I suppose I was asking for it when I wrote my last post [Send me to Coventry].
The universe just had to teach me a lesson !
Last week I sent out a request for some information to a bunch of people at work. I’d already discussed this individually with each of them, and I’d layed out what I wanted from them in a workshop meeting about a week before.
I knew what their issues were with what I was asking for (“this is going to take some time” and ”this is going to benefit your department, but doesn’t really help mine”). But I thought I’d persuaded them to help me out.
So I send an email, thanking them for their support, describing the information I need, and (critically) asking anyone who has a problem to email me, without copying everyone else in.
So what happens? First, a couple of emails asking for clarification. No problem. Then one reading way too far between the lines, identifying a range of risks and issues, and suggesting that no one should do anything until we know a whole lot more than we do now. Finally, one that says wouldn’t it be a whole lot better if my department found all of the information for itself, so that the cost of getting it falls on the department that wants it most.
The thing is that every one of them hit “reply all” and told everyone. Now, instead of having a few problems to unpick, I have a real mess on my hands.
A few years ago my first wife put the nail in the coffin of our relationship by doing something similar. Our marriage had been on and off the rocks for a couple of years. We’d broken up and gotten back together again so many times that people joked about it behind my back at work. The kids had spent half of their lives without one or other of us living at home. They had seen too many arguments, and I had heard too many promises of “I know we can’t afford it, but if we just buy this one thing I’m gonna be happy”. And, in the background, there were her affairs with other men.
This is an area that guys don’t like to to talk about much. There’s a lot of shame in being a cuckold. And eventually I got sick of being in a sexless, loveless relationship myself, and for a while I too found someone else.
Throughout all this though, I really, really, really wanted to make it work. I was obsessive about it. It didn’t matter what we’d been through. We’d gotten through it. We were still a family, and being a husband and a father was what I wanted to be.
But the clincher came when she decided that everyone we knew had to know about my affair. Maybe it was guilt about her own behaviour: the gap between the person she portrayed herself to be to our friends and the person she had become. But she told them all what I had done, and in a few short weeks, my friends all seemed to have abandoned me.
I never recovered. I probably never will. I found out that I had no one who would stand by me. No one who even cared to listen to my story. My friends distanced themselves from me, and pushed me out, and I realised that what I had been fighting for had been a lie.
I fought on for about a year after that. Bound in our relationship by a desire to do the right thing, for myself, for my wife, for my kids. But I was lost. Betrayed by everyone I knew. And when my wife started demanding that I move out again, something she did constantly and with little provocation, I knew that I would never feel any respect for her ever again. And I left.
I often have reason to regret leaving. My kids missed out on the family life I so wanted them to have. And I have missed so much of their growing up. My wife used them as weapons in our divorce, and they both suffered as a result. But five years on my relationship with the kids is good and getting better. My ex will be friendly sometimes, and just as crazy as ever, others.
The fall-out from telling everyone can be just devastating sometimes. The lesson – there are times when ”the least said, the better”.
