Living with the 1%
By: Maria Stanborough
Tags: 1 Percent, Inequality, Equality, Wealth, Rich

About 3 years into my relationship with my ex-partner I took myself to a bar in a downtown hotel. I had become a cliché. A middle aged woman with a wealthy husband sitting alone drinking in a hotel bar.

I picked this place because I wanted anonymity. I figured hotel bars were used to seeing us — middle aged women who are weary and yet have everything anyone could possibly want. A little later a friend joined me. During our conversation she stated that I had “won the online dating lottery” (I had met my partner online). I was with a handsome, charismatic 1%’er — the richest of the rich. I could have anything I wanted.

Except a safe, loving home.

I didn’t tell her that. Because at the time I didn’t know.

Three and a half years and many, many therapy sessions later I can finally name what was missing from my relationship with him. It has taken me this long to understand what the emotional abuse of my relationship did to my soul, what my history of family trauma did to my nervous system, and how the one fed off the other.

To say I was emotionally abused when I was with him would have seemed incongruent when looking at our lifestyle. We went on holidays to expensive and beautiful places, and were VIPs at music festivals. At the Austin City Music Festival we were near the stage in a cordoned off section and given water pistols to keep us cool. I started spraying the crowd of young people outside our area, and they began chanting, “V. I. P., cool us down.” I stopped after that, feeling awkward at being identified for who I had become.

The strange narrative of my relationship with Rob is that I never cared about money. I was committed to a life of social change, and had many careers in which to manifest this desire. The last version, when I met Rob, I was an urban planner. It was confusing, me earning a good, middle class income and living with someone who went to the office every day but could have, if he wanted, parachuted out of a plane instead.

Looking back at my relationship and seeing who I became scares me. Radiohead has a video for their song “No Surprises” which shows the beautiful and melancholic Thom Yorke in a diver’s suit which is slowly filling up with water. The video is the story of my relationship. I was losing myself while standing in place, drowning by the thing that was meant to keep me safe.

The emotional abuse — gaslighting as it is often called — consisted of him layering lies, manipulating the truth, controlling my behaviour, covering up and denying. Probably the worst of it was the blame. Everything was my fault. It is exhausting to always be told by your lover that you are wrong, you are to blame for everything and anything, even if nothing bad happened.

I tried to counter with my truth but any attempts were met with silence, coldness, and disregard. As a woman with a history of trauma woven into my DNA from my family, it was impossible for me to understand what he was doing was wrong. For me it was familiar.

And unfortunately for all of us, it seems emotionally abusive behaviour is accepted when it comes to those who are very wealthy. We have seen it with the now-exiting president of the USA. It was there with Steve Jobs, it is no doubt there with Jeff Bezos — redirecting and blaming others while their bad behaviour continues.

When my partner and I were splitting up I had a lawyer who was like the Laura Dern character in “Marriage Story,” only without the expletives. My lawyer worked with lots of wealthy clients. I was trying to understand my ex-partner’s abusive behaviour and wondered aloud if the money had made him who he is. She said it is hard to know whether the money made him who he is, or if who he is made him go after the money. I had never looked at it this way — that he was empty long before he became rich, and the money was the only way he knew how to fill up.

My partner has since remarried. He found a woman who calls him her ‘tycoon,’ ‘emperor’ and ‘alpha.’ I grimace as I write these down, but they are public declarations she has made. At the same time, I am still waiting for my him to return my belongings to me.

When I left our home I didn’t pack up everything because, initially, I didn’t know how long our separation would be. A few months and therapy sessions later I told him I couldn’t reconcile. I didn’t realize he would keep things that never belonged to him. His millions could easily replace anything I had left behind.

If you had asked me eight years ago if I thought this is where we would be, I would have laughed. Rob has no need for an antique chair I found and had reupholstered, a retro screen print I had framed, or a piece of street art an ex-boyfriend gave me many years ago.

But emotional abuse is not about the things in and of themselves. It is of the need to control, manipulate, and maintain power.

On a recent sunny day in Vancouver I was delivering food boxes to lower income residents as part of a volunteer, Covid-emergency response program. All the residents I deliver to live in Vancouver’s eastside, the poorest postal code in Canada. All the people I deliver to are lovely and kind.

My ex- owns four houses between Vancouver and Whistler, all in nice areas with lots of amenities. He is admired for his wealth and acumen, while so many people live in substandard conditions. Yet he goes uncriticized.

To me this is a microcosm of how we have all internalized the emotional abuse of a system that lets the wealthy do what they want. It suggests, perhaps, how we all need to go to therapy to understand how our own belief system is destroying us. As long as we think it is good for a handful of people to have a lot, while a lot of people have little, we are accepting a system that hurts us all.

For my own part I am grateful I met Rob. If not, I never would have looked deeply into my own history of trauma. I woke up late in life to finally understand that love doesn’t have to hurt; in fact, that is not love. They say you keep getting the same lesson until you finally learn what you need to. I think I’m good. I got the message.

But I worry for the larger numbers of us, those who may idolize the rich, who don’t see they should be more embarrassed for their wealth and emptiness than they are.

The ones we should appreciate are like the Indigenous mother and daughter I met on Vancouver’s eastside who obviously love and care for each other. Despite what are probably deep histories of colonial abuse, inter-generational trauma and economic marginalization, the mom proudly introduced the young woman standing beside her as her daughter, and the daughter beamed happily. In that moment they showed real love. That depth of emotion is what we should aspire to.

This honest, deep emotion is as rare, if not rarer, than the 1%, and so much more valuable.