Loraine Marshall: Escaping A Controlling Relationship While Building Successful Businesses

On today’s episode of the Engaging Marketeer, Darren is speaking with Lorraine Marshall who works in digital marketing and property but a lot of this conversation is about relationships. Lorraine talks about a relationship that started to go sour in 2017 and didn’t really end until very recently. She discusses how it was under coercive control and how someone tried to stop her doing the business that she’s doing because they didn’t want her to have her own interests and how she dealt with that.

 

How Lorraine discovered that her partner was having an affair

Lorraine: I was left basically precarious, I was in a relationship for 11 years and he cheated on me in 2017 to 2018.

I was thrown into a bit of chaos because at that point in time, I had invested a lot of money in an online business education platform to learn digital marketing. I was moving forward with that thinking that I would create some sort of income from having a digital business online, and this has always been something that I’d wanted to do. Unfortunately my partner had other ideas and really didn’t want me to do an online business or anything like that. Because I’d spent money and invested in myself, that was really bad, I should have asked him first. And I wasn’t spending his money, it was my money.

Darren: So he didn’t want you to do it even though you were spending your own money?

Lorraine: Yeah. So in December 2017, in between Christmas and new year, he sat me down on the sofa and he starts to explain that he was coming back from a trip from Bristol, he was going back to his house in York and saw the signs for Sheffield. And he remembers this woman that he’d started to have a relationship with before, in 2009, and then he rekindled the relationship with this woman in November.

So four weeks back, he’d started this affair with this woman and then in the December, he was telling me about it. He was confessing that he was having an affair.

I don’t know why he did that but now after I’ve done lots of research and I understand why he did it. It was his attempt to thwart me in progressing the business ideas I had, the education that I was wanting to do, how I wanted to earn money. It was his attempt to stop that from happening

Darren: To control you, in other words.

Lorraine: Yeah, that was a control thing, he didn’t want me to do that.

 

Lorraine’s troubles with her controlling partner

Lorraine: I’ve had three long-term relationships in my lifetime and I say I’ve been through the “3 D’s” of relationship endings. The first one was my husband and that was divorce. The second one, I didn’t get married, he was my partner, we lived together, we started a business together and in the December of 2006, he died of a heart attack. So that was death of a partner.

Now the last relationship I had, started in 2009 and ended in 2020. So the affair that he had in 2017 didn’t end the relationship because I was a bit trapped but also because I loved the man and I thought he loved me. And he told me that he still wanted me so I stayed and fought for him, to end that affair, so that we would be together in retirement.

And through 2019, I’d regained my confidence and I’d started doing things like yoga, art and dance lessons. There was going to be a carnival in February 2020, I did the carnival, he was all proud and we were planning to start a business in Spain. He was planning that we would have a removal fund to go to the house in York that we’d lived in and that the things would arrive in Spain. But then obviously everybody knows what happened in 2020.

Darren: I seem to remember something about it yeah.

Lorraine: So obviously, when that that happened, business couldn’t get started because what is the point in starting a business when businesses were closing down?

So in July, he was able to fly out and he organised the removal van again and he took photographs of all the things that he packed in the back.

And then he’d send me messages to say that he’s going to see this transformational coach. He flies back on the 25th of August and he’s very talkative about how this transformation has gone, how we can improve his health. Then on the 26th we talk all day about it, on the 27th we entertain some guests that were here on holiday.

On the evening of the 27th he said “Let’s have a night cap, we’ll sit outside.” So we made the drinks then he said to me “I’ve got something to tell you” of course as soon as he said that, my mind jumped back to 2017 because it’s the first sentence he said when he was going to confess about this woman.

Then he just said “I’m in love with another woman. We can remain friends, if you want to remain friends, we just can’t have sex anymore.” And that was the end of the relationship, that was it.

Darren: And was this the same woman or was it a different one?

Lorraine: It was a different one but he told me who the woman was. It was someone who he lived with, very briefly, in the 1980s. 38 years previous, he’d lived with this person and then all of a sudden, through lockdown, they’d had these messages going on. Then he met her in August, I think, and then all of a sudden, within a few days of meeting, he was in love with her again and that was the end of our relationship.

 

Why Lorraine has been living under a threat of eviction

Lorraine: Now it’s three years post separation, I have attempted 10 times in total to try and come to some settlement, some agreement. Because as soon as he left here and went to live in the house of the other woman, he wrote another email to me. He then said to me, through his solicitors, he was going to go to court, I would be evicted and I would leave with nothing. So I’d gone from half of the property to nothing at all, that was just a couple of weeks after he left.

I must have had a bit of intuition because, when he delivered this four sentence speech, I just got up, I didn’t say anything, I didn’t react. I walked away from him, I walked into the bedroom and then I let out what I wanted to say. So I think some intuition came over me to not respond, not get angry, not shout, not react because certain personality disorders feed off the emulsion, fear, anger. So I was blanking myself down to not react, to not show those emotions in front of him.

And I’m still here, because the court system is very slow. He did go to court, he did get his eviction order, I’ve been under the threat of eviction since October of 2020, but he actually got the court through in 2022.

Darren: So this is still in Spain?

Lorraine: Yeah I’m still here in the house because the eviction hasn’t happened. But I’m under the threat of being evicted now.

 

Writing a book about this experience

Lorraine: While I was under the threat of eviction, I actually wrote a book which is titled “Post Separation Abuse. Betrayal, Abandonment, What Type of Man” and I wrote my story from the death of my partner, how that happened, to finding this new relationship and how that unfolded from 2009 to 2020.

