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Understanding: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's husband left her for a younger woman so she knows what Vicky Pryce has been going through
There is nothing unusual about husbands walking out on their wives of many years to set themselves up in another home with a younger, replacement model. One with fresher skin, glossier hair, a youthful body full of ripe promise. It happens all the time. It happened to me.
Back in the old marital home, the discarded, shattered woman is left behind, surrounded by objects and memories of a marriage, echoes and voices of a family life abruptly, cruelly, cut short. And then there are the children: shocked, angry, hurt, bewildered.
As the betrayed woman, society expects you to take it on the chin, accept that men do this from time to time, let them walk away and, above all, be dignified. Meanwhile, all you want to do is express the agony raging within you. Many want to exact a quick and vicious revenge.
Never has there been a better lesson in where these passions can lead than the jailing this week of the brilliant economist Vicky Pryce.
Her utter determination to exact revenge on her husband for leaving her â€" by revealing how she had taken his speeding points â€" ended up destroying both their lives.
Inevitably, she has been pilloried by many, mostly female, commentators for becoming the living embodiment of the ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ cliche. For the sake of the children, it has been argued ad nauseam, she should have suffered in silence, let it all go. Been dignified.
That’s so easy to say until you become the woman abandoned by a spouse to whom you have given every ounce of your youth, love and devotion. I for one can feel Vicky Pryce’s pain, and understand all too well how she was driven to such a dark and ugly place.
The grief and rage you feel when your husband of many years dumps you and your children without a backward glance is eno ugh to send any woman mad. It almost did for me. I was a basket-case for nearly two years â€" and I’m not alone.
It may have been almost 25 years ago, but I can still picture the scene in our bedroom, as my then husband of 17 years, Mo, delivered the devastating news that he had fallen in love with one of his students, a young woman all of 22, with a head of cascading blonde curls.Â
I remember feeling as if all my insides were crumbling into a heap of rubble. My skin was hot and feverish, my throat dry and my heart throbbing so hard I felt it might leave my chest. My thoughts were deafening and out of control, as if there had been a terrible multiple car crash.
I was sobbing, hysterical, making no sense because I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Watching me break down, his eyes first panicked, then became increasingly cold and contemptuous.
He wanted the scene over and done with quickly so he could move on, move out, make the practical decisions that needed to be made.
Just like former Cabinet minister Chris Huhne, who famously broke the news to Vicky Pryce that their 26-year marriage was over during the half-time of a World Cup football match, before heading to the gym, Mo, too, was in control. He knew the script, had planned it all, wanted it over and don e with quickly.
'I remember the agony when he said he was leaving. My skin was hot, my throat was dry. My thoughts spun out of control like a terrible, multiple car crash'
He said he had fallen in love, couldn’t live without her and was going to leave me and our ten-year-old son.
It was like being beaten up, each word a blow to the face, the head, the chest, the stomach.
My role was to be a smart, independent and modern woman. To understand that marriages die, maybe even enjoy being free after so many years with one man. That would have suited him and his paramour well. But, just like Vicky, I couldn’t, wouldn’t, oblige.
The day Mo departed our marriage, he found time to iron his favourite shirts (some were gifts from me), pack his bags neatly and leave a few instructions about bills and things.
I wept through it all, begging and pleading with him not to go. Our child was bewildered and upset by my tears but didn’t really understand what was about to happen.
And so it was that one cold dark January day in 1989, ten days before our son’s 11th birthday, when I was 39, my university lecturer husband traded in his old life for a thrilling new one with a woman half his age.
I descended into what I can only describe as a kind of maddening sorrow.
No one who has not been through it can possibly imagine the depth of grief and the temporary insanity that befall such wives when collective histories, marriage vows and hopes are suddenly deleted by the husband who decides he wants a new life and love.Â
Happier times: Yasmin with her husband at their wedding in 1972
One such wife I know started slashing herself at the age of 43. It was, she said, to stop her from slashing the face of her ex. She was a teacher and has since recovered from that trauma, but the scars remain all across her arms.
A woman emailed me this week to describe how, 30 years ago, her husband’s ‘life-changing betrayal’ left her ‘unhinged with misery’. She still feels the loss of him, even though he has since died.
Stella, another acquaintance, divorced against her will, and became a recluse and a depressive. She was so disabled by grief she couldn’t function and her children were taken into care for a while. They have never forgiven her.
I, too, was completely grief-stricken by the loss of my beloved husband, and sometimes spent entire nights sobbing into one of his old shirts, desperate to detect the scent of him.Â
There were days when I vomited blood. My doctor diagnosed a stress-induced bleeding ulcer. I didn’t plot supreme revenge â€" I was just too sad for that â€" but I did talk to his large family, colleagues and our friends about his betrayal. This, of course, made him furious.
'How it enrages me to see men go on to have second and third families and then boast about how they are much better partners and fathers than they were first time around'
I started smoking, even though I’m asthmatic. A Mexican friend going through her own ordeal â€" her baby son had died in his cot â€" gave me whisky to drink one night to ease the almost physical agony. Suddenly, I was drinking a bottle of whisky every night.
One of my best friends, Ann, moved in with me because I was, at times, suicidal, wanting to escape the purgatory. My only sister has been mentally ill for years and my mother Jena was terrified I was descending into the same darkness.
