How to Stay Married (9 page)

ANOTHER GREAT FALLACY
is that marriage stops you falling in love with people. It doesn’t. One of the most happily married men I know says he was riddled with guilt because he developed a violent crush on a blonde staying in the same hotel while he was on honeymoon. If you were the sort of person who was always falling in love before marriage, you’ll probably go on doing it afterwards. Don’t panic – nip it in the bud early. Refuse to see the person concerned. It will tear your guts out for a few weeks, but you’ll find you get over it, just as you got over the crushes you had before you were married.

If you fancy someone, and you know they fancy you, don’t try and rely on mutual self-control. These things if allowed to develop invariably get out of hand and can escalate into nasty things like divorce. The most shortsighted remark ever made at the beginning of an affaire is: ‘You’re happily married and I’m happily married, and if we have an affaire, we’re both adult enough not to let it get out of hand or anyone get hurt.’ This is rubbish. Someone always gets hurt, and it’ll probably be you. And remember, once your husband or wife finds out you are having an affaire with someone else it will cause them appalling unhappiness,
and
your marriage will never be the ‘glad confident morning’ it was.

MUTUAL INFIDELITY

‘Husbands are such a bore,’ said a friend of mine. ‘They always want to know who you’re dating.’ Some couples manage to go their own way, making a pledge of mutual infidelity, but I cannot help feeling that one of the partners must be enjoying it more than the other.

If you must have affaires, be discreet. The cardinal sin is to be found out. And when it’s all over and you’re feeling a louse and you want to clear your conscience, don’t indulge in tearful confessions to your husband and feel you’ve cleaned the slate. It will upset him quite unnecessarily.

DISCOVERY

If you do discover your husband is having an affaire with someone, and he doesn’t know you know, play it cool. It may blow over. Remember, ‘the robb’d that smiles steals something from the thief.’

If you find out, and your partner knows you know, the only solution is to raise hell, and insist that it stops immediately. Once you start condoning something like this, you’re lost. Usually the jolt of your finding out and minding so much is enough to make him give up the other person, in which case welcome him home like the prodigal son, and
never never
reproach him again.

People often have affaires as a bid for more attention from their partners and purposely leave clues so that their partners will find out and be jolted into loving them more. So if you discover your husband is having an affaire with someone, have a look at your own behaviour before you blame him to see if it’s you who’s at fault.

A FEW PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

If your wife seems like a bolter, put her on the same passport, then you won’t waste a fortune in air tickets getting her back.

If you suspect your partner is having an affaire with a particular person, go into howls of immoderate laughter every time that person’s name is mentioned. When they ask why you’re laughing, laugh some more and say no one takes that idiot seriously. Nothing douses passion quicker than ridicule. I really fancied a man once, until someone pointed out he looked like Dracula.

DETECTION

There are a number of indications that your partner is having an affaire with someone:

If your husband insists he’s been lunching at the local with the boys, and comes home reeking of garlic, gets out a packet of matches with the Mirabelle printed on it, and lights a king-size cigarette when he normally smokes Woodbines.

If he starts a pointless row at breakfast, so he can storm out of the house, and needn’t come back until late.

If he suddenly starts working late consistently and comes home smelling of scent.

If he looks happy on a Monday morning, and miserable on a Friday night.

If he suddenly starts having a bath in the morning.

If the distance between the ends of his tie is different in the morning from the evening.

If he keeps making ridiculous excuses to buy more cigarettes during the weekend when there are plenty of packets in the house.

If there’s a spate of wrong numbers, it may not be burglars …

If your wife after always dressing scruffily for the office suddenly starts smartening herself up, shaving her legs, buying new underwear, and getting home late.

If she doesn’t look dismayed when you say you’re going to America for three weeks.

If she is home all day and the loo seat is up when you get home.

If she suddenly gets sexually revved up. Women are like machines, the more they’re used the better they work.

If she starts suggesting you make love to her standing on your head, she may have been reading the
Kama Sutra
.

If she starts leaving intellectual books by the bed, or tidying the house frantically in the morning …

If you have a man friend to stay, and he knows where to put things away when he’s doing the drying up.

If you’re both out to work and you come home and find the towels all tidy in the bathroom instead of scrumpled up as usual. Or if the cat isn’t hungry …

EVERYONE CAN MAKE
a mistake, and there’s no point in a couple sticking together if they’re utterly miserable, even for the sake of the children, who would be much happier with one contented parent than two continually at war. Do try and distinguish, however, between a temporary bad patch, which all marriages go through, and a permanent rift. Divorce is very unpleasant and very expensive. A great deal of mud-slinging and bitterness will inevitably occur, and there’s the nasty business of dividing friends and property.

