She
Married Him To Stop Him Getting Away, Now He’s There All Day
This painting’s title was taken
from the gist of Philip Larkin’s poem “Self’s The Man” which contains the
lines:
“He married a woman to stop
her getting away,
Now she's there all day.”
In this painting the woman is looking at her man and wondering why she’s
married to him.
I wonder how many people have this thought about their spouse. I read an
article about life’s biggest regrets (listed at the bottom of this) and near
the top was staying with the wrong person for far too many years. I remember
someone telling me there’s nothing lonely than being with the wrong person
(he’d had three wives.) He said people’s needs change from ages 18 to 40 before
reaching a sort of plateaux and the person you want at 18 is, like a tattoo,
something you certainly don’t want at 40.
m extremely happy in my own company so it puzzles me how eager people
are to get so intimately and quickly bound up with someone. I’ve heard people
say, “When I got married I knew - just knew
- in the back of my mind it wouldn’t work,” or “I set up home with him because
I didn’t want to be the last one at home with my parents,” or “I don’t like
coming home to a dark empty house so she’ll do.” I remember being surprised
once when a woman colleague said to me (as we queued by the fax machine), “You
need to get a girlfriend so people don’t think you’re weird.” Is that how she
thought?
I remember a young temp working at the office told me she wanted to be
married with three children by 25 (she was single and 18). I said she was very
young for all that and asked, “What happens if the man works out to be a complete
dick?” She said something like, “Well so long as he’s got one - I want a
minimum of three children by the time I’m 30.” I heard about a year later that
she was engaged.
I suppose its easy looking back at how naive we are when young and it
doesn’t help that Nature seems to be a cruel beast. It dazzles and dazes people
so they’re thrown together to perpetuate human life but doesn’t care a jot if
they stay together. It doesn’t even have to wait for men and women to come into
season like some animals; they can just breed all year around from young years.
When I’m out I observe couples all the time and sometimes wonder what
glues them together. Usually its obvious but sometimes not. Only you know the
state of your soul and partnership. I’ve known people split up and would not
have forecast it.
Growing up I naively thought people were bonded by love (all those
films, songs, poems, paintings all tapering down to that bubbling crucible of
love) but over the years I’ve developed a poor view of love. Of all the married
couples I suppose 60% are there for love and its magic. The other 40% seem to
be there due to fear of being alone/the unknown, worry of what others think,
fear of getting ill alone, companionship, children, money, inertia, or lack of
money to escape. I’m sure if people of this group came into massive riches they
depart the relationship for something better. Yes, a fairly wretched view of it
all, eh?
So here’s a painting of a woman looking over her husband as he slobs on
the couch. As you can see I took a photo of myself on a couch and just painted
that. I dabbed in some Y fronts and bits of food about the place.
I was going to have the woman holding a drink or something but that
would have been a distraction. I tried to make it obvious she was wondering why
she was with him.
25 Biggest Regrets Of Life
1. Working so much at the expense of family and friendships. How do you balance meeting that
short-term deadline at work and sitting down for dinner with your family?
It’s tough. There are always worries. “What will my boss and
co-workers think? It’s not a big deal if I stay late this one time. I’ll
make it up with the family this weekend.” But the “making up” never seems
to happen. Days turn to months and then years and then decades.
2. Not taking care of my health when I had the chance. Everyone doesn’t think of their health –
until there’s a problem. And at that point, we promise ourselves if we
get better we’ll do a better job with our health. It shouldn’t take a major
calamity to get us to prioritize our health and diet. Small habits every
day make a big difference here over time.
3. Wasting too much time with the wrong partner. Many open up their heart, set up home,
take on massive financial commitments and have children with the wrong spouse.
They more they get entangled in these commitments the more difficult it is to
escape. Some feel escape is too difficult or the fear of starting again can be
daunting but more long-term couples are getting divorced than ever before.
4. Standing up to bullies in school and in life. Believe it or not, a lot of our biggest
regrets in life have to do with things that happened to us in grade 4 or some
other early age. We never seem to forget – or forgive ourselves – for not
speaking up against the bullies. We were too scared. We wish we had been
more confident. And by the way most of us have also met up with a bully
in our work life. Maybe he was our boss. We remember that one time
we wish we’d told him off – even if it cost us our job. We usually take
some small solace in hearing that that bully later on made some unfortunate
career stumble.
5. Stayed in touch with some good friends from my childhood and youth. There’s usually one childhood or high
school friend who we were best buddies with. Then, one of us moved away.
We might have stayed in touch at first but then got busy.
Sometimes, we thought to pick up the phone, but maybe we don’t have their
number or email any more. We always wonder what it would be like to sit
down with them again for a coffee.