But I also did a lot of research about emotional and psychological abuse, causal control and the laws in Europe, Spain and the UK. Because at the time I was writing my book, the law was being looked at again in the UK, the law for cohabitation, because the laws are not the same as marriage. And there’s lots of couples who think that they’re secure but there’s no such thing. And so if you haven’t got an agreement in place, if you haven’t got anything in writing at all, you’re in a relationship and you’re not married and you don’t have your name on the deeds, you don’t have your name on the utilities, it’s very difficult to prove anything or to have any way in law to get any compensation for any length of time that you’ve been in that relationship. Because it comes under the laws of TOLTALA, which is to do with property law and it’s very expensive to do litigation for that.

So this is why I actually wrote the book in the first place, to warn people that if you’re going to be in a relationship and living together, that you should talk about what will happen if that relationship ends, what you expect and have some sort of contract. Because you’re not protected in law.

Darren: It’s one of those things nobody wants to think about but everybody should.

Lorraine: You should. I mean you can protect yourself, he did. In 2016, he was writing the will out, telling me about what the will was and he had one in the UK and one in Spain. I never really looked at the details, thing was, I didn’t understand that I should have looked. I should have been on the deed, I should have been on the utility bills, I wasn’t on any of these things.

Darren: Which again is a coercive control thing that you’re not on these.

Lorraine: Yeah because obviously he was in control of all the finances. I didn’t know how much he earned, I didn’t see any of his business accounts or nothing. I had no clue, I just trusted him, I put my trust in him.

So in my previous relationships, because I was more of an entrepreneur, I was always the one that looked after the finances. So I might have only had part-time jobs, I was looking after the children, I was a housewife, I was doing voluntary work or whatever. But I was the one who was in control of the finances and the banking and paying the bills, making sure everything was running smoothly. And I think a lot of women from the north of England do the exact same thing.

I know in middle class relationships, that might be a little bit different, because the men are often in control of the finances and the woman has to ask for everything. But I’ve never been in that situation because I always had my own income, I always had some money.

 

Not realising the signs of a controlling partner

Lorraine: So when I came here, to live in this house in 2016, I took my pension because I was self-employed from 2005. I started a business with my partner, he died in 2006 so it was just 18 months after we started. So I started that business, built the business up and it was 2016 when I thought it’s too far, it’s not working. I could see obviously there was lots going on in the UK, lots of new introduction legislation and I decided that it would be a good idea just to sell the business then. And I sold the business off to another agent in Sunderland and then took my pension out so I could start over and do something else, while I was here.

I was living in a three-bedroom flat when I started, then I ended up getting inheritance. So I ended up buying a little cottage and I was running my business from one bedroom in the cottage and I was quite enjoying it. Everything was good, I had a relationship and we had holidays abroad, we had two or three holidays every year. Everything felt as if it was really good until I came here.

I didn’t realise that I ended up being isolated. Because when I was more isolated, that was when he had more control of the situation because he knew I was here. He even installed 24/7 security surveillance cameras and he put one in the porch, one overlooking all of the pool area and one that looked to the gate. And it wasn’t until after he left, when I was thinking to myself, I’m like “Hold on a minute, that means he could have watched any time, he could have just logged in to look and review the videos to see what I was doing around the pool, to see what I was doing at the porch.” And I didn’t realise any of that. He said he just wanted to make sure nothing happens, to make sure I was secure. So it wasn’t too long after he’d left that I realised that, so it was really strange.

 

How Lorraine worked her way into the student accommodation industry

Lorraine: I could even tell you the story of how the business started. In 2005, my partner was working for a young student, he was starting off his student rentals business. And all of a sudden, there was signs everywhere about this student rental business.

I was in a network marketing company, at the time, so I had a car with a massive telephone number right across the side. So my partner was using my car, he was going out in this car, with my number splashed across the side of it and then all of a sudden, we started getting phone calls. “We’ve seen this car outside of this place” and then more calls. These were irate landlords who were ringing this the number to say that they wanted to know where this guy was, who had rented their house to students, because they hadn’t gotten any rent.

Anyway, what happened was, my partner is talking to these people on the phone, he’s saying “I don’t know where he is but Lorraine knows all about this, she can help you with that.” And I’m like what’s he talking about? A couple of days later, he’s talking to two landlords, who’ve got five properties between them, and he is telling them how we can manage the properties for them and find them tenants. And I’m like what! I didn’t have any idea of how you would run anything to do with properties but he’s told these people “Lorraine knows all about that” and I’m like I don’t know anything about it.

So I’m going to do lots of research to find out how you do this, what you do there. I mean there was only me and him so when we ended up getting the keys to these five houses, we started the business just like that. I was like well what can I do? How can we do this? We were in the houses cleaning, when the students had disappeared, we were sweeping the floors, he was decorating the rooms, it was chaos.

But we actually did rent the rooms out and we did get them let and I was like how do you do a contract? I didn’t know anything about contracts. And the other bit was, obviously, when I’d gone to the bank, I said I need to open a business account because I’m starting this business and previous to that, I’d had some bad credit. I’d lost a car, I’d been in a situation where I’d lost a job, my network marketing business wasn’t really taking off. And I went to the bank and they said “I’m sorry but you can’t open your business account” so I had a personal account and I thought well I’ll just use that. So I started putting the money in there.

 

About Lorraine:

Lorraine is someone who is in the digital marketing world and also has plenty of experience in the student accommodation industry after starting up her own business with her partner in 2005.

 

About your host:

Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/

Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com

Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk

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