When Charlotte Ree got engaged, her soon-to-be husband set “two conditions”.
One was that the then-27-year-old get her driver’s licence. The other was that she pool her much-larger income with his, and open a joint bank account.
The latter was something that she and her fiance – who she had been with, by that point, for the better part of eight years – “hadn’t done before, and that my mum was really adamant that we shouldn’t do”, the Sydney-based author and home cook tells news.com.au.
Ree did it anyway.
“For me, part of it was that I just wanted to invest in him, and invest in us. I just really believed in that, and believed in that love,” she says. It was a love – and a future – her husband also wanted to invest in, albeit in a much more stringent and eventually “controlling” way.
From the joint account they set up, “all of our bills got paid – phone, internet, electricity, petrol, rent, food, all of the ‘necessary’ things”.
“But if I wanted to get an Uber home because it was late at night, or go out with girlfriends, it had to come from $100 I was given each week.”
Ree – whose book Heartbake was released last month – stresses that she had access to their accounts, and she “could’ve moved the money, but I chose not to”. And thus – as she writes in her part “bittersweet memoir”, part recipe book – “through my silence, I became unintentionally complicit in my own financial manipulation”.
“He was not – and is not – a bad guy. He was not conscious of what he was doing, just as much as I wasn’t. We just wanted different things,” the 32-year-old says.
“For him, what he really wanted was to set up financial security and our financial future. Did he have to do it in such a frugal way? I don’t think so. But did he have our best interests at heart? I absolutely believe he did.
“It’s one of those situations that it’s not until you step out of it that you realise the environment you were in. So for both of us, we were like, ‘Oh, shit. Neither of us intended for that to happen’. But we just got there and then, because of our own stubbornness or frustration, we both dug down in opposite directions.”
It “completely” sapped the romance out of their marriage.
“There was no, ‘I’m going to take you out to dinner and that’s on me’. It was, ‘Right, that’s $46.50 each, put it into the account’. And that was really hard,” she recalls.
Two “significant” things happened that ultimately made Ree “aware of [the] negative impacts” of her husband’s financial control.
“The first was that I needed new bras – and bras, as we girls know, are expensive. I have a tiny body, but a big bust – so they’re f**king $100, $200 each. We argued over that,” she says.
“And then we also argued when I decided I needed individual therapy. And therapy is, unfortunately, really expensive – even with the mental health care plan.”
But the moment she “knew” her marriage was over was when the couple “were on a boat for this brand that I’d done some work for (as a side hustle to supplement income and make some more money) and I’d just gotten a bonus at work”.
“And I really wanted to take my long-service leave and go overseas, and he just kind of tapped me on the back and said, ‘You know, I’d really love for you to do that, but it’s all gotta go into savings’,” Ree says.
“And it was just a sliding doors moment where I just thought, It doesn’t. And I can leave, and I’m going to use that money to leave, and that’s what I did.”
Twenty-four hours after she moved into her new home, Sydney was plunged into its first lockdown.
“I can laugh about it now. [But] it was grim. There’s no other way to put it. It was so grim.”
Saying goodbye not just to her husband – who she had been with for a third of her life – but to his family and “to a part of myself as well, it was traumatic”, Ree says.
She threw herself into dating – treating it “like a full-time job”, where she’d cook men lavish meals, acts that in part “came from a place of me feeling totally unlovable”.
“And going into [these dates], just feeling like by cooking for men and them saying that they loved my food, [what they were saying was] that they loved me,” she says.
“It wasn’t always necessarily the fault of the men that I got so caught up in them – some just were very terrible at articulating expectations, as was I – but others took advantage of me at that time, in terms of my generosity and caretaking capabilities, which I think is something that everybody wants.”
What she ultimately realised, between lockdowns 2020 and 2021, was that “I just didn’t need someone to complete me – that I could complete myself”.
“And that someone could enhance me – and could add to my joy – but they weren’t the reason for it,” Ree says.
“For so long, I just didn’t feel like I deserved to nurture or nourish myself, and I had no appetite – and that’s part of grief for me, is that I don’t get hungry. But one thing I’ve learned is that you can have grief in one hand, and you can cling onto joy in the other. Having one feeling doesn’t eradicate or dismiss the other.”
It’s this sentiment that’s at the heart of Ree’s book, and one that’s been reinforced to her in recent months, after a relationship that comprised “the most magnificent year of my whole life” came to an end.
“For the first time in my life, I had a really healthy love, and a really mutual love – and I mean mutual effort, mutual satisfaction, mutual reward. And also, for the first time in my life, I cared as much about someone as I did about myself – and I think for so long I just cared about other people, and didn’t care about myself. And so that was kind of amazing. It was like someone was holding a mirror up to me and I could really see myself for the first time,” she says.
“The thing I would say is, it’s kind of like you’re making a cake batter. And you have the most perfect ingredients, and you’re in the best possible mood, and it’s the perfect setting, glorious oven. And yet the cake still doesn’t rise. And I suppose that’s kind of what happened with us. It was just two people who, at any other given time, would’ve been perfect for each other. But he needed to just go out and be on his own for a while.”
Does Ree still love him, and think that he’s the love of her life, and “hold out hope against hope that maybe one day we’ll get back together”? “Absolutely.”
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“But regardless of that, I know that I have myself. And I think that’s the one thing I just want to say to people, is that no matter what highest of highs you have, there is always a low around the corner. And it can be really destabilising, but it’s how you take that and transform that,” she adds.
“I don’t think any pain is ever not for a purpose. I think everything is for a reason. And I guess, for me, I’ve transformed my pain into this book. And now this new pain – I still am working my way through that – but the pain is what is going to lead to that transformation.”
Heartbake: A bittersweet memoir by Charlotte Ree is published by Allen & Unwin and is available now
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