When jealousy becomes pathology
Six years ago, Cindy Joseph*, then 47, flew to England for her grandmother's funeral. When she arrived back home in Burlington, Ont., 10 days later, her husband, James*, was a changed man. The minute she walked through the door, he told her in urgent whispers that they needed to talk as soon as their kids went to bed. "I thought he was going to say there was someone else, that he was having an affair," says Joseph.
Instead, her husband told her he knew she was the one having an affair. And he said he had the evidence to prove it, producing a plastic grocery bag filled with photos, receipts and phone bills. It also contained concert stubs and love letters Joseph had saved from her teenage years. "At first I thought it was some kind of misunderstanding, it was just ridiculous." But her normally rational husband was convinced that all this "evidence" pointed to her repeated infidelities, and he wanted answers: Was that New York number on the phone bill a call to a stateside lover? Was she still seeing that old teenage friend? Was the receipt for golf balls a gift for another man? Whose number was scrawled on this tiny scrap of paper? "Even though I had logical explanations for every single question, there was just no satisfying him. We spent hours that night going over all this stuff."
In the grip of paranoia
The unwarranted accusations continued the next day, and the next. Soon her husband began to call her at work, distraught because he'd found some further proof that she was cheating on him. He highlighted questionable calls on the phone bill and, with him at her side, she dialed each number in an effort to reassure him. "I'd be on speakerphone and half the time I had no idea whom I was calling. He'd tell me what he wanted me to say because otherwise he thought I might be speaking in code, tipping off the person at the other end of the line." The calls were to work colleagues, her children's friends, a local business. "He'd look defeated when he saw it was a legitimate call, but he was still always suspicious."
James started rifling through her purse and flipping through her appointment book. He checked her coat pockets and inspected the clothes in her closet. He followed her to work and parked the car outside her office with the expectation of catching her going out to lunch with another man. Soon James was paying less attention to his landscaping business, drinking more, and clearly caught in a grip of paranoid thoughts and manic actions.
