The Curious Case of Mrs Christine Hemming

At first glance this seems a simple case; an upset and jilted wife seeking revenge on the woman who has ‘stolen’ her husband.

Her revenge? She broke into the house of her husband’s lover, stole her cat and crept back down the garden to escape. Embarrassingly, there was CCTV footage that has done the rounds on the internet. Any reader can google and find it but for my own reasons, I don’t want to further humiliate the woman by posting the link. I am sure that there are plenty of bloggers and media outlets who have already done so.

I listened to the news as I was driving on Friday. There seemed a certain caginess about the report that made me wonder whether there was something more to this story than a mere case of infidelity.

And so it turned out to be.

John Hemming is a Liberal Democrat MP who apparently has a distinct eye for the ladies. He had been married for 30 years and within that time he’d had numerous extra-marital affairs. He was indeed so proud of his dalliances that he nominated himself for the News of the Screws “Love-Rat of the Year” in 2005.

Weird guy!

Mrs. Hemming knew all about his relationship with his lover. She ‘shared’ him, stipulating that she could cope with his infidelities if he could just come home each night to sleep with her. She had accepted that this man was incapable of a monogamous relationship and had done the decent thing, enabling him to have time away from her, enjoying the closeness of an additional relationship in his life.

This probably all went wrong because he was reneging on the original arrangement, and obviously I am surmising here, to spend more days and possibly nights with his lover.

As an onlooker, we do not know the story. Nobody knows or is entitled to know about the arrangements, thoughts and feelings within other peoples’ relationships. We can make all sorts of naive and ill-informed assumptions but it is only the people involved that know the truth, and even then that is not always the case. Sometimes the people involved do not fully understand the situation, how they feel and what they can cope with. Theory is often far different from reality, and there is also the issue within such complexities that your feelings can alter from one minute to the next.

Such complexities are so named because they are not simple. They require trust and honesty, and yet however much we might want it to be different, sometimes honesty is not possible because we simply do not know how we feel from one moment, one day to another. Feelings, as I said, can fluctuate.

But what really interests me about this case is the reporting in the press.

At first, there was a veiled, almost embarrassed reporting that this polyamorous situation had emerged. Surely real people don’t live like this? Isn’t this sort of behaviour reserved for the trailer trash in the US of A or the Mormons? Surely no middle aged, middle class woman would ever agree to such madness? Surely nobody in their right mind would want to share their special person with another?

But this is precisely the decision that Christine Hemming had taken.

Nobody knows why she did this but it could have been for a number of reasons. She may have been polyamorous herself and this arrangement allowed her to have her own dalliances or intimate relationships with others. She may have felt it was the only way to keep her man; by enabling him to have the sort of freedom he craved, knowing that he would still return to her – after all, he had history of doing so, and we are all creatures of habit be it monogamy, serial monogamy, polyamory or a succession of one-night stands.

Or maybe, she was cajoled or bribed into making this decision, against her will, either knowingly or not. Maybe she didn’t really want her man at all but didn’t want to create havoc for her children. Or maybe she asked for this arrangement just to be vindictive. If she wasn’t going to be happy with the arrangement, then she was damn sure her husband wasn’t going to be either.

The truth is that we do not know why and how this triangle of relationships happened but in the press, there has been an automatic assumption that this woman has ‘endured’ the perpetual cheating husband, without any of us knowing how and why such an arrangement occurred.

What we do know, due to the aforementioned CCTV footage, is that this woman finally cracked.

When we are out of our comfort zones we sometimes act out of our natural behaviour zones too.

Three days prior to this break-in (which incidentally wasn’t a break-in in the strictest sense of the word because she apparently had keys to the property and no windows or doors were broken to gain entrance) Christine Hemming had finally decided that she could no longer cope with this situation. She finally decided that she did not want to be in a marriage with this man. Maybe he finally realised that he did not want her and was only maintaining the relationship out of obligation or out of fear of losing something other than the intimacy with his wife.

She had cracked. She had been with the man for thirty years. That’s a hell of a long time. I’m beginning to think that the habit of being with one, two, three or however many partners becomes established relatively quickly so losing a partner after such a long time can certainly be tumultuous.

