Can meeting up after 15 years finally bring closure to our toxic divorce? (Spoiler alert: The answer from LIZ JONES and former husband NIRPAL DHALIWAL is an explosive NO!)
- Liz Jones leaves the terrible reunion convinced that single ladies have it best
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LIZ SAYS…
Me and Carrie Bradshaw? We’re like twins. She’s a columnist who writes about her love life. Check. She writes books. Check. Is a podcaster. Check. Has had a chequered relationship history, never had children, but simply loves fashion. You see? Joined at the hip.
And because I, like millions of women, identify with her so closely, having rewatched every episode of Sex And The City since it first aired in the UK in 1999, plus the two films and now season two of the reboot, And Just Like That . . ., I have used her as guidance, a touchstone.
I believed, I now realise stupidly, that life is like a glitzy TV show where lowly columnists can afford $575 Manolos. And even if Carrie’s husband, Mr Big, who jerked her around for years, keels over on a Peloton, everything will be OK.
So, when the stills from a yet-to-be-aired episode of And Just Like That . . . reveal that Carrie, a year into widowhood, has met up with hunky, dependable carpenter Aidan — a man with no sharp edges — and my editor suggests that, well, perhaps the path to closure and friendship involves meeting up with your ex like Carrie, I agree.
Inspired by Carrie and Aidan’s reunion in And Just Like That…, Liz Jones decided to meet up with her ex-husband Nirpal Dhaliwal
Because who, after all, has time to meet anyone new? There will be warmth, surely, and perhaps a spark? Fond memories of a shared life? Perhaps, when you meet an ex, you’ve both changed, grown up, are a better fit? Perhaps, being older (Carrie is 56, I’m 64), we’re better at being in a couple, less needy, less obsessed with work.
Incredibly nervous and fearful, I do want to see if, like Carrie and Aidan, meeting up with an ex is a good idea.
I emailed my ex-boyfriends, of which there are only three and a half. My first boyfriend? I can’t remember his surname!
I can remember the name of the dog who lived across the road when I was a child, but not his name! He took my virginity when I was 32, so it’s a bit of a gap in my memory.
My second boyfriend, Trevor, doesn’t reply. A film star I had a dalliance with in 1977 declines gracefully; I imagine because he is married and remembers my acne. A musician ex recently blanked me in a jazz club.
But my ex-husband agrees to meet up. I last saw Nirpal Dhaliwal many years ago.
He came to stay with me in Somerset, a year after the decree absolute. We met in 2000. I was the editor of Marie Claire, he was a reporter on BBC local radio.
He came to interview me but later confessed that he really wanted to ‘check out the women’ in my office.
Liz and Nirpal at the book launch for Nirpal’s novel Tourism in 2006. The two writers met when Liz was 41 and Nirpal was 26
He emailed my PA to ask me out. I was reticent, as he was 26 and I was 41, but at that time I was the only singleton in an office of more than 30 women. I felt I was in a good place to share all the wonderful things in my life: house, car, travel.
I was already writing a column in the Sunday Times about my love life, but that seemed to thrill him — he adored his ‘high-profile naughtiness’.
We got married in 2002 at Babington House private members’ club in Somerset. I paid for everything: for the hire, the champagne, the cake, the flowers and, oh yes, the wedding bands, as well as his made-to-measure suit.
It was an awful day: he only sat next to me for the starter. By the main course he had disappeared to be with his mates and I didn’t see him until breakfast. I knew it was a mistake, but it was done.
Even the honeymoon in Seville was a disaster: he had only passed his test recently so I had to do all the driving. But I did love him, and he told me many times he loved me, leaving me little notes in my luggage when I had to travel for work.
I encouraged him to give up work, write his novel. I got him an agent, and even employed him when I moved to be features editor of a daily paper.
Yes, he was lazy, and undermined me constantly, but it was only when, on my birthday in 2006, I found emails to him from his mistress in New York that I started proceedings to divorce.
After the divorce? It was so liberating not to be constantly monitoring, not to be helping him as though I were Sisyphus, he the great big rock.
Liz and Nirpal on their wedding day. Describing it as an ‘awful’ day, Liz says she knew at the time it was the wrong decision
There have been a few emails since. One said ‘I bear you no ill will’. He wrote to say I did well on Celebrity Big Brother in 2014. No contact since.
I often forget I was married. He has cropped up in my column in You magazine from time to time, but more as a generic husband than an actual one.
I found out he cheated on me many, many times. He drained my energy and my bank account. As a writer, of course I’m going to tell you all that.
Yes, relationships deserve privacy, but they also deserve respect. If you don’t show me respect or honesty, the gloves are off.
He has written a flurry of articles about me, which morphed from, in 2019, ‘Why I only date older women’ (‘I loved being the plaything of older women . . . [with] extraordinary bodies . . . My ex-wife and I fell in love while staying at GoldenEye, Ian Fleming’s Caribbean estate’) to, in 2021, ‘No one thought to question her shabby flaunting of a brown and virile toyboy’ and ‘the intentions of older women towards their young prey are often toxic’. A staggering volte-face.
