Long after the wedding fervour has died down, what makes a marriage work?
STACKS of data exist on what makes for marriage breakdown, but, what makes us have and to hold until death do us part is much more mysterious. Starting with the wedding, marriage has got to be one of life’s more bitter-sweet experiences; what starts with a fierce raging romantic passion rarely, if ever, survives the grinding ordinariness of living year after year, decade after decade with the same person.
How then do most couples cope with the slow but steady shedding of passion? How does one accept the reality of a mature relationship?
George Georgiou, 42, is married with two young children. He has a mature outlook on marriage, believing that it’s important to realise that, like the moon, a relationship with a partner will also regularly wax and wane. “Marriage,” he said, “does do one thing – it allows us to have each other so that when we do fall out of love, we can hopefully stick around without reaching for the bread knife until the time comes around again when we fall back in love, because, like everything else in this life, relationships are cyclical. I have a genuine enduring love for my wife, okay, its no longer the big brash lusty type of love we once had, but it’s matured into something we feel comfortable with. We have adjusted to each other and with adjustments come all sorts of bonuses like talking about and trying to fulfil together one’s personal aims and ambitions.”
Faced with the discovery of hundreds of love letters written by her then fiancé, Janice tried to explain to me how she felt upon reading these epistles of love thirty years on. “I honestly thought these letters were long gone, destroyed or lost in various house moves, but they had been lying all the time in two dress boxes in my sister’s attic for over three decades. Reading them again after all this time I was struck by how utterly different I was at 23, at least, as the person perceived by my soon to be husband.”
Janice went on to marry David but divorced at 39. Did reading the love letters now make her regret the split? “Of course the letters are wonderful, full of love, hope and plans for the future. I suspect if I had them with me, when married I would have taken comfort from them. They would have been a solid reminder of the nice loving man I married, but, in reality I would have had to question if there was really that much of the lovely, caring, romantic nice man left after we had been married for sixteen years, and importantly would he have recognised himself in the letters? Mine was a long lost grand passion; the fact that it became spent so soon, is something no-one ever warns you about.”
Barbara and Dennis recently celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, both were quite happy even keen to openly discuss their relationship to the point of telling me that “yes we do still have sex but not on a regular basis, perhaps only once a week.” Dennis went on to confide further his feelings for his wife. “Time itself binds people together. I love Barbara now more because I know her so well. When we were first married we were literally strangers, sex was the main motivation for everything, then, that side slowed down a bit and we moved on to getting to know each other as people and, to be honest she is, and always will be, the other pea in my pod. I couldn’t see a life without her by my side. My tip for a long and happy marriage is to keep saying regularly ‘You’re absolutely right my dear’. Never go to sleep angry with each other – that’s the biggest killer, try to stay out of her way for at least two or three days a week so she can have some space to do what she wants to do, like have her girlfriends round for lunch or to be able to freely go off on day trips with her chums.”
Elise has been married for twenty nine years and believes that after decades of being with the same man, women do become resentful of having to do it all and she feels that most of the men she has met who are in long-term marriages seem overburdened and regarded as a bit useless within their long term partnership. “Men,” Elise believes “got married to have sex and be looked after and it didn’t happen. Women got married to be fulfilled and it didn’t work out like that.” So, what are these couples living with now? “They live with the fear of the three Ds: divorce, desertion, and death. Older folk just can’t afford to divorce – the prospect of swapping the nice big house and garden for a couple of maisonettes is a grim image that has kept many a couple here ‘safe as houses’ in their long-term marriage.”
So, what is an ideal marriage in action? According to Margaret, a retired counsellor for Relate the UK-based marriage guidance organisation, it is an exercise of imagination. “I would always tell couples they would have to deal with an exhausting daily grind of give and take, nag and evade, attack and retreat – that’s basically an ideal marriage in action”.
A lot of people I talked to admitted out of earshot of their spouse that if they had the financial means they would rather be on their own, living a life that suited them rather than sharing one that didn’t. Others felt that given the number of obstacles in one’s path, keeping together and at the same time being relatively happy as a couple had a lot to do with the length of the relationship. The deeper the foundation of family life, the greater the impact that an emotional earthquake like divorce makes on family and friends.
It’s this knowledge that makes couples stay together, along with the basic fact of life that if you want to grow old together, the real skill to be learnt is how to manage togetherness so that it also allows for a sense of separateness.
