‘Gert Jan doesn’t do anything anymore that he doesn’t feel like’

Marianne: „As busy as I can be, Gert Jan is so calm. For me it is very nice that I have a quiet partner, the moment I jump out of the band or get panicky. It’s okay for him to get a kick in the ass for a while. He also agrees, if it suits him.”

Gert Jan: “Marianne is always right, isn’t it.”

Marianne: “That’s our joke. I am always right, except on Sundays.”

Gert Jan: “I repair cars and build gas systems in cars.”

Marianne: “You are not just… You are the owner of a company.”

Gert Jan: „Cars that normally run on petrol can be run on gas, which is cheaper. I work full time.”

Marianne: “Six days a week, often.”

Gert Jan: “Yes, but less than before. Then I was a little too busy with it. That didn’t go very well.”

Marianne: “He had a heart attack a few years ago, because he just slept at the office.”

Gert Jan: “Well, so that…”

Marianne: “You have been a really big one, with seven employees, from 2006 to 2008.”

Gert Jan: „The crisis came in 2008 and it all went wrong in one go. I was stressed, it gave me a heart attack.”

Marianne: „I have my own massage practice. I have worked in healthcare for fourteen years, with people with intellectual disabilities and severe behavioral disorders. My child’s host parent pulled me into the massage world, a course turned into a sports massage course. Now I have a professional massage room on the first floor of our house. The health care foundation where I worked is one of my biggest clients. There I massage clients and former colleagues two days a week. So we are both entrepreneurs. In that respect Gert Jan has been of great help to me, because he has of course been an entrepreneur for many years. And if it gets later than planned, that’s okay too.”

Gert Jan: „I myself know what it is like to run out of things. I can enjoy myself just fine.”

In brief

Marianne Bins (47) and Gert Jan van Donselaar (53) live together with Marianne’s daughter from a previous marriage, Vera Lynn (14), in a house in Veenendaal.

Marianne has her own massage practice at home, and twice a week she massages clients and employees of a care institution on location. Gert Jan has a garage company, he is specialized in young timers and installation of gas systems in petrol cars.

Together the couple earns about one and a half times the average.

7 month old puppy

Marianne: „We both get up at eight o’clock. Usually I go straight downstairs – we have a seven month old puppy, a large Swiss mountain dog; I’ll go outside with him for a while. During the week I always make a fruit smoothie for us.”

Gert Jan: „I do as little as possible. I am not a morning person. I prefer not to talk to anyone. That is not always possible at work, of course. People are coming to bring the car.”

Marianne: „On Mondays and Fridays Boris goes to the garage. Then it is the working dog, we always say.”

Gert Jan: “That’s going well.”

Marianne: „It lies on its mat and sleeps. I have a 14 year old daughter from a previous marriage. She is in MAVO 2. Sometimes she starts at a quarter to nine, other times at eight. He does his own thing. She lives with us. All the way. Her father lives here a few blocks away. She sees them once in a while. Gert Jan and I have no children together. We’ve only been in a relationship for three years. We said to each other: if we had met twenty years ago, we would certainly have had a family together.”

Gert Jan: „When I came to live here, Vera Lynn was really still a child, now an adolescent child. It was a bit crazy. But now it’s pretty normal.”

Marianne: „They have a really good bond together, the two are crazy about each other. Crawl together on the couch.”

Gert Jan: „Now a little less, now that he is an adolescent. She’ll be fine as long as she listens.”

Marianne: „I work at home, or finish early. It makes sense that I cook. We usually eat around six o’clock. I would prefer to eat later. When I didn’t work that much in the evenings, he came home around six o’clock and we started cooking together. Drinking a beer with the two of you, shuffling the pans. Because I work again at seven in the evening three evenings a week, I can’t make it.”

Gert Jan: “In the evenings I watch TV or go cycling.”

Marianne: “He sits on the exercise bike every night.”

Gert Jan: „I read all kinds of things on the exercise bike. Otherwise it will take so long. At the moment I am in the dog books.”

Marianne: “He reads everything from that dog expert, Cesar Millan.”

In bonus time

Marianne: „Gert Jan just doesn’t do anything anymore that he doesn’t feel like doing. After that heart attack he says: I’m in bonus time. And I’m going to spend that time well. So everything he doesn’t like, he buys off. Earlier I sometimes asked: do you want to vacuum downstairs? But he’s so pissed about it. Then he says: find a cleaner, I’ll pay.”

Gert Jan: „I think it is a waste of my time, vacuuming. I don’t always live so consciously. I am not always busy with the infarction, but I regularly have moments when I think about it.”

Marianne: „He has planned and arranged his life so differently now. You just can’t get Gert Jan crazy. I can stand on my head. In the beginning I thought: fuck off dude, with your money. I want you to do this job with me, to help me physically. Finally I started a conversation with him. Since then, things like that just run between us. I now know that it is not unwillingness. I buy my own bunch of flowers at the market and then I say: I got those from you, isn’t it nice!”

In Rush Hour, couples and singles tell how they combine work and private life. Participate? Mail to [email protected]

How are they doing?

living

Marianne and Gert Jan live in a terraced house in the middle of a residential area, with a garden. The dream is a small farm with a vegetable garden, chickens and a garage for Gert Jan. Marianne: “So that I can shout from the vegetable garden: honey, coffee!”

Transport

Gert Jan and Marianne both have a car. Gert Jan has another ‘hobby car’, a BMW M5 from 2001. It is now in a garage, but Gert Jan wants to use it soon. “If I start that, I’m happy all day.”

Pet

The puppy, Boris, has been in the house for six months. He was found to have a birth defect and had just undergone surgery. Marianne: „Then the three of you whine for two days and you realize how quickly you become attached to such an animal. With a little luck it will be nine years old and it will be a happy egg.”

To bed

Half past eleven, eleven o’clock.

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A version of this article also appeared in

the newspaper of May 28, 2022