Having never mastered the metric system, I am utterly defeated by grams in cookery. Last week, as his red pair of cords plummeted to the floor, Leo announced he’d lost ten kilometres in weight.
Invitations and letters disappear in chucked-away newspapers, so people roll up unexpectedly for drinks or even dinner.
‘You never told me they were coming.’
‘I did, I did, but you never listen.’
But though domestic chaos is come again, I still believe that a happy marriage is the best thing life has to offer, cemented as much by the moments of irritation as of tenderness.
‘For everyone, particularly children,’ claimed Cecil King in 1969, ‘the essential basis for security and happiness is a loving home.’
To counteract this, hideous recently released statistics reveal that 50 per cent of children today can expect their parents to split up by the time they are sixteen. More tellingly, a vast 80 per cent of these splits happen to unmarried couples. Marriage, for all its limitations, makes people try harder.
Children above all long for their parents to stay together. When a teacher asked one little girl to define love, she wistfully replied: ‘Daddy and Mummy getting married.’
So I hope, despite some arrogance and smugness, that by charting the very real joys as well as the pitfalls — and panic stations — of our early years together, I may reassure and encourage more couples: married, unmarried, gay and straight, to stay together more happily.
God speed and good luck.
Jilly Cooper 2011
Introduction
IT IS EXTREMELY easy to get married — it costs ?4.5s. and takes two days to get a licence. It is much harder to stay married.
My only qualifications for writing a book on the subject are that I have had the example of parents who have lived in harmony for nearly forty years, and I myself am still married extremely happily after eight years. In eight years, of course, we’ve had marvellous patches and patches so bad that they rocked our marriage to its foundations, but I’ve come to realise that if you can cling on like a barnacle during the bad patches, your marriage will survive and in all probability be strengthened.
Anyone else’s marriage is a dark unexplored continent, and although I have observed far too many of my friends going swiftly in and out of wedlock, I can only guess at what it was that broke the marriage up, Since the word got around that I was writing this book, my task has been made doubly difficult by the fact that married couples either sidled away or started behaving ostentatiously well, whenever I came into the room.
One of the great comforts of my own marriage, however, has been that my husband was married before, knew the ropes, and during any really black period, when I was all for opting out and packing my bags, would reassure me that such black periods were to be expected in marriage, and it had been far worse for him the first time round.
Similarly I hope that by pointing out some of the disasters and problems that beset us and how we weathered them, it may reassure other people either married or contemplating marriage.
Here comes the bride
THE WEDDING
THIS IS BLAST off — the day you (or rather your mother) have been waiting for all your life. It’ll pass in a dream and afterwards you won’t remember a thing about it. It helps, however, if you both turn up. Dope yourself with tranquillisers by all means, but watch the champagne later: drugs mixed with drink often put you out like a light. And don’t forget to take the price tags off your new shoes, they’ll show when you kneel down in church.
Coming down the aisle’s more tricky — you never know where to look, that radiant smile can easily set into a rictus grin, and there’s bound to be one guest you know too well, whose eye you want to avoid (like Tallulah Bankhead’s remark about one couple coming down the aisle: ‘I’ve had them both and they were lousy!’).
If you look solemn, people will think you’re having second thoughts. Best policy is to settle for a cool smirk with your eyes on the door of the church.
Be careful what hymns you choose. People like a good bellow at a wedding, so don’t choose anything obscure. Equally, be careful of hymns with double meanings like ‘Jesu — the very thought of thee’, which will make everyone giggle and spoil the dignity and repose of the occasion.
THE RECEPTION
First there’s the line-up, and you’ll get so tired of shaking hands, trying to remember faces and gushing like an oil well, you’ll begin to have a real sympathy with the Royal Family.
Don’t worry when you circulate among the guests afterwards if none of them will speak to you. They’ll all feel you’re far too important to waste time talking to them, and you’ll wander round like a couple of wraiths.
If you must make speeches, keep them short. Thank everyone in sight, and tell one stunning joke to convince your in-laws you do have a sense of humour after all. Never let the best man either speak or read the telegrams, unless he’s very funny.
Don’t flirt with exes. One girl I know, whose husband spent the reception playing ‘do you remember’ with an old girlfriend, refused to go on the honeymoon.
Try not to get drunk — you may feel like it — but it will cause recriminations later.
The honeymoon
ORIGINALLY, THE HONEYMOON was intended for husbands to initiate their innocent young brides into the delights and mysteries of sex. Today, when most couples have slept together anyway and are already bankrupted by the cost of setting up a house, the whole thing seems a bit of a farce and a needless expense. You probably both need a holiday, however.
