9:00 A.M.
LYING ON THE BED, CHEERFULLY POSTCOITAL, I WATCH PETE LEAVE. I remember once reading about a man in his nineties with heart problems, who was admitted to hospital to be monitored on an ECG. When his wife of sixty years came to visit, the ECG went haywire: his heart still skipped a beat when she walked into the room.
I am lucky, because I think: I am that old man. Whenever I hear Pete’s key in the door, my heart still skips a beat. And I know he feels the same. Customarily, I make silly noises when I hear him return, “Argh! Grargh! Waah! Gnuuuu!”
He will reply, “Fnrrrrr. Brrrr. Haaaaa. Lurrrrrr.”
These noises mean: I would still choose you. I don’t even need words anymore. I am glad home is you.
A GREAT DEAL of mad balls is written about love—and, more specifically, how to recognize it, when it arrives. Depending on what we’re reading, we are told things about astrological compatibility, and birth order, and physical types, and shared values, and cultural sympathies. Love is often presented as something that can be recognized if you remorselessly grill your prospective partners with some kind of gigantic tick-list, which you need to hit a 70 percent like-for-like on (“I loved the second series of Saved by the Bell, too!”) before you can safely say whether you really love someone or not.
Well, it’s all balls. Now safely in my wise middle age, I can tell you the three vital—and, indeed, only—things about knowing you’ve found “The One.”
If, when you get near them, you find yourself huffing up great lungfuls of them—really snorting them down like it’s Friday, and they’re a nitrous oxide balloon, and you intend to do this all night long—then this will be the person you marry, whether they’re an Aries with brown eyes or not. Do you find yourself sniffing the top of your partner’s head so hard their hair actually moves? Do you frequently wedge your nose in their armpit and inhale them whilst going, “ARGH! SO GOOD!”? Have you sampled their body so thoroughly you could actually tell, in a blind smelling test, the difference between their tit sweat (oddly fresh) and their back sweat (more complex and earthy), but eventually concluded that “It’s all good, man?” Does their body smell like a super-awesome combination of life, puppies, rain, hot cross buns, and “the good times”? Then congratulations—you’ve just found your true love. Pat your partner-selecting nose like it’s a clever, faithful old horse, and enjoy the next decades of joy.
There is science behind this—a combination of hormones, pheromones, and DNA can sense which partner would be optimal for you to reproduce with—but I prefer to believe that the nose is simply a solid-gold wizard, which knows magic when it finds it.
And as for your waking time together—a good half of that will be spent sitting next to each other on the sofa, in silence, or in a car in a traffic jam on the road to Birmingham in the rain, eating M&S garlic and chili prawns from the container and listening to Now That’s What I Call Music! 42. Although you will want some sparky bants and intellectual to-ing and fro-ing, the baseline for a long-term relationship should be making silly sounds at each other, for hours, in a meaningless fashion.
This is the primary effect of The Good Smell: It gets you superstoned. You’re smoking this big darling like a massive doobie. As a consequence, you are sillier with them than with anyone else. When you guys are together, you really twat about. Silly voices, terrible puns. Laughing hysterically at your own jokes. Being able to find mending an overflowing toilet together amusing.
If you’re the hard-assed CEO of a multinational corporation, and you know for a fact every single one of your employees would lose all respect for you if they saw what you’re like when you’re arse-ing around with this dude, then, again: congratulations. This one’s a keeper.
“If you leave me, or make me leave you, that’s what the rest of your life will be: eating a ready-made meat pie-for-one,” she told her husband.
He treated her like a goddess.
True love always remains, at its core, sexily deferential.
SO THAT’S LOVE. That’s the choosing someone lovely who you fancy bit. That’s the bit we all talk about. Turns out, thanks to your nose, and the word “thanks,” that’s actually the easy bit. The hard bit is: everyfuckingthing else that comes after. Spending the rest of your life together, as a couple. Because how do you do it? What does “the rest of your life” look like? What’s that schedule like? What’s the template?
Unfortunately, as far as society is concerned, we have very little to go on. Humans are the only species to invent storytelling, and we came up with this in order to relay the most important information to each other, down the generations. But if you think of all our current stories, myths, and archetypes, most of them are about people finding love. They are about people in the prelove state.
HERE’S THE THING about the institution of marriage. Before you get married, you can have revelations about yourself, form gangs, go on quests, save the world. You can jump off things, and scream, and be made over, and give speeches, and cry in the rain, and punch people or dragons, and press buttons in the nick of time, and learn, learn, learn. You are the exploding center of all things.