And then there are the dreaded destructive emotions. In this case, it appears that they reared their ugly head to the point where Mrs Hemming was not in control, was been driven by darker forces and did not fully understand what she was doing.

In her defence, she said she had no idea what she was doing at the house, whether she intended to ‘take’ anything and even once she had taken the cat, she had no idea why and considered walking back into the house immediately to return it.

She was not in control.

So the media finally conceded that these polyamorous situations do exist in this country but oh how weird they are, and let’s emphasise this as much as the madness of a jilted wife. The caginess of reporting gave way to the sensationalism of this unconventional relationship genre, with a certain sneering at all involved in such a decision. How could the wife let this happen? How could the man really split his loyalties and love between two people? How could the lover deal with the fact that she could never spend a night with her man? How could the wife or the lover call Mr. Hemming ‘their man’ when it was evident that he was two peoples’ ‘man’ or where it was even more evident that he was nobody else’s man because possessing in another human being is wholly unnatural, even with a bloody marriage certificate.

And once they had conceded that this was a situation that all had agreed to, then the media had to look at it all with incredulity. This should not be. It was against the natural order, etcetera, etcetera.

Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if the whole situation had been reported differently?

Wouldn’t it have been truly sensational if the media had not made the conformed assumptions and simply accepted this as a feasible way of living, that like so many relationships it just happened to go wrong, not because polyamory was unworkable but because some relationships have a shelf-life.

Wouldn’t it also have been wonderful if this situation had never made its way to court? Wouldn’t it have been far better for all involved, including all the children within this arrangement, for the three people to sit down and talk quietly with one another, with the husband and the lover respecting and acknowledging the upset and emotions that were insanely driving the wife?

And this is something that the newspapers could not possibly contemplate. I have yet to see one comment regarding whether this was a case that required prosecution. Don’t get me wrong. I am not condoning breaking in or causing havoc to another persons’ life but it is somewhat understandable. Can anyone really say they have gone through the break-up of a relationship without any glimmer of destructive emotions or associated feelings?

Not one comment about this in the newspapers, other than a sack of sympathy for Mrs. Hemming in a pitiful and in my opinion patronising manner. Not one paper or television outlet has suggested that this should not have been a case for the courts or media. Not one commentator has stated that this could have been sorted sensitively by all concerned if only the three people involved could have acknowledged their wrongdoings and sorted it out between themselves.

Yes, Mrs. Hemming was acting in a destructive manner but at some point either the husband or the lover must have done the same by contacting the police in the first instance and then continuing with a vengeful stance by insisting on prosecution.

However, the saddest thing about this as far as Zenpuss is concerned is that it is yet another example of where a relatively sensible polyamorous arrangement has gone wrong.

My head tells me that polyamory is right. It is the honest way of living rather than pretending that we are capable of having one partner for life. My polyamory is different to others. I still think that you can have a significant other whilst remaining wholly committed to a polyamorous life. Others think differently but I just want to see it work! And the hopeless hopeful in me wants the press to report on it working too.

It would be so wonderful to get some examples out there on how it does work but the problem is that where it is working, people are too frightened to come out and admit that they are living in this polyamorous way because it is not the done thing, and what would the rest of the world think of them?

I am not about to embark on a confession of my own, and nor would I advocate that others do this without thoroughly considering the consequences of such a disclosure, but it really would be rather helpful, both personally and socially, to find an example of where polyamory actually works.

And until that happens we will continue to get the mockery within the press, we will continue to ridicule those who engage in such arrangements, suggesting that they are weak-willed or pathetic to agree to such an existence, rather than acknowledge that this is something that they have entered into thoughtfully. We will continue to have the “I told you so” mentality when it all goes belly-up, and as a consequence we will perpetuate that age-old myth of monogamy.

Or maybe I have got it all wrong after all.

No, I just want an example of where polyamory works, in real life, not in Hollywood or the likes. I just want to see one decent example of how it can work effectively so that it can be a shining example of how one could live a successfully intimate life.

And I suppose I partly want that example to be me.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/02/cat-theft-paris-fashion-immigration?newsfeed=true

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-15115033

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And finally, here is a photo I found whilst googling for some photos. For the pedants, lexicographers and linguists amongst us, what should we make of this?

Another blog I think.