Jilly Cooper: How to Stay Married

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 …

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.

An extra large bouquet

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.