MARY: My mother always told me to count to ten before flying off the handle. But it’s not possible to use this tactic with Giles. Family members and friends know that he actually wants us to fly off the handle following his provocations. We can tell this is so because dimples are the sign that he is happy and they appear in his cheeks as he sees someone ranting in reaction to a bespoke comment which would enrage only that person. And so to the outside observer that person will look hysterical and bad by favourable contrast to gentle Giles with his dimples.
Why does he want to be so annoying? He claims he is suffering from ‘classic Middle Child Syndrome’. And that the only way he could get his parents’ attention during his childhood was by annoying them.
The other day I found a suitcase of my old diaries in the attic. Inside were thousands of words written in bitterness about Giles’s appalling behaviour, and not just the bespoke provocations. From the perspective of twenty years on, they just made me laugh and wonder why on earth I had got so cross at the time.
The treasure trove reminded me of how therapeutic it can be to write things down – a diary is a poor man’s psychotherapist. Instead of speaking to the therapist at £100 an hour, and them saying nothing, you pour it all out into your diary and reach the same conclusions without paying.
GILES: Since appearing on Gogglebox and suddenly having time to talk to each other, we had begun to remember what we originally liked about each other, and to see how dialogue is the best way to arrive at a peace settlement. With the thirtieth anniversary of our marriage approaching, it was time to expand on this dialogue by beginning another journal, this time with myself as co-author, to take things a step forward by analysing, not just for ourselves, but for the public consumption of the small audience who seem interested in us, anecdotal accounts of the various hurdles life and marriage throws up at a couple in a bid to try to see what, in the dread words of the politicians, lessons can be learned.
In this we are, of course, invading our own privacy but, if it helps other couples to save their own marriages it will be worth it.
MARY: In the meantime, I have recently started, in tandem with my own work diary, which just details appointments, an equivalent rest diary for Giles to prove to him once and for all that he is suffering from a sort of Work Dysmorphia. While he genuinely believes he is working very hard every day on writing and painting and house maintenance, I hope to prove that in fact he is gardening for up to sixty hours a week.
GILES: Gogglebox has definitely saved Mary and my marriage. It’s a wonderful thing to have a perspective on how you are viewed by other people, i.e. the public, who have seen us on telly, and who, according to the Twittersphere – which neither of us follows but my sister kindly sends me a digest from each week: six positive tweets and one negative (for balance) – keep repeating the phrase ‘relationship goals’. I don’t know what it means but it seems to be positive. Viewers seem to think it a plus that we are able to finish each other’s sentences, for one thing.
Working together by watching telly at the same time, meant that we suddenly no longer lived like two intimate strangers who passed in the night – Mary working from 6 am till 8 pm, then falling asleep slightly drunk at 9 pm; me gardening from 1 pm till 3.30, when I have lunch, and then going to bed at two in the morning after watching vintage horror films like Basket Case, Carrie or The Wicker Man. These habits meant we had precisely one hour in each other’s company per day from 8 to 9 pm, at a time when Mary was shattered after a full day’s work and I was at my peak of alertness.
It took public interest in our marriage to make us think about it objectively. Are we actually happy? So I have agreed to keep a diary – or at least notes and observations of the marriage – as a way of acting as our own management consultants to see what negative patterns recur which could be corrected. Patterns such as Mary gallivanting in London, while I keep the show on the road at home.
The problem with most thirty-year-old marriages is drift. We are told that opposites attract but sometimes our marriage feels like Brexit and Remain. Continental drift is the tendency of tectonic plates to move away from each other. As people grow old they change and their interests diverge, although Mary claims that while she moves with the times I have been ‘stranded in the Seventies’ and so effectively we are living in parallel universes.
The signs of incompatibility were always there. Mary, upwardly mobile and socially incontinent, while I am downwardly mobile and want to buy a static caravan to reduce costs and restrict my social life to other like-minded worthy folk interested in the pro-active conservation of moths and butterflies and in archaeology. I want to mix with people who can advance my knowledge rather than my social status.
When I first met Mary, we hung out with the Eighties version of the Made in Chelsea set, playing court jesters to people who were superior in social rank to ourselves. These were the sort of people who appeared in the Bystander pages of Tatler (where Mary had got her first job in journalism). What eventually put me off this set was someone showing me a video of one of the weddings we went to at the time. Although I enjoyed seeing a younger version of myself, I noted I was following Mary obediently around, dressed as a penguin and looking utterly bored and dejected. It was like when you catch a glimpse of yourself in a shop window and you think, ‘who on earth is that?’
While Mary’s idea of happiness is the sort of conversations which emerge through being a member of a house party of twenty for a week or so, some of the best conversations I’ve had in the last thirty years have been with a Peugeot mechanic who operates from an agricultural building in a field in Gloucestershire. I found I could easily spend two hours with him putting the world to rights, both of us leaning into the Peugeot estate’s bonnet, without any progress on the alternator having been made.
MARY: How come we’re still married after thirty years? I believe there’s a reason why our generation has more stamina to withstand marital irritation in the short term and wait for the good times to roll around again. We were born and grew up and had already developed our telly-watching habits over decades before the widespread advent of videotapes and DVDs (circa 1985). Tolerance, patience, respectful attention, on the grounds that we will probably see the point if we continue concentrating…those were the values inculcated into us in the days when there was no alternative to ‘sitting out’ a programme.
As on telly, so in life. Our generation is accustomed to just keeping going through the boring or difficult times while those who’ve come after us have been programmed, not to ‘give it a chance’ but instead to fast forward or eject. PROOF: everyone who saw it first time around agrees that the film Doctor Zhivago is a masterpiece, yet try showing it to anyone under thirty. They simply don’t have the mental stamina to keep watching.
The theory that riding out the bad times and not expecting perma-pleasure will pay off in the long term is borne out by Roger Bamber, partner at the 900-lawyer strong Mills & Reeve. When clients walk in looking to file for divorce, the first thing Bamber does is to try to persuade them not to. Says Bamber, ‘Six years down the line, a large percentage of our clients regret their divorce.’
Yet divorce has become something of an epidemic and to me the link with fast forward and eject is obvious. Sticking out the nuisance has much more going for it in the long run.
GILES: I like the idea that, by not divorcing, we are bucking a trend. Moreover, I always say that far too high a premium in our society is based on achieving personal happiness.