“Everything changed for me after the wedding and setting up home”, recalls Mariusz Singleton. “Until we went through our nuptials our lives were satisfactory, I mean we had the same run of the mill rows that most couples do, with the same bitter recriminations and palpable sense of hatred for each other but generally we were happy; apart from the time we spent together obviously”.
Mariusz was speaking at a marriage guidance counsellors’ recruitment seminar in Worthing and went on to describe incidents during his four years of spousal hell and the trauma that it had left him with. “My wife, Beth began to act very strangely upon moving in to the marital home. The first concern I had was when I found her taking a bottle of liquid and pouring the contents into the toilet, she made sure she covered the entire inside of the bowl with the blue substance”, he recalled. “It was most strange, paying good money for the bottle of Domestos I think it was and then discarding much of it”.
He fought to hold back the emotion when he quoted another occasion of unusual behaviour; “I came home early from work and found that many of my clothes were sopping wet, Beth had intentionally saturated them and then proceeded to display them from a line she had strung across the garden. The garments were visible to any of our neighbours, it was very embarrassing”.
“I wish I’d acted then”, Mariusz laments, “I closed my mind to it all but after the birth of our son the behaviour went beyond the pale and I snapped. I would dress him each morning in the ridiculous padded underpants she insisted we use but then would watch as she would undress him and change the pants ten, sometimes twelve times a day. Even in the middle of the night she would wake to perform the ritual. I couldn’t bear to watch the little mite suffer so I left her”.
Mariusz is left in a state of utter confusion as to how custody was awarded to his wife and after a breakdown and loss of his job he scratches out a living as a government minister. His final advice on marriage; “You’re better off single”.