And then, at very end of the story—when you have completed all your growing and learning—you get the biggest reward of all: You are deemed complete enough to win the heart of the hottie and settle down. There will be a wedding scene! And that—that is the ending. Your story is considered told, now. You are done. You will now step through the door of your house and cease all adventure. You will not go anywhere, form any gangs, or save the world, now you are married.
Indeed, it would be weird if you even thought about those things—for you are presumed to have everything you need, inside that partnership. Like you built up a layer of emotional fat while you were single, and now you can just live off that, until you die.
You have become replete—and also silent, now. Once the door has closed on the marital house, no reports can emanate from it. If the marriage is good, then the marriage must also be silent. That is one of the rules. You do not gossip, you do not share. A good marriage is mysterious to everyone else around it. What happens in there? Who are those people who walked into it on their wedding day, and then pulled up the drawbridge? If a marriage is successful, you walk in there in your teens, twenties, or thirties, and then only come out again in a coffin—the partner who outlived you standing there, waving goodbye.
And whatever the mutual business of the marriage was, over those years—the parenting, the caring for elderly relatives, the siblings having breakdowns, the friends divorcing, the politics that buffet it, the legislation that changed it—that, too, is seen as private.
For we don’t write novels about long and happy marriages. We don’t have big blockbuster stories on how to raise children. We don’t show the endless, everyday business of domestica. We don’t show the house that becomes a refuge for relatives who are breaking, broken, or unwell. We don’t show how thirty turns into forty, turns into fifty; we don’t show towns as thousands of houses with thousands of silent marriages in them. We don’t show equal partners running a collaborative effort. We don’t show the adventure of keeping love alive until we die. We have no template for that.
It is left, instead, to every household, on its own, to work out how that might happen: no useful role-model shortcuts; no helpful archetypes; not a single example of how you are supposed to make this work, in the twenty-first century, on a day-to-day basis.
When two people love each other very much—that’s invisible. The world likes to pretend everything that happens in your world is your business, your problem, and to be kept quiet and solved by you and you alone. It is up to you to decide what your marriage is. Society ends on your doorstep. Marriage is a private enterprise. It’s just you two, alone. That’s the bad news.
But that’s also the good news! Because it basically means you and the person you love get to invent what marriage is.
Here, then, are some scenarios you might recognize from your marriage, which you will not have seen in any story, and, therefore, have to improvise your way through on an ad hoc basis.
“WHO IS THE MOST BUSY?”
The majority of modern marriages contain two working parents. This is such a recent invention—just one or two generations old—that literally no one has yet had time to come up with any solutions for how to make it work. And the reason they’ve not had any time to come up with any solutions is they were too busy working! If you are in a marriage with two working parents, then, congratulations! You’re part of a societal experiment with no precedents! Hurrah!
Casual anecdote suggests that the most common way to deal with this situation is a game called “Who Is the Most Busy?”
To play “Who Is the Most Busy?” properly, one must begin from the moment one wakes up. Within the first moments of mutual consciousness, one begins a version of “Scissors, Paper, Stone”—asking, “How did you sleep?” a question which you then must answer at the same time as your partner. No pause is allowed—both must reply in synchronization, thus:
“How did you sleep? I didn’t get off until midnight—”
“I was still emailing at 1 a.m.”
However, like “Scissors, Paper, Stone,” it’s a best of three game: the 1 a.m. emailer has won the first round, but the second round is “Sleep Quality Evaluation”: one offering, “I had a terrible anxiety dream about this report,” as the other counters with “I had perimenopausal night sweats. My side of the bed looks like I’ve wet myself.”
The decider is the description of how one feels at that moment: “My eyes feel like bags of grit,” “I’m so tired, thinking feels like punching treacle into a sock.”
Exhaustion Pecking Order now established, there’s a brief side game of “Who Has the Least Time for Self-Maintenance?” whilst dressing—“Christ. Look at my arse. I haven’t had time for a run for three weeks” vs. “Argh! Look at my roots. I haven’t seen a hairdresser since July”—before breakfast is used to tackle The Schedule.
The purchasing of birthday presents; a child’s braces-tightening appointment; the installation of a burglar alarm; an upcoming school concert; the car registration; the mending of a phone; the collection of a prescription; a hospital appointment; picking up a child’s friend from school. These are listed out loud, and you and your partner take turns to divvy them out, according to ability.
