My wife recently bestowed me with the honorifics of “not completely useless” and “tolerable”. There was no irony or playful affection. It was factual cold and logical analysis. On the receiving end I accepted with pride and satisfaction. There is no intent to cause offence or gain the upper hand in such domestic exchanges. She was just delivering the latest judgement on a relationship that has lasted 41 years, including 34 years of marriage and 36 years sharing the same address.
Nearly three decades ago, a similarly realistic assessment was delivered on the way to Sainsbury’s with our two infant children in the car. I can’t remember the provocation, but she told me categorically, “I am a [blanking] Saint I am. Nobody else would have married you”. I pondered this and replied honestly, as is our rule. “No. I think somebody else would have married me but nobody else would have put up with me”. We both pondered that, including running through a long list of contemporaries to check if we knew of any other female, who might have had the “tolerance”, and drew a blank. In the thirty years or so since, there has been no cause to amend our position.
I am now 67 and she is 64, according to the stats about 50% of our peers and relatives should have divorced or separated at least once by now. Our social and family networks are way out. It’s far fewer. Of my twelve close university friends who meet every year for a reunion, eleven got married and only one has divorced. Way below target. How do I explain this? What does it mean? What help can we bring to others who would like to avoid the cost and trauma? I can’t speak for all those people, but I can speak for myself.
You must set your expectations and standards very low. For a start, Jane Austen is no help. Worse than that, she spreads notions that are totally, utterly, categorically, permanently, unrealistically, verbosely impossible. Our view is that once safely through the rapids of early infatuation, a successful long-term relationship floats along on a calm slow flowing stream interrupted here and there with inevitable waterfalls and dried-up riverbeds that you must find a way through. Looking forwards to long periods of routine monotony and short periods of excitement as you try to avoid wrecking the boat is a truth Mr Darcy could far more usefully acknowledge.
Note: we conduct this kind of analysis on long car journeys, often on the way back from gatherings where we encounter peers of some description who we are inclined to compare ourselves against in order to get a fix on how well we are doing, relatively speaking. I can’t think of an occasion where we ever felt worse off. Considered in the round of all the experiences of the last forty plus years, we feel fate has smiled to bless us with such a fortunate position. The markers for “relatively speaking” being our children, how we live, our achievements and failures and now at retirement age, our savings, and pensions. All in all, with most of life now safely banked, and far less of it to come, if it all ended now, we couldn’t complain. This is an English way of saying it has been as good as anyone could reasonably ask for. And, that’s as much leaning towards Austen as I can stand.
Looking back from here, the good times aren’t worth referring to. Anyone can deal with good times. It’s hard times that supply the test. Like most people from normal backgrounds, we started out with nothing. To build a life like the successful young couples we saw looking out at us from the John Lewis adverts in the Sunday colour supplements, everything had to be earned with our own labour. Mummy and Daddy or dying relatives didn’t send bungs. And, to earn big bucks without the advantage of introductions from inside the circle of wealth, we had to follow high risk careers, where pay is linked to performance. That meant a lifetime in sales, marketing, running your own business and taking on high risk projects. A world in which the clock resets to zero and you must chase the target again every year. Every year for forty plus years? That sounds impossible, and it is. Of course, there are years, sometimes running consecutively, when it all goes wrong, and you fall backwards and wonder whether you will stand up again. And in those years normal life ploughs on; children need shoes, mouths need food, mortgages must be paid, relatives and friends become ill or need help, cars need to be repaired, school fees roll in, countries go to war, stock markets collapse, inflation roars, it rains every day of your camping holiday, etc etc etc, and through all this the person closest to you, who is the easiest to complain to or blame or make demands on, is your life partner. It’s no wonder the divorce rate is so high. (You can’t divorce anyone else can you?). Operating under stress, a few badly judged words or actions have catastrophic consequences. A strain becomes a rupture and war breaks out.
Our method for managing this is to accept that our better (or worse) half is going to be monumentally useless and less than tolerable at times, in fact a lot of the time. Accept it. Don’t confront it. Don’t try and change it. Roll with it. Walk around it. They will do things, buy things, sign you up for things that you utterly detest. Forget it. Don’t let it eat you. Remember, you (that means me) are equally in fact probably much worse. When facing frustration just take one step and one day at a time because that is the way to walk a million miles. Don’t think. Just do. Thrust your front foot forwards (or backwards) and the other will follow. Take another stride. Don’t nurture and nourish a grudge. Or if you do, bury it deep so it doesn’t show. Given time all these crises run out of steam. New ones emerge just enjoy the calm when you can. Don’t look back, don’t look forward, enjoy or endure today. I know that’s hard, but the more you do it, the more you sort of .. accept it. Right now, we are approaching the end of two years that have been immensely difficult because we completely disagree about constructing a garage which somehow transformed into a clothing factory and office next to the house. The few attempts to discuss or reconcile our positions on what it should actually be have resulted in very frosty conclusions with a definite winner and loser. I choose to lose. I celebrate defeat. The right course for a successful marriage is to be wrong in every way. For me to hold the line at “not completely useless” and “tolerable” with an albatross the size of a gas planet circling and swooping is not miraculous, it is the just reward for learning how to be wrong. As the garage is now built
and tension has subsided, are we going to enjoy a mellow autumn of retirement holding hands walking along the beach into stunning sunsets? I sincerely blanking hope not. If you spent your whole married life dodging the slings and arrows of fate, rolling the dice and running sixty seconds of distance run, you don’t want to fizzle out looking soppy like that. We will arm wrestle the whole way through and be very satisfied and even – happy – to do so.