I was recently emailed a newspaper article where he wrote that my ‘relentless obsession with my career’ left him ‘hellishly lonely’. At least I didn’t sleep with any of the men who supposedly hit on me. At least I put a roof over our heads.
Nirpal is no longer the 26-year-old I met in 2000, but a 49-year-old man. One of the things he snapped at me before he moved out of my house was, ‘I want to be a dad. And you can’t give me that.’ So, is he happy, and indeed now a dad? Was I the obstacle to a wonderful life?
I’m having my make-up done in the studio where we are to recreate Carrie and Aidan’s date, and I hear his voice. My stomach churns.
Strained: Liz and Nirpal recreated the Carrie and Aidan scene (pictured) from the TV show And Just Like That…
I get up to say hello. He doesn’t rise from his slump, or smile, or speak. Perhaps he’s nervous. We pose for photos, but he doesn’t speak to me. He keeps looking at his phone. A woman’s name pops up. The married me would have been sick with fear that the person who should be closest to you is in fact your enemy.
But today, I feel nothing. And I’m reminded, as we all should be, that to be a woman on her own is far, far preferable to being in a marriage where he treats you badly, and uses you as a cashpoint, and turns out all the lights when you are working late as ‘I have to be up early for yoga’.
Not one nice word comes my way. The stylist has brought wine as a prop, and Nirpal proceeds to drink it, even emptying my glass into his.
After the shoot, we walk to a bar. ‘Can I have the cocktail menu?’ he asks. He orders an espresso martini. And suddenly he is shouting, spitting words in my face. ‘I’ve grown to hate you . . . You’re an idiot.’
I’m shocked. He is like a stranger. Where is the funny, cheeky chappy?
I ask if he lives on his own, has children. (I’m being slightly disingenuous, as an article by him in May had the sign-off ‘I’m still single’.)
‘I don’t want to talk about my life in any way, shape or form. I live in West London,’ is all he will say, as though he’s Meghan and Harry running from the paparazzi. ‘I’m not giving you any material.’
He says the F-word 29 times in 30 minutes. He does ask how I am, with a distinct lack of conviction, but when I say I’ve just lost my dog, there is silence.
‘Are you wearing hearing aids?’
Me: ‘Yes. Didn’t you notice I was deaf when we were married?’
‘What am I? A doctor?’ He gets more and more angry, and I start to wonder if he’s drunk. People on neighbouring tables look uncomfortable. But I persist, as I want answers.
‘Why did you cheat on me? Why did you not leave if I was ‘a f***ing old hag’ as you called me. Why did you marry me? It wasn’t the Hotel California — you could have left.
‘I was a confused young man. If you wanted maturity you should have found someone your own age,’ he tells me.
‘But you pursued me,’ I say, ‘you asked me out!’
‘So what?’
I point out that I wanted to be married in order to be looked after, to have a friend, someone to support me. He never did that. Instead, he told me ‘never write about your opinions’, yet my column was shortlisted for awards year after year.
‘I’m a much better writer than you,’ he spits.
Liz was surprised to feel nothing on the day she met Nirpal But today. She was ‘reminded, as we all should be, that to be a woman on her own is far, far preferable to being in a marriage where he treats you badly’
I say quietly: ‘But I’m columnist of the year.’
‘Who gives a f***, you’re a f***ing s*** writer.’
Has he any fond memories? I remind him that he once wrote a piece saying ‘We laughed all the time’. How about the Dior show in Paris? Calvin Klein in New York?
I know he enjoyed our exotic holidays, as he also wrote that ‘no 25-year-old could have provided me with such experiences’.
I tell him I had found him funny, intelligent, well read. I tell him that I loved him once. He shouts: ‘You won’t shut your mouth!’
I tell him I did ask him to leave many times, and he begged me to take him back.
‘Oh shut up!’
‘Did you tell me to shut up?’
‘Yes. Are you going to hashtag that as a MeToo? “My sexist husband told me to shut up.” Is that going all over Twitter now?’
He brings up a piece where I’d revealed I’d felt sorry for him, as he’d had a difficult childhood. He’s very angry. ‘Nirpal,’ I say. ‘It’s called empathy.’
I bring up the fact he did propose, though he has denied it in print: ‘I want to be tied to you, Chubby,’ were his exact words. (I’m a recovering anorexic; he thought the nickname funny.)
‘I never proposed!’ And just like that, he crosses a line. He tells me all my friends hate me, and my family hates me.
Liz and Nirpal found no common ground during their reunion, with Liz leaving sure that single women have it best
I’m flabbergasted and retaliate: ‘But you wrote about your father, your novel was a thinly disguised autobiography; you even forgot to change the name of your best friend halfway through!’ He says he is still in contact with them as, unlike me, he’s not ‘vile’.
I tell him I’m still in touch with ‘H’, who cleaned my house in London for 11 years. She has cancer and I’ve been helping with vet bills. Did you ever help a fellow working-class immigrant?
‘She was the cleaner,’ he says.
Wow. There is zero self-awareness. No filter. He doesn’t take the blame for anything. When I ask if he’s sorry he cheated, he says: ‘I’m utterly unrepentant.’