The problems begin if there is imbalance in the divvying—if the divvy load weighs too heavily on one side. In this instance, the person who feels most overburdened can often opt to manifest this feeling visually by—as they recite what they will be doing today—loading or unloading the dishwasher in a noisy and overburdened manner, whilst sighing heavily.
However, caution must be exercised with this tactic, for if it is done in too self-sacrificing a manner, the unburdened partner might, correctly, identify what is going on—“You’re being a bit of a martyr”—and you will lose half the points you have accrued so far.
In the worst-case scenario, the partner will then go on to say, “As you’re obviously finding it hard to cope today, I will do everything. No don’t worry—I don’t want you to feel burdened,” and start making terrifyingly effective calls to local servicemen whilst angrily typing emails and combing a child for nits—just to show how super-capable they are.
If this happens, it’s checkmate, dude—you have overplayed your hand, and have gone from The Busiest (the winning slot) to The Most Ineffective (the losing slot), and you have to start again from scratch by doing one of the Big Ticket Awful Jobs, e.g., the clearing of the loft, or calling your partner’s mother “for a chat.” Just to prove you are an effective person, after all.
Never go “Full Martyr.” Delegate as you would in the workplace. Every marriage needs a whiteboard in the kitchen with The List of Jobs on it, to be divvied up equally, no excuses. And if your partner feels you’re “being too businesslike about all this,” reply, “Dude, we bought a property together, we have yearly accounts. Do you remember when we signed those legal documents—even though I was wearing a mad white dress, and you were drunk? Marriage is a business.”
WHOSE SURNAME WILL YOUR CHILDREN HAVE?
Indeed, what names will they have at all? Ostensibly, the mother should have the deciding vote here. If your vadge is about to be exploded by a head, it seems only fair you get to name the subsequent person the head is attached to. That seems like a fair exchange. Besides, often—in the preceding nine months—one might have had recourse to address the baby directly, as it kicks the shit out of your kidneys, or squats on your bladder, and one often finds oneself barking, “Okay, Roy, I get it. You’re an active kid! But chill with the abdominal roundhouses, eh?” at one’s distended, pulsing tum. You may already have started the naming process, just to establish a relationship with the beast inside.
However, we must admit something quite important, to wit: pregnancy hormones can often directly affect a woman’s taste in names. In a bad way. Here, for instance, are some of the names I considered for my daughters, whilst heavily pregnant: Lettuce. Plum. Clove. Ambrosia.
Looking back now, I can see what was going on: I was just hungry. After all, I was about to name my child after (a) the ingredients of an unprecedentedly unpleasant salad or (b) tinned rice pudding.
Thankfully, my husband—who was not insane with hormones—deftly and gently encouraged me to think of names “that maybe wouldn’t make their lives a living hell,” and we settled for the more prosaic Elizabeth and Nancy instead.
Incidentally, when it comes to unworkably quirky names for your baby, I believe that the greatest possible argument against teenagers becoming pregnant is that the baby names you like when you’re, say, fifteen, single-handedly prove you’re not ready for motherhood yet. My teenage diary records that, had I had a child in 1988, I would have called them either Kitten Lithium, K. T. Blue, Tatty Apple, or Aloyious Jonst. Thank God my access to sperm was severely limited to the amount of none.
Surnames, though, are a whole other minefield. There are only three options: yours, his, or both of yours wedged together like a supergroup, like you’ve given birth to Hall-Oates or Simon-Garfunkel.
Double-barreling your surnames together has the effect of making your child automatically sound as though it’s posh—either an advantage or disadvantage, depending on where they are, and what they go on to do. If you are comfortably middle class and liable to be around actual posh people, it can be helpful: The posh will confidently engage your child in conversations like “Was your first pony quite naughty?” or “Which is best: skiing or diamonds?” which means they have accepted your offspring as one of “them,” and they will reap benefits such as “being invited to their cousin’s castle in Carcassonne” and “being given a column on The Telegraph.”
If you do not move in these circles, however, there is the chance your double-barreled child will be kicked up the bum by surly youths shouting, “Get your butler to stop me, Price-Waterhouse-Cooper!”—even though you live in a terraced house, and eat jam sandwiches for pudding.
If double-barreling is not an option for you, then you are a couple who has to pick just one family’s surname to continue—which, when you put it like that, is brutal. The brutality of your situation explains how these things tend to end up being decided: Whatever your history and sexual politics as a couple, things are usually decided on the basis of “whose set-in-their-ways father will freak out the most if his grandchildren do not have their surname?” Nine times out of ten, this means the kids are getting their father’s surname.