6. Turned off my phone more/Left my phone at home. Many of us can’t get off our phone/email
addiction. We sleep with it next to us. We carry it with us constantly.
It’s right next to us in the shower, just in case we see a new email icon light
up through the steamed up shower glass. We know constantly checking email
and Twitter in the evenings and on weekends takes us away from quality time
with family and friends. Yet, we don’t stop.
7. Breaking up with my true love/Getting dumped by them. Romance is a big area of regret for most
of us. Maybe we dumped someone that we wish we hadn’t. Maybe they dumped
us. Most play a never-ending game of “what might have been” for the rest
of their lives. It is tough to simply be happy with the love that you’ve
found and takes away from the special moments you have today, if you’re
constantly thinking back to what you once had — which actually might not have
been half as good as we think it was.
8.
Worrying about what others thought about me so much. Most
of us place way too much importance on what other people around us think about
us. How will they judge us? In the moment, we think their opinions
are crucial to our future success and happiness. On our death beds, none
of that matters.
9. Not having enough confidence in myself. Related to the previous point, a big
regret for most of us is questioning why we had such little confidence in
ourselves. Why did we allow the concerns of others to weigh so heavy on
us instead of trusting our own beliefs? Maybe we didn’t think we were
worth having what we wanted. Maybe we just thought poorly of ourselves.
Later on, we wish we could have been more self-confident.
10. Living the life that my parents wanted me to live instead of the one I
wanted to.
Related to that lack of confidence, a lot of us get sucked into living
the life that we think a good son or daughter should live. Whether
because we’re explicitly told or just because we unconsciously adopt it, we
make key life choices – about where to go to school, what to study, and where
to work — because we think it’s what will make our parents happy. Our
happiness is derived through their happiness – or so we think. It’s only later
– 1o or 20 years on – where we discover that friends around us are dying and
we’re not really doing what we want to do. A panic can start to set in.
Whose life am I living any way?
11. Applying for that “dream job” I always wanted. Maybe we didn’t apply for that job we
always wanted to because of a child, or because our spouse didn’t want to move
cities. It might not have been the perfect job for us, but we always
regret not trying out for it. Do you think Katie Couric regrets
giving the nightly news gig a shot? No way. Sometimes you swing and you
miss, but you have no regrets later on.
12. Been happier more. Not taken life so seriously. Seems strange to say, but most of us
don’t know how to have fun. We’re way too serious. We don’t find
the humor in life. We don’t joke around. We don’t think we’re
funny. So, we go through life very serious. We miss out on half (or
maybe all) the fun in life that way. Do something a little silly today.
Crack a joke with the bus driver – even if he ends up looking at you weird.
Do a little dance. You’ll probably smile, on the inside if not the
outside. Now keep doing that, day after day.
13. Gone on more trips with the family/friends. Most folks stay close to home. They
don’t travel all that much. Yet, big trips with friends and family – to
Disney World, to Paris, or even to the lake – are the stuff that memories are
made of later in life. We’re all thrown in to some new unfamiliar
situation together. We’ve got to figure it out as a group – and it’s fun,
even when it rains. We really remember trips.
14. Letting my marriage break down. Back to romance now. More people will
divorce than stay together. If you ask these folks, they’ll tell you that
it was for the best. They couldn’t take it any more. And, of course,
there are some marriages that shouldn’t go on and where divorce is the best for
all parties involved. However, if you talk to many people privately,
they’ll tell you they regret their marriage breaking up. It’s never just
one thing that ends a marriage – even if that one thing is infidelity. There
are usually lots of signs and problems leading up to that. The regrets
most of us have is that we didn’t correct some or most of those “little things”
along the way. We can’t control our spouse but we can control our actions
and we know – deep down – we could have done more.
15. Taught my kids to do stuff more. Kids love their parents, but they love doing
stuff with their parents even more. And it doesn’t have to be a vacation
at the Four Seasons. It could be raking leaves, learning how to throw a
football, or cleaning up a play room together. We learned all the little
habits that we take for granted in our own behavior
from mimicking our parents. If we’re not making the time to do stuff
with our kids, we’re robbing them of the chance to mimic us.
16. Burying the hatchet with a family member or old friend. I know family members that haven’t
talked to a brother or sister for 30 years. One’s in bad health and will
probably die soon. But neither he nor the other brother will make an
effort. They’ve both written each other off. And there’s blame on
both sides – although I take one’s side more. But these were two guys
that were inseparable as kids. They got washed in a bucket in their parents’
kitchen sink together. Now, neither one will make a move to improve
things because they think they’ve tried and the other one is too stubborn.
