives we rarely have moments of conflict. The house is a slum because I'm physically incapable of making it anything else. I'm not allowed to throw anything else. Or rather I would have to resort to lies, subterfuge and other forms of deceit to clear out the house of some proportion of the detritus with which he's filled it. And were I to remove a significant proportion I'd be caught out because it would be obvious.

What would happen?

Well he'd get all upset. He doesn't like anything being thrown out, and that's presumably anything at all. Otherwise why is his bedroom a festering cesspit of litter, cups, mugs plates, crumbs, abandoned clothing, books, cds and a mountain of other crap.

I know I've been here before with this blog.

The trouble is that when he's all upset he's rather unpleasant and he tends to take it out on the nearest person. I'm working this evening, tomorrow afternoon and then Wednesday and Thursday evenings. That means he will have to collect the offspring after school, feed her, wash her, keep her company generally and get her into bed.

For the moment I have to keep this job and that means leaving her exposed to his temper. Last week one day I came home after work to find the storage boxes from the bottom of my wardrobe all pulled out and strewn across the floor. She's hidden herself away in the bottom of the wardrobe and still won't talk about it. He'd never hit her or physically hurt her. I'd set the authorities onto him at the first hint of that sort of thing. And he won't shout at her because he hates confrontation or rowing.

What he does to her, I think, is what he does to me which is reduce, grind down. I wish I knew how to describe the process. It involves sniping and snarling and a lack of kindness, a dismissal. Does that sound pathetic.

I think, when all's said and done, the day I can describe what he's been doing to me and what I suspect he's doing to her, is the day I'll be able to pack up this blog and walk away.

A couple of things have prompted this. Yesterday he came back from a visit to his mother with stuff to be put away in the fridge which earlier in the week I'd dismantled and given a thorough cleaning. The fridge is getting on in years and though bought new wasn't a particularly good make or model. The shelves aren't strong and can't take much weight; particularly they can't be laden with lots of heavy jars, drink and roasting joints. Something had to give but with reference to the point made earlier he hates throwing anything away and got into a classic huff when I started picking through the older contents to create some space for the new.

One day in the near future one of the shelves will go. And being able to say "I told you so" will be no consolation. We need a refrigerator.

Then afterwards he asked me to leave out for him my boxed set of Series 1 of 24. He's decided he'd like to re-watch the series in the hour he has between finishing work and collecting from school and then in the hour and a half she's at Cubs this evening.

The trouble is he'd prefaced the request with some sneering about how a colleague keeps her DVD in such pristine condition, down to the disks all being kept the right way up within their cases. Trouble is I'd like him to treat anything of mine I lent him exactly the same way she asks those who borrow from her collection to treat hers. And I can't ask him to keep the disks in their cases, and the cases in the slip case, and keep everything together rather than leave it lying about where it will get damaged. To treat it with respect as someone else's possession, to be taken good care of and returned in the condition it is received in.

I'm just fed up because today I'm in a no-win situation. I can choose to not leave the disks and he'll be upset, creating an unpleasant environment for everyone until he decides he's made his point. I can choose to say something and he'll sulk and create an unpleasant environment until he feels he's made his point. Or I can just give the set to him in the knowledge it will almost certainly come back with scratched disks, and scuffed cases and slip case.