My 4th marriage

Why someone would marry 4 times is probably a mystery to most so I thought perhaps that those who know me are owed some explanation

I have to say from the outset  that my relationship with K was an intensely sexual one and hence is not fit for publication (though I have my notes).  So I am to  degree leaving out the most significant parts of our times together

I met her on Sunday 3rd Sept., 1995 at 10.30 am. I was aged 50. She had placed a "Personal" advertisement in a singles circular called "Possibilities" describing herself as a "6' Amazon lady". Liking tall women as I do, I had to reply, though I felt at the time that a 6' woman would be unlikely to find me of interest as tall women are generally fanatical about not going out with men who are shorter than themselves.

I wrote to her in May but she took until September to ring me. We met in the Mall in central Brisbane, had a cup of tea there at Jimmy's cafe and then went for a walk in the Botanical gardens. It must have been less than an hour after we had met that we had a passionate kiss (in the Botanical gardens) and then walked with our arms around one-another through Brisbane to Central Railway Station -- outside which we had another very passionate and obviously public kiss: Not bad for people at our stage in life, when new relationships generally seem hard to form! I was soon very much in love with her, in fact.

K. has a self-image as being very kind, generous and helpful to all those she comes in contact with. I initially saw some evidence of that being true and it is of course something that I greatly respect. It immediately made me feel protective towards her. She was 47 at the time and a grandmother. She had two adult sons. 

She had already been married and divorced three times when I met her. Both her children were from her first marriage. I seem to recollect that she mostly lived in Lithgow during her first marriage.

After her first marriage broke up, she had spent nine years as a member of the Army Transport Corps -- where she reached the exalted rank of Corporal! Her duties in the Army were mainly clerical -- she arranged Army travel -- but she did various courses and also became a qualified weapons instructor! She has the sort of conservative views that one normally expects from an Army background.

After leaving the Army she had been in Real Estate for about 10 years -- ending up running her own Real Estate business. About a year before I met her, however, she had had a minor traffic accident which made her very anxious and insecure and thus made it very difficult for her to drive. This crippled her activities in Real Estate and caused her to sell her agency.

In her teens and twenties she had been quite an athlete. She represented N.S.W. in TWO sports -- swimming and basketball. Her height, of course, made her a natural for basketball. In my earlier years I had always perceived that there were some pretty good-looking sporting women around but never could get near to any of them because of my own lack of ability and interest in sport. So in my 50s I was very pleased to get myself one of the best of such women.

Other things that I liked about her were: The fact that we had most attitudes in common -- including a liking for classical music; the strong animal attraction between us; that she is (in fact) 5'10 1/2" tall and strongly built; her erect military bearing, her classically female figure and her long red hair and green eyes. She is a very attractive woman in almost every way and is in fact very close in size and shape to Elle Macpherson -- one of the world's most photographed women. Most people took her for being at least ten years younger than she in fact was.

Amusingly, K. and I are not only exactly the same height but we also have the same hat, shoe and glove size, eat exactly the same amount at mealtime and weigh almost the same. She even fits perfectly into my dinner jacket and trousers! I am a lot bigger around the waist than she is but she has a bigger bum.

Amusingly, despite her size and tomboyish image, K. has typically feminine arachnophobia. I came into her room once to find her lying virtually paralysed in her bed because there was a big (but harmless) huntsman spider on the wall opposite her. It ran onto a picture frame as I walked in so I just took the frame off the wall and walked out carrying the said spider -- which I then deposited harmlessly in the garden. I do not usually kill things if I can help it -- cockroaches and mosquitoes excepted. K thought I was very brave to walk out carrying something that had a big brown spider running around on it! Horrors! K. being so full of jollity most of the time we have a lot of laughs too. 

I met both her mother and father when they came to the wedding. Her mother is very dominant and her father is very quiet. He was an engineer of some kind and they were apparently fairly well off. They were living in the Newcastle area. 

Our relationship had lots of dramas almost from the start with virtually weekly upsets between us but less than three weeks after we met she had moved into Forest St to live with me. Pretty good going for both of us! On 4th October she agreed to marry me -- one month and one day after we first met. We also set the wedding date for just about as soon as possible -- 10th November (1995).

I took her to The Clansmen to place an engagement ring on her finger on a Saturday in early October (The Clansmen is an expensive Scottish restaurant that is one of the most prestigious in Brisbane). I wore the kilt but I think she was the one who looked the most Scottish -- or Gaelic anyway as I think it is in fact mainly Irish ancestry that accounts for her looks.

I have seen the results of some IQ testing she did and she scored quite highly generally but was pulled down by an atypically low score on verbal IQ. She does tend to mix up her words a bit and I think that she is in fact mildly dyslectic. She has had little formal education 

As a woman about to embark on her 4th marriage I am sure that radical feminists would regard K. as a great failure for feminism.

When one reflects that she was in the Army for 9 years, however, I think that one should say, quite to the contrary, that she is a far better feminist than most. She was a "man" among men and lived by their standards for all that time. She was on occasions the only women in camp with over 1,000 men -- and won their respect as a fellow soldier nonetheless. K. has shown in real life that she can live up to some of the most exacting of male standards for many years. How many of even the most butch feminists can claim the same? I don't see any of that as important myself but it could be a rather thought-provoking case-study for some feminists nonetheless.

Maybe some women might be helped to hear that a woman such as K. is still so totally feminine as to be swept off her feet by a man. 