They think they’ve done all they can and washed their hands of the
relationship. They’ll regret that when one of them is no longer around.
17. Trusting that voice in the back of my head more. Whether it’s as simple as taking a job we
weren’t really thrilled about or as complex of being the victim of some crime,
most of us have had the experience of a little voice in the back of our heads
warning us that something was wrong here. A lot of times, we override
that voice. We think that we know best. We do a matrix before taking that
job and figure out a way to prove to ourselves that, analytically, this makes
sense. Most of the time, we learn later that voice was dead right.
18. Not asking that girl/boy out. Nerves get the best of us – especially when
we’re young. We can forgive ourselves that we didn’t screw up enough
courage to ask that boy or girl out on a date or to the prom. But that
doesn’t mean that we still won’t think about it decades later. Sometimes
people regret seeing someone famous or well-known in real life and not going up
to them and telling them how much they inspired them in our lives. It’s the
same underlying fear. We always we could have just said what we really
felt at that moment.
19.
Getting involved with the wrong group of friends when I was younger.
We do dumb stuff when we’re young. We’re impressionable. We
make friends with the wrong crowd, except we don’t think there’s anything wrong
with them. They’re our friends and maybe the only people we think that
truly understand us. However, we can really get sidetracked by hooking up
with this group. Sometimes it leads to drugs or serious crimes. We
never start out thinking our choice of friends could lead us to such a
difficult outcome.
20. Not getting that degree (high school or college). I’ve spoken with lots of folks who
didn’t graduate with a high school or college degree. When I met them,
they were already well-known at their job. And there are many examples I
can think of where their jobs were very senior and they were very
well-respected. However, if the education topic ever came up in private
conversation, almost universally, you could tell they regretted not getting
their degree. It made them insecure, almost like they worried they were
going to be “found out.” Most of these folks will never go back to get it
now. Whether they do or not, they’re great at what they do and don’t need
to feel bad about not having that piece of paper.
21. Choosing the practical job over the one I really wanted. I was watching CNBC the other day and one
finance guy was being asked for advice on what college kids should major in
today. He said: “It sounds corny but they’ve got to do what they love.” He’s
right. Of course, as a country, we need more engineers, scientists, and other
“hard” science folks. But, at the end of the day, you’ve got to live your
life, not the government’s. There are many who think they need to take a
“consulting job” to build up their experience before settling in to a job they
love. Although there are many roads that lead to Rome, you’re probably
better off just starting immediately in the area that you love.
22. Spending more time with the kids. I had an old mentor who used to tell me,
“when it comes to parenting, it’s not quality of time that’s
important, it’s quantity of time.” When we get so busy at
work, we comfort ourselves knowing that we’re going to stay late at the office again
with the idea that we’ll make it up by taking our son to a ballgame on the
weekend. As long as I spend some quality time with him, we think, it will
all balance out. It probably won’t. There are lots of busy
executives who take control of their schedules in order to either be at home
for dinners more or be at those special school events with the kids. Kids
do remember that.
23. Not having the courage to get up and talk at a funeral or important
event. I remember at an
old Dale Carnegie class I attended, they told us more people were afraid of
public speaking than dying. They’d rather die than give a speech
apparently. Yet, when you’re close to death, you’re probably going to
wish you’d gotten over those fears on at least a few occasions, but especially
at a loved one’s funeral or some important event like a wedding.
24. Not visiting a dying friend before he died. I had a buddy I went to high school with who
died 3 years ago. He was in his late 30s with a great wife and 3 great
boys. He had cancer for the last 3 years of his life. We’d talked off and
on over that time. Two months before he died, he called me and asked if I could
come by to visit. I was in the process of moving and too busy with my own
family. I said I’d come soon. A month later, it was clear he had
days to live. I rushed to the hospital and did get to visit at his
bedside before he passed, but he was a different guy from the one I’d spoken to
only a month earlier on the phone. He was just hanging on. We hadn’t been best friends
and we hadn’t seen much of each other since high school, but I know I’ll always
regret not going to visit him earlier when I’d had the chance. What I’d
give to have one last regular chat with him.
25. Being a better father or mother. There’s no bigger legacy than our
children. Often, they turn out great. When our kids struggle
though, there’s nothing bigger than makes us feel guilty. Yet, when they
start showing signs of problems – with school, or friends, or otherwise —
there’s often been many years that have passed in which we could have and
probably should have been spending more time with them. No situation is
ever lost though. There is always time to improve our relationships with
our kids. But, it can’t wait another day, especially if it’s a relationship
that’s been neglected for years.