‘My ex taught me, control freak, to follow my heart’

“Everyone knew Behrouz, he was the most handsome man in town. But also the vaguest. Night after night he sat in the cafe, alone, with a beer or a magazine. He intrigued me. After an exuberant evening with friends, we got to talking and decided to dive into the Amsterdam nightlife together. On the train I became enchanted. Behrouz was surprising and passionate; even when we went shopping we made ‘stopovers’ to kiss.

Behrouz was incomparable to any other man I had met up to that point. He taught me, a seasoned control freak, to follow my heart. We had to, because his phone was regularly empty while we hadn’t agreed where or what time we would see each other: at such moments I couldn’t help but listen to my heart. Instinctively we met at the same time in the same cafe.

Creativity

Behrouz grew up in Tehran but fled the war with Iraq in the 1980s to evade military service. Together with a friend, he made this journey full of trauma and setbacks. For days he hid in a trunk and was scammed by smugglers, but through many detours he eventually reached the Netherlands. This hellish experience caused a lot of pent-up sadness and anger, but also creativity. Everything was possible with Behrouz. I found that very attractive. If he missed the last train because we were kissing too long, he would arrange a bicycle to get home – something I don’t often see a Dutch man doing.

The first time in his house I looked around in surprise: there was nothing in his living room. No couch, table or TV. There was no bed anywhere, where the hell would we sleep? But Behrouz was already busy: with a hundred blankets, he carefully built a nest for us, piece by piece. In the meantime, he talked about the hot summers in Tehran, when he and his brothers were forced to sleep on carpets on the roof.

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Where the wind took us

Behrouz had a creative solution for everything, that was his charm. But planning or agreeing things was complicated: he wasn’t used to that. At first it didn’t matter, I fluttered with him, we just saw where the wind took us. But once we had two kids, things got more complicated.

Behrouz is a father who puts together the children’s beds himself, or who makes a swing from the curtains. But if I wanted to cut a fruit snack, I first had to look for the knife, which was somewhere in the shed as a screwdriver. Once I had saved up for such an expensive bicycle seat with a mudguard, I was careful with it. When it snowed shortly afterwards, Behrouz casually used the fender as a sled. Creative yes, but the thing was also completely demolished.

A point behind the relationship

Although Behrouz literally gives his children his last crumb, he could also get incredibly angry. Growing up in a culture where showing emotions is taboo, Behrouz learned – using his father as an example – that anger was the only emotion a man was allowed to show. He never physically harmed us, but the way in which he could regularly explode – vexed by many underlying traumas – was intimidating and frightening.

In the meantime I paid for the household, the boys, the income. I bore all the responsibility, he none. He himself saw it differently; compared to his father who came home drunk every night while his mother looked after their eight children, he did an awful lot.

Behrouz did not grow with our new situation of managing a family. He remained the free, spontaneous spirit with whom it was impossible to make agreements, who bore no responsibility and who increasingly disrupted our lives with his fits of rage. It hollowed me out so much that after fourteen years I unfortunately had to end our relationship. I would have loved to see it differently, because it was certainly not my love for him.”

This article can be found in Kek Mama 07-2021.