COULD YOU FALL IN LOVE ALL OVER AGAIN?
P aul Grieves, 47, sits back in a chair and looks at a photograph of his wedding to Kathleen, at St Mary’s Catholic Church, Whickham, Tyne and Wear, in 2004. “Kathy is looking lovely,” he observes, “and I’m in a shirt and tie and we’ve both got smiles on our faces. We’re surrounded by flowers in the church, so I’m assuming – well, no, I’m pretty sure – it was a nice day.”
Paul is a man of great warmth and charm who talks well and fluently, but there is something a bit odd about the way he scrutinises the photograph, noting the individual features of the faces, some failure in the normal interplay between image and memory.
“He doesn’t remember our wedding day,” explains Kathleen, 50, who works in IT. “All he can remember is when we had our first dance, he stood on my foot.” The rest is sunk in darkness.
In August 2005, Paul was riding his motorbike back from his job in surveillance with the local police, when he collided with a car. He broke his arm and his rib cage and was unconscious for five weeks. When he slowly came around over a period of weeks, he recognised Kathleen, but denied ever being married to her. The accident had wiped any memory of the previous two years. He couldn’t remember his stag party, wedding, honeymoon, anything about his life as a husband. “It’s like trying to look into a thick, settling fog,” he says.
The drama of memory loss and the impact it has on a marriage is about to hit the big screen with The Vow. The film starring Rachel Mcadams, Channing Tatum, Sam Neill and Jessica Lange is based on the book about an American couple, Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, who had a devastating car accident just 10 weeks after getting married, 18 years ago. Kim, a basketball coach from New Mexico, suffered a punctured lung, concussion and a broken hand. But Krickitt, a former gymnast and college sports star, fractured her skull and was in a coma for 10 days. Three weeks after the accident, she could name her parents. But when the nurse asked, “Who’s your husband?” she replied: “I’m not married.”
Tests soon confirmed her memory of the previous 18 months was entirely lost. And this includes the moment when she met Kim, fell in love and got married. Her husband was now a complete stranger. She felt nothing for him. “I don’t have a visual memory in my head,” she reported, “and I have no memory in my heart.”
Kim felt he’d lost the great love of his life even though she was still standing there. He remembers comforting himself by saying: “This isn’t my wife; my wife is in this body, trapped and trying to get out.” The film charts the paradox of Krickitt trying to be a convincing wife in the strange situation of not knowing her husband. And Kim trying to be a good husband to a wife who had no recollection of their passionate past.
“I honestly didn’t think our marriage would work,” he has said – but he wouldn’t give up.
Their story is about many things: faith (both are very religious), marriage vows, and how to be a good person. But mostly it raises the question: if you suddenly found your husband a stranger, could you fall in love with him all over again?
“If he was as young as when you first met him, probably yes,” says Lisa Appignanesi, author of All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion, “but actually, seriously, I’m not so sure. Working at relationships is fine, but working at love is not something that is conducive to making it happen.” The difficulty, she says, is the state of love is so complex.
“We’ve evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and procreating,” says Dr Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist. “One is sex drive, craving for sexual gratification; second is romantic love, the elation, the euphoria of falling madly in love with somebody; and the third, is attachment, the calm and security you feel with a longterm partner.”
The typical trajectory starts with intense romantic love. “You feel elation when things are going well, despair when things are going poorly. You have tremendous energy, you work all night, you talk till dawn, you become sexually possessive, you begin to crave the person, you obsessively think about the person, and you are highly motivated to win them,” says Fisher.
Then comes deep attachment – and this takes time. When newly in-love couples relate their past over dinner it’s like showing a guest around their house before inviting them to move in. Through the banality of day-to-day rituals – choice of aftershave, fondness for pasta, the lilt in certain words – couples, subtly but importantly, build up a stock of experiences.
“Shared memories are terribly important,” says Appignanesi. “When people split up later in life, one of the things they say they miss most is this ability to have someone who has kept in them a record of your past. You don’t have this shared past together you can think about, look back on, or even just mention in a haphazard and irrelevant way.”
This is why marriage after a brain injury can be such a challenge. “This isn’t reestablishing a relationship,” says Dr Colin Wilson, consultant neuropsychologist at the Regional Acquired Brain Injury Unit in Belfast. “It’s a new relationship. For the patient, there is no reference bank of how his or her partner reacts or how they respond, or that sense of knowing someone based on past memories.” He goes on: “And then, for the non-injured party, there is a sense that their partner might look very similar, might speak very similarly, but actually, there’s a change in personality, temperament, outlook and ability to form and maintain a relationship.” In other words, you can be in an old marriage with a completely new person.
Paul and Kathleen met through friends about 12 years ago, so the accident hasn’t entirely erased their relationship. “When he came to, he knew that I was special, but he thought I was his girlfriend,” she says. He even proposed all over again from his hospital bed.
The new Paul still looks like the old Paul, but is quieter, more serious, and has yet to return to full-time work, although he is now studying at Gateshead College. “He needs help reminding to go to appointments or organising his finances,” says Kathleen. “If we go on holiday, I have to help him pack his suitcase to make sure he packs the right stuff.”
“The saddest thing for me,” says Paul, “is all those special things and special places I’ve been with Kathy which I can’t remember.” She can tell him about their honeymoon in Santorini or the time they visited her niece’s new baby, but it just isn’t the same as feeling and experiencing the emotions. Paul, says Dr Wilson, is an “outside observer of his own emotional experience and that is really quite disconcerting”.
So, Kathleen and Paul have been creating new memories, chatting over chicken tikka, shopping, swimming in Rhodes.
Paul has got to know his wife again. “She’s good fun, lovely looking and very understanding, especially now, having to cope with what’s happened.” Kathleen, for her part, now accepts that when her husband opens their wedding album, she won’t see smiling recognition, but bewilderment on his face.
“He doesn’t need to remember the wedding,” she says, “he just needs to remember I’m special to him.”