Listening to his ranting, I feel like a Tempur mattress. I remember exactly how he made me feel for the seven years we were together. The endless put-downs, the barbs. I’m relieved to be in a crowded room. But there is closure.
I realise I’ve changed. I’m no longer needy, smoothing his path in a desperate game of curling I’m never going to win. And so I say: ‘I have a theory. The reason you’ve changed is because life didn’t work out the way you wanted it to. You regret what you lost.’
‘Not for a f***ing second. [I’m] glad to be rid of you. Your theory is horses***.’
He leaves, without offering to pay the bill. Plus ca change. I sit, shaking, and two young women on the next table come over. ‘Are you OK? We can’t believe a grown man talked to you like that!’
But, sad, romantic that I am, on the train home I watch the trailer for Carrie and Aidan’s reunion. ‘Some things are better left in the past,’ says Carrie. ‘But maybe not everything.’ So I email Nirpal.
‘I forgot to show you this photo of us at your book launch.’ It’s a great picture. I look beautiful, not an ‘old hag’ at all. He looks like the cat that got the cream. ‘You did love me once. I wish you well.’
Oooh! I got a text!
Liz and Nirpal on their wedding day. The pair got married in 2002 at Babington House private members’ club in Somerset
‘You should have kept your stupid yapping mouth shut.’
Yikes. All I can say, Carrie, is run for the hills. Finally I’ve realised I’m far more of a Samantha (the take-no-prisoners Kim Cattrall) who declared, when dumping toyboy lover Smith:
‘I’m going to say the thing you’re not supposed to say . . . I love you, but I love me more.’ These days, just like Samantha, I have boundaries.
She will never get married, and neither will I for a second time. All you single ladies — you have no idea how lucky you are.
NIRPAL SAYS…
I had not been in touch with Liz for about ten years, and not met her in almost 15, but I wasn’t surprised when she emailed me suggesting we go on a date like Carrie Bradshaw does with her ex-boyfriend Aidan to see what, if any, sort of chemistry now exists between us.
I watched many episodes of Sex And The City with Liz during our years together, and saw how and why she so desperately emulated Carrie’s cadaverous physique, ostentatious fashion addiction and dreary self-obsessed writing.
With a face like one of those knobbly root vegetables that make the news for resembling human sexual anatomy, and an intellect Wayne Rooney would look down on, Carrie did the utmost possible with what nature cursed her with, spending a dragon’s hoard in her pursuit of love — fooling the likes of Liz into thinking the same might work for them.
Before Liz contacted Nirpal about the reunion, he had not been in touch with her for about ten years, and had not met her in almost 15
‘I am at an £85,000-a-week spa in Zurich next week,’ breezed Liz in typically off-handed Carrie fashion, ‘but I could do the week beginning June 26, say for lunch?’
She was, I presume, there to suffer some heinous procedure — a sulphuric-acid colon cleanse, or a brutal wire-wool face peel — to shave whatever minutes she could from looking her age at our photoshoot.
Being thoroughly glad to be rid of her, I had no hopes or expectations before meeting her for the first time in a decade — yet I was still crushingly disappointed.
I was mortified at being photographed with her, the whole world knowing I had married her.
I then grew angry, remembering her ceaseless snipings at me these past 23 years, such as writing at length about how I never ‘gave’ her an orgasm, when she had not once ‘given’ me one.
The few climaxes I achieved with her I had to labour grievously for, eyes shut while imagining her attractive younger friends, or, more often, someone I was cheating with.
When Liz wrote she had stolen my sperm from a used condom in an attempt to get pregnant, it could only have been one that fell from my pocket after an encounter elsewhere.
Sadly, Liz and Nirpal’s reunion turned out nothing like Carrie and Aidan’s, which saw the old lovers chatting and laughing
‘How long has it been since you two last met?’ asks the photographer as I down my first glass of wine. ‘Not long enough,’ I reply, pouring myself another. Trying to ease the tension, she adds: ‘Love and hate are closely related.’
‘They’re really not,’ I counter. ‘They’re very far apart.’
Liz says and drinks nothing, while maintaining that deranged rictus grin of hers throughout.
Our date alone at an upscale restaurant is no better. I order an espresso martini that I hope will stop me falling asleep in her company while continuing to anaesthetise me, but Liz is one of those people who ages like bread not wine, and her conversation consists of stale high-pitched whining about my failings as a husband, demands for an apology and prying enquiries about women I cheated with.
She offers her deluded ‘theory’ that my disgust at her stems from regret at our separation. The worst I can say about Liz is that she hasn’t changed a bit. I leave after 30 minutes, unable to bear it.
Afterwards, she emails me a picture of us she’d tweeted in March. My back turned to the camera, I appear to be saying something of no interest as she stares indifferently away — not the most romantic snap. Nonetheless, she posted it with the words: ‘Me and the ex husband at the launch of his novel. I think he loved me.’
My reply to this is: ‘If you wanted me to remember you fondly, you should’ve kept your stupid yapping mouth shut and not spat venom relentlessly at me for 16 years after we parted.
‘Your interest in me has only ever been that of a demented, toxic obsessive . . . Now leave me alone for ever.’
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