On another occasion when I booked a motorized Gondola (from Breakfast Creek) to take the two of us for a ride and dinner on the Brisbane river, she got dressed and went out in my black dinner jacket and trousers with the white torsolette underneath and NO blouse. With black high heels on she was quite a vision on that occasion too. She looked far better in my dinner outfit than I ever could! She looked particularly good in high heels not only because she had long legs but also because she was so tall already. Having someone so tall in heels made it very obvious that it was all done for fun and titillation. The heels nearly tripped her when she got into the Gondola, however.

K. loves boats so the Gondola ride with its private seafood dinner was just about the ultimate turn-on for her. I did as a result have a very loving long body in my arms in that Gondola.

My son Joey and K. got on very well. K. does have a way with kids -- mainly because she takes them seriously and tends to talk to them as if they were adults. She and Joey used to play computer games such as "Civilization" and "Genesia" together quite a lot -- which the 8 year old Joey loved! He was very pleased and keen to get K. as a stepmother.

The wedding was in St Paul's Anglican Church at Ipswich and went off very well except for the 38 degree heat. We had the original 1552 Anglican prayerbook service, which was great fun.

The reception was at home at 24 Forest St but had one rather large hitch: The caterers didn't turn up! Christopher (my brother) and I went and got lots of Kentucky Fried Chicken instead, which was very popular.

We spent our wedding night in a big two bedroomed air-conditioned apartment overlooking the river at Dockside and we both had a great time  that night. A bridegroom is supposed to feel that he is the happiest man in the world on his wedding night and I certainly did.

We had a very good breakfast the morning after in the restaurant at the Treasury casino too. The honeymoon was a week in Cairns. It was a bit stressful as she chose the first day of the honeymoon to give up smoking. We practically split up the first day as she was extremely tense and distant towards me. I put it down to nicotine deprivation, however, and we seemed to get over that hump OK. While we were up North, I took K. to see Etty Bay outside Innisfail and told her that it was my favourite place in all the world. 

Shortly after we got back to Brisbane, however, she became quite irrationally hostile towards me. She seemed to want me to shut up and just pay the bills. That is more or less how her mother treats her father and she seemed to want to recreate the same sort of relationship with me. I am no saint, however, so would not abide that at all. I knew all along that she was fairly neurotic (which means that she over-responds emotionally to almost everything) but thought that I could deal with it. I was wrong.

What she finally walked out over (just three weeks after the wedding!) was fairly trivial but that is how neurotics are. She felt that I was "putting her down" in a remark I made -- even though I had no such intention. I would hardly want to put down the woman I loved!

Her response had a lot to do with that dreaded old status-sensitivity I suppose. My status as both a millionaire and an academic is unfortunately pretty intimidating to most people -- regardless of any attitudes or intentions on my part. Those whom the economic position doesn't intimidate, the educational background does -- and vice versa.

So on Thursday 30th November she moved back to her house at Leichhardt and went back on the dole amid considerable anger towards me. The only thing she seemed to want to talk to me about after that was money and she did get a bit out of me for the sake of peace: On 29th. November 1995, I gave her a cheque for $1828 to pay the arrears on her mortgage payments to the Dept. of Housing (the old "Housing Commission") on her house at  Avon St., Leichhardt. The house was on the verge of being repossessed at the time.

Her car in fact had already been repossessed by that time so I also gave her my car (the Laser), though it was 11 years old by then so that even on a trade-in I would probably have got only about $2,000 for it. The general idea behind these gifts was to enable her to re-start life as a single person.

There certainly were many signs throughout our time together of her not loving me but at times she did seem to love me too. She even wanted to have a baby by me using donor eggs and we went and saw Dr. Hennessey (of the Qld Fertility Group) about it before the honeymoon.

K. and I did get together briefly a couple of times after we split up. One of those occasions was when she invited me to attend her graduation ceremony for a training course she had done. I went and it turned out that she had trained as a Prison Officer -- for guard work in a MEN'S prison (Borallon). She had to train in unarmed combat, riot control etc -- and passed! She was the only female in the course but still did well. Not bad for a grandmother! She always was an athlete, of course.

Anyway she was very friendly with me and went around arm in arm with me introducing me as her husband. She looked pretty good in her uniform and it was great to have my arm around that big body again. She soon got cross with me again, however, so we obviously just could not understand one-another. I always loved seeing her, however.

Most people would probably see my brief marriage to K. as something of a disaster but I think of it fondly as one of the best experiences I have had. Why? Largely, I guess, because K. was physically my ideal woman. I absolutely loved her looks. Just being with her turned me on. And having sex with your goddess is pretty hard to beat as a life-experience. Most men do NOT get to marry their physical ideal. I did!

Throughout our relationship, she always seemed to need to have a lot of money spent on her. I was however so taken with having such a Goddess in my life that I did not care one way or another about the financial side of it all.

During our time together, she did however often seem to love me and she certainly loved our sexual relationship. Even after our splitup, she once said to me: "I really loved you, you know." And I believe her. 

Part of the reason why the marriage was so short-lived was my doing. By the time K. walked out on me I had met JHM. And that was also the experience of a lifetime. JHM is the only woman I have known whom I consider to be my cultural equal. We share a similar awareness of high culture (Classical music, classical literature, history etc). An example:

She once asked me while she was reading something: "What does 'peynted' mean?". Give up? I didn't. After just a moment I replied "It is Middle English for 'painted'". Unbeknown to me JHM was at the time trying to decipher a short Middle English poem and my answer was indeed what she needed.

So I probably could have got K. back after she walked out but I did not try. I was looking forward to getting to know JHM. I prioritized culture over great sex! Some women who know me well would not be surprised by that.