For a chap who likes to believe he is fairly good at things he puts some effort into, it seems I am pretty crap at relationships. My current wife excepted, obvs – love you so much honey. Mwah mwah. I do care. Really, I do. Despite my efforts to cultivate a gruff exterior I am really quite a thoughtful fellow. Honestly. At times. When I remember.

I guess that is what you get when raised by a strong woman with no regular father figure present. My mother, for the record, was the Governor of a Maximum-Security Men’s prison. I remember her telling me a story of taking over a prison, getting the guided tour by the Guards, and when the inmates saw that it was a woman, they all started swearing and cursing  to rattle her. She walked to the end of the Wing, turned back and addressed them all with a little smile and the observation, “Gentlemen, you’ll have to do far worse than that to upset me. I have raised three boys and they can all swear better than you.”

But back to relationships for a moment. I really don’t get why people pay so much for therapy. Having ‘A Therapist’ strikes many of us Brits as a certain type of American peculiarity. If you face into thoughts/feelings/emotions etc and be honest with yourself (I grant you that it is not easy nor pleasant, but it is certainly cheaper and not as cringeworthy as telling it to another only for them to reflect it back to you asking you what you think it means and then charge handsomely for it) then you can come to a reasonable conclusion about the serious things.

My ex-wife, when we realised things were tough, convinced me to come with her to a marriage guidance counsellor in Oxford and I agreed. Hell, we were getting nowhere, knew things weren’t that good and were at a loss for suggestions. I bit back my inner cheap-gene feelings about paying someone to tell me what I knew, albeit suppressed nice and deep like any good English person does with emotions, and went along with an open mind. The Marriage Counsellor was very pleasant, welcomed us in and started by explaining that she’d like to get to know us better. So far, all very reasonable sounding. We smiled and nodded obligingly. She started by producing a flipchart and explaining that she wanted to chart our families in order to understand us better. One for each of us. “Let’s start with you, Dominic.”

I can say definitively that that is the exact point where things started to go downhill. You see, at that time in my career I was facilitating a lot of workshops, several days a week for three years. It was mostly my job and I knew just how much information fit on a flipchart sheet and just how small you can write with a flipchart marker. In short: I this was an area where I felt qualified to make this type of simple judgement.

At this point I interjected and, smiling back, observed that she’d need more than one piece of paper for mine. My ex-wife also smiled, nodded, and agreed. For she too, being in a corporate job, was no stranger to the limits of a flipchart. The Counsellor smiled back – there was an inordinate amount of smiling by this stage – far too much in my book. Neither I nor my ex did the overly smiley stuff. Nonetheless, artificial facial muscle distortions aside we both knew that one sheet of paper was simply not up to the task for my weird and wonderful family tree, no matter how small she could write with those chunky markers.

The Counsellor– still bloody grinning like a demented Cheshire Cat, are they trained/ordered to smile. All. The. Time? – demurred and explained that she was more than capable of doing this. I smiled back and reiterated again that this was not only unlikely but impossible. She scoffed, doubled down, poised her pen, and dragged the flipchart closer.

It was at this point that we lost faith in her entirely. I was suddenly overwhelmed by that feeling you’d have if someone started in on your hard earned cash and was setting fire to the notes one by one. The only small relief was that we had not pre-purchased a block of sessions with this demented grinning woman. Thank God for small mercies.

Whatever we may have thought of one another – the clue to the outcome is in my application of the prefix “ex” – at that moment we were quite united. Whatever we may have disagreed over we both knew that my family tree was one giant shitfight and would defy a single flipchart page. Still, we both silently thought, it was going to be great fun seeing her try. In the end it went to three full pages and neither of us was so graceless as to indulge in a ‘told you so’. We didn’t have to. She knew.

Looking at the bright side, it turned out that we had spent £50 on an hour of pretty good schadenfreude. I just patiently answered her questions, and, at my insistence, we only went from my parents to the present day. If she had bothered to ask before marching so far out on her limb of flipchart defiance and setting out her stall of certainty, I could have explained that my mother had been married three times, my father four, I have one full brother, two half-brothers, one of whom I have never even met, a stepfather, two stepmothers, a step-brother, and a step-sister.