So before you run off, whether it’s with someone or not, make absolutely sure you want to go. Your partner may or may not take you back afterwards, and the longer you stay away the more difficult it will be to start again.

Another thing to remember is that it’s very cold outside the matrimonial cage. One beautiful woman I know recently left her husband because she was bored and unhappy. She was back within six months.

When she was safely married, she had a wonderful time, having numerous affaires, being hotly pursued by hordes of men (for nothing is more attractive to a man than a bored, beautiful but safely married woman – all fun and no fear). Once she had left her husband the men who had been swarming round her weren’t nearly so anxious to declare themselves, and she soon found it was back to single girl status with all the nagging worries of who was going to take her out the next night.

Sometimes an affaire can ventilate a marriage and make a couple appreciate each other more:

Another friend of mine became so infatuated with her lover that she left her husband. Next morning
she
and her lover went along to the lover’s solicitor, who asked her if there was anything detrimental they could use against her husband in the divorce. Was he cruel? Did he neglect her? Did he have affaires with other women or beat her up?

She thought for a minute and then burst into tears, saying she couldn’t think of anything wrong with him. She rushed out of the solicitor’s office and went back to her husband, whom to her amazement she found absolutely devastated by her departure. They have been happily married ever since.

‘
HAS TOM FERTILISED
Wendy yet?’ asked one of the small bridesmaids gazing at the bridal couple at a recent wedding.

Premature certainly, but it’s amazing how many brides have to carry extra large bouquets these days.

A girl I know who was married when she was eight months pregnant was given a year’s subscription to the Nappy Service by her office as a wedding present. Although there will be a few raised eyebrows if a baby turns up before nine months have elapsed, particularly if it is a spanking ten pounder and cannot
be
fobbed off as premature, the fact remains that the moment you get back from your honeymoon, people will start expecting you to get pregnant.

Every time the wife looks tired, has a bilious attack or leaves a party early, people will start exchanging knowing looks.

If after two years nothing happens, the pressure will really be on. Hints are dropped about ‘getting set in your ways’, or ‘too used to living on two incomes’. People will keep suggesting you move to the country and send you estate agents’ lists of bijou residences with large gardens. Dire warnings will be given about the difficulty of having babies after the age of twenty-five.

After three years, you will be offered names of ‘perfectly marvellous gynaecologists’, and friends will say the wife is overtiring herself and ought to give up work. People will take her aside and say: ‘Don’t you think Henry ought to see a doctor as well, darling?’

Parents-in-law will display angst about not having any grandchildren to talk about at bridge parties.

They should all realise that it’s none of their business. Anyone who starts interfering on this subject deserves a flea in their ear.

If couples don’t have children, it’s either because they don’t want to yet, or because they’re trying and they can’t. Not being able to have children, whether it’s temporary or permanent, is extremely distressing. (There is something tragic and yet ridiculous about those abortive threshings night after night.) Outsiders should not contribute to this distress by asking stupid questions.

I couldn’t have children and, after seven traumatic years of trailing from doctor to doctor, we finally in extreme trepidation adopted one. It has been an un-qualified success. Within twenty-four hours of the
child’s
arrival we were infatuated with him, and couldn’t imagine life without him.

Everyone told us we were too set in our ways. You lead such a full life, they said. Too full? Too empty? Too full perhaps of empty things. Children are not nearly so much work as alarmist mothers crack them up to be, and they are more fun than one could believe possible.

One of the great revelations of my life was how immeasurably much better life was when one was married than unmarried. Another was how much better marriage is when one has children.

I AM FULLY
aware of the inadequacies of this book. Some aspects of marriage are covered very scantily and some not at all, and because I was writing about staying married, I have dwelt more on the pitfalls than on the very considerable joys of marriage.

‘For everyone, and particularly for women and children,’ Cecil King wrote recently, ‘the essential basis for security and happiness is a loving home.’ Marriage is not a battlefield, it is a partnership, and married people should be partners not rivals. And although it is important to be a reliable wage earner, a splendid cook, a good manager, and magnificent in bed, the most priceless gift one married person can give to another is a merry and a loving heart.

Jilly Cooper
, OBE, is a journalist, writer and superstar. She lives in Gloucestershire with her husband Leo, her rescue greyhounds Feather and Bluebell, and her black cat Feral.