Jilly Cooper: How to Stay Married

We did evolve a splendid bill-paying evasion technique. We never paid a thing until we got a solicitor’s letter; then we would send the creditor a cheque, unsigned, so they would spend another week returning it, whereupon it would be returned in successive weeks, with the date left off, the wrong year, or the numbers and letters differing.

Another ruse was to ring up when the final reminder turned up and say in aggrieved tones: ‘But I’ve already paid it’, and they’ll spend at least a month trying to trace it.

With electricity, gas and telephone, you can always write and query the amount, saying you’ve been away for the last month and you can’t think why the bill is so high.

Perhaps the best method is to keep sending the bill back with ‘Not known here’ written across it.

I tried once to keep accounts and in the third week, when I was making great efforts to economise, I saw to my horror that the expenditure had doubled. I went sobbing to my husband, who pointed out quite kindly that I’d added the date in.

Try to pay the rates by the month — and why not investigate a household budget account with your bank manager? It considerably simplifies bill-paying. Another minor money problem is that one always assumes that one’s partner will have some money on him, and he never has, so you find you have to jump off buses because neither of you can pay the fare, or walk home five miles from parties in the middle of the night because you can’t afford a taxi.

Remember that each partner is bound to think the other one is extravagant, and that everyone always thinks he is broke however rich he is. As one friend said the other day: ‘We’re just as poor as when we were first married but on a grander scale.’

SHOPPING

Shop early in the morning when there’s more choice, and mid-week when things are cheaper.

Always make a list, or you’ll have the absurd situation of trailing miles to Soho market in your lunch hour, then buying all the things you’ve forgotten on the way home — at Fortnums.

Don’t let men go near the shops, they’ll blue the week’s housekeeping on salmon and rump steak and come home very smug because they’ve shopped so much more quickly than you would have done.

Take things out of your shopping bag and put them away at once, or you’ll have frozen raspberries melting on to the drawing room carpet, and liver blood permanently on your cheque book.

Despite the maxim: ‘If you can get it on tick it’s free, if you can pay by cheque it’s almost free, but if you have to pay cash, it’s bloody expensive,’ pay cash if you can. Our biggest shopping bill is always drink, because we can chalk it up at the off-licence round the corner.

Be tolerant of each other’s extravagances. Everyone lapses from time to time. One of the nicest things about my husband is that he never grumbles about my buying a new dress unless he thinks it is ugly.

TIDINESS AND UNTIDINESS

If the husband is married to a real slut, who constantly keeps the house in a mess and serves up vile food, he has every right to complain. There’s a happy medium between being a doormat and a bully. Rather than work yourself into a frenzy of resentment, first try to tease your wife out of her sloppiness, and if that doesn’t work, risk a scene by telling her it just isn’t good enough.

A firm hand

Women on the whole quite like a firm hand, and one of the saddest things a wife ever said to me was: ‘It was only on the day he left me that he told me for the first time that I was a lousy cook, I turned the place into a pigsty, I never ironed his shirts, and left mustard under the plates.’

Men like a place they can relax in and if the wife is the tidy one, she shouldn’t nag and fuss her husband the moment he gets home.

‘I can’t stand it any longer,’ said one newly married husband, ‘she’s taken all my books and put them in drawers like my shirts.’

‘Among some of the best marriages,’ my tame psychiatrist told me, ‘are those in which, although the husband and wife started at relatively distant poles of neatness and sloppiness, they moved towards a common middle ground, through love, understanding and willingness to understand each other’s needs.’

CHANGING PEOPLE

YOU SHOULDN’T GO into marriage expecting to change people. Once a bumbler always a bumbler, once a rake always a rake (a gay eye isn’t likely to be doused by marriage). Once a slut — although she may make heroic and semi-successful attempts to improve — always a slut. When we were first married, my husband used to dream of the day I stopped work, like the Three Sisters yearning for Moscow: ‘The house will be tidy, we shall make love every morning, and at last I shall be given breakfast.’

Well, I stopped work, and chaos reigned very much as usual. It’s a case of plus ça change , I’m afraid.

Your only hope is that by making people happier and more secure they may realise the potential inside them and develop into brilliant businessmen, marvellous lovers, superb cooks, or alas, even bores. And remember, the wife who nags her husband on to making a fortune won’t see nearly so much of him. He’ll be in the office from morn until night. She can’t have it both ways.

DIFFERING TASTES

Certain things are bound to grate. He may have a passion for flying ducks and Peter Scott and she may go a bundle on coloured plastic bulrushes and a chiming doorbell.

The wife may also use certain expressions like ‘Pleased to meet you,’ which irritate her husband to death; or he may say ‘What a generous portion’ every time she puts his food in front of him.

Now is the time to strike. If you say you can’t stand something in the first flush of love, your partner probably won’t mind and will do something about it. If, after ten years, you suddenly tell your husband it drives you mad every time he says: ‘Sit ye down’ when guests arrive, he’ll be deeply offended, and ask you why you didn’t complain before.

IRRITATING HABITS

Everyone has some irritating habits — the only thing to do when your partner draws your attention to them is to swallow your pride and be grateful, because they may well have been irritating everyone else as well.

I have given up smoking and eating apples in bed, or cooking in my fur coat, and I try not to drench the butter dish with marmalade. My husband no longer spends a quarter of an hour each morning clearing the frog out of his throat, and if he still picks his nose, he does it behind a newspaper.

There are bound to be areas in your marriage where you are diametrically opposed. Compromise is the only answer. I’m cold blooded, my husband is hot blooded. I sleep with six blankets, he sleeps half out of the bed.

I like arriving late for parties so I can make an entrance, he likes arriving on the dot because he hates missing valuable drinking time. I can’t count the number of quiet cigarettes we’ve had in the car, waiting for a decent time to arrive.

Don’t worry too much that habits which irritate you now will get more and more on your nerves. My tame psychiatrist again told me: ‘Those quirks in one’s marriage partner which annoy one in early days often become in later years the most lovable traits.’

MY HUSBAND AND I quarrel very seldom, we both loathe rows and hate being shouted at. I was very worried when I first married because I read that quarrelling was one of the most common methods of relieving tensions in marriage, and was confronted with the awful possibility that our marriage had no proper tensions.