She cooked for us, tried to give me courage, prayed, and counselled me: ‘He’s just a man. Don’t let a man own your life. You are more than someone’s wife. You have your son â€" that is the blessing,’ and so on, words I could neither hear nor heed.
I lost weight fast; my hair started falling out in clumps. I could think or talk of nothing else. Somehow I had to find the strength to look after my child, whose world had also collapsed.
My marriage had been a love story. Mo and I met in my native land of Uganda, and married in London in 1972. We were postgraduate students, penniless but ecstatically happy. He was my best friend, the nucleus of my life, my present and future.Â
High hopes: Yasmin and her ex while pregnant with their son in 1977
I confess I felt less worthy than him because he was exceptionally handsome and I was no great beauty, but in most other ways we were equals.
I came from an unhappy family. He was my escape and refuge from all that, too.
We lived in Oxford until our son was born, then moved to London in 1978 when Mo was offered a university job. We bought our first flat â€" our marital home in which I still live.
Both of us were determined to give our child more love, security and economic stability than either of us had known.
I gave up on my dreams of writing so Mo could pursue his studies, fulfil his dreams. I taught English as a foreign language to refugees and foreign students, and we lived on that money. I felt noble, appreciated, a martyr to love.
And we were madly in love. We had fun, excited each other, danced and laughed, entertained dear friends. I did arty things with our son while his dad was the unbeatable sportsman and naturalist. I hardly recognised the man who betrayed and destroyed all we had in the flicker of an eye. And I hardly recognised the person I turned into as all we had been and built came tumbling down.
Sometimes when I look back I am still ashamed that I was so badly affected by the break-up, so weak, so incapable of holding in my tumultuous emotions.
Pathetically, I visited psychics and fortune tellers, trying to find out what lay ahead, if the pain would one day pass, if I would want to live again.
They were mostly charlatans â€" one weirdo even practised voodoo â€" but I hung on to their absurd predictions, swallowed the powders they gave me, chanted the spells they sold, all supposedly guaranteed to bring back errant spouses.
People who see what I am now will find all this hard to believe, but it is all true.
My darling mother, who’d been through so much in her own life, helped with my beloved son, who needed me to be strong so he could cope with this sudden upheaval. It was the only time in my life I failed him badly and I feel guilty about that to this day.
For the first year, Mo and I still saw each other â€" he came to our home to be with our son. These were the hardest times, especially when he left. Then one day, adding insult to injury, my ex suggested we should be friends. This was a few months after he had walked out.
‘Friends,’ I replied, ‘are not treacherous. Unlike you, they don’t destroy me, tire of me and go off to find younger friends. You and I will never be friends.’
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He had the gall to say he was hurt by my rejection. We have not spoken since. He married his lover and they went on to have more children as so many men do.
I know there are countless dumped women like me who will identify with my feelings and understand all too well why Vicky Pryce was so consumed with fury and sorrow that she was prepared to ruin her husband’s life â€" and even her own â€" to wreak her revenge.
I understand how the storms in her heart flooded her entire being and why the wiring in her head became twisted and frayed.
I know and like Vicky Pryce. We met at an event and I found her charming and very bright. We occasionally see each other at parties and email each other from time to time.Â
She shouldn’t have broken the law by taking her husband’s speeding points and, however bad and mad she was feeling, she should have realised what would happ en when she went to the Press to expose him.
But those who have savaged her in recent weeks â€" men as well as women â€" have gone way beyond that.
They can’t forgive her for her hellish fury, her refusal to let her husband go quietly, for wanting to punish him instead of being noble and dutiful like, say, Judith, the ex-spouse of David Mellor, who was dumped ignominiously and simply vanished without a sound. As good ex-wives should.
Well, sorry, but why does no one ask these philandering men not to stray for the sake of the children? They waltz off with a new woman on their arm, leaving chaos and misery behind them â€" and a woman whose best years were wasted on them and who now faces loneliness and uncertainty.
Guilty: Vicky Pryce has been vilified but Chris Huhne is more to blame according to Yasmin
It was Chris Huhne who first hurt their children, not Vicky Pryce. Not a single commentator slated him for that while she was repeatedly accused of harming her kids, whom she loves deeply.
How it enrages me to see men go on to have second and third families and then boast about how they are much better partners and fathers than they were first time around. Imagine how those cast-off children feel.
It is time to challenge the hypocrisy that surrounds men who break up their families. These abandoned women need to find their voices. That won’t stop men from discarding old wives and families, but they will at least have to acknowledge the pain and chaos they cause. To be hurt and then have to suffer in silence, or pretend to be happy, is a travesty.
Though we haven’t spoken for two decades, my ex-husband has certainly heard my voice through our family and friends, and I’m sure he wil l read this article, too. I bet he hates the fact that this old bag won’t play by the rules.
My boy is a fine young man in his 30s now and I have found real happiness with my tender, second husband whom I married a few years after Mo left me. But I still wish my first marriage had not broken up, that my son’s dad hadn’t dumped us.
Every time I hear of another wife and family treated as little more than disposable scrap by a husband and father, I remember those times: the ravaged emotions, the pressure to behave well, to be superhumanly forgiving and forbearing. With a smile.
Twenty years after my agonising divorce, after decades of feminism, that inequality, those double standards remain in place. And no one will be feeling the injustice of that more than Vicky Pryce as she ponders the wreckage of her once happy life from a lonely prison cell.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a columnist for The Independent.
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