Whilst this tends to leave female partners wildly resentful—and apt to whisper things at their children like “The minute Granny and Granddad die, you can change your surname to mine, okay?”—it does mean that, when and if you get a dog, your husband can’t argue when you triumphantly register it at the vet under your surname, whispering, “Pulled one back for Team Moran.” You take your tiny comforts and victories where you can patriarchy-wise. If the building of a matriarchy starts with the recruitment of dogs, so be it.
And remember—ultimately, whoever has the baby, has the power. All grandparents have to bow to the cradle—for life without their grandchildren is unthinkable. You have a pretty big unspoken bargaining chip. Especially if your child is called Chip, and he’s really hefty.
WHAT I MEAN WHEN I SAY “I LOVE YOU”
“I love you” should be the simplest, most straightforward phrase in our vocabulary. It should mean, simply, “I, meaning me, love you, meaning you.” There shouldn’t be any weird gray areas, or double meanings, involved. It’s a basic, yet classic, sentence.
But if I think about all the times I’ve said “I love you” during my twenty-five years with Pete, I have to admit that I have rarely meant, simply and purely, I love you. I love you has meant, over the decades, dozens of wholly different things, and been said hoping to prompt hundreds of different consequences. I chuck love around like it’s vinegar on chips; like high notes in the third verse of a Mariah Carey song.
And that’s before we get to the ways in which I have said it. I’ve sung it; I’ve shouted it; I’ve done it in the voice of Kermit crying; I’ve written it on my tits to be found, as a surprise, but also written it into a pile of mashed potatoes with my finger. Love is all around. But love really isn’t all you need—anyone who’s dealt with the consequences of a child coming into the bedroom at 2 a.m., whispering, terrified, “There’s something wrong with the toilet,” will know that love comes second best to a plunger, a wet-and-dry vacuum cleaner, and good ventilation.
So: all the loves.
First of all, there’s the fairly straightforward ones we all do: “I love you” at the end of a phone call, instead of “goodbye.” I guess this also means “Don’t die while I’m away, as the paperwork will be a nightmare and I haven’t brought a front-door key with me, and I don’t want to climb through the window again.”
Then there’s “I love you” in lieu of “thank you”—uttered when being presented with a baked potato, or a cup of tea. I guess that means “I love you for being a thoughtful person who knows what I like right now, and it makes me appreciate you.”
Then there are the slightly more emotionally complex “I love yous”—when spooning at the end of the day, where it means a combination of “Thank God today’s over,” “You feel nice,” and “I appreciate you donating your body warmth to my legs.” “I love you” when we’re in the bath together, and what I really mean is “And I would love you even more if you gave me a foot massage. Oh look! There’s my feet! On your belly! What a coincidence!”
I say “I love you” not only when leaving the houses of unhappy couples, where it means “Thank God we’re not them, please don’t change,” but also when Pete’s done something I would like him to change, but I’m trying to sugar the pill. “I love you! You look so lovely! Do you think it’s time we should treat you to some new trousers, perhaps?” or “I love you! And would it be okay if you rolled the pizza dough a little thinner? I essentially want a cheesy crisp.”
Sometimes, “I love you” is a warning, which demands instant action—used instead of “This anecdote has gone on too long,” or “Let’s leave,” or “Please take me away from this boring man.” At a party, if I say “I love you,” and slip my hand into his, it means we will be back in the car in less than five minutes. So, it means “goodbye” here, too—to everyone else.
When I’m hungover, or have been evil, or grumpy, “I love you” means “Please forgive me.” When I say it, I feel like a drowned cartoon cat, hoping to be toweled dry of their shame. “Please cure me. Reassure me I have not broken the love.”
Sometimes, and I am ashamed to admit this, “I love you” actually means “I love me.”
“I love you!” I will say, quite violently, when walking into a room in a new dress that I feel amazing in. “I love you,” I will say, after I’ve made a joke that makes him laugh, or I’ve cooked him something he enjoys eating, or if I’ve just had a sudden burst of joy. “I love you” here means “When I love me, I love you more—because we are kind of the same thing, now.”
When I realized this, I started to understand why people who are unhappy with themselves often find loving others difficult—“I am in love” means just that: you are in the love together, and if you don’t love yourself, you are confused as to why the other person likes you. You are standing outside the love, bewildered as to why the other person feels so happy.
During sex, “I love you” is a fucking minefield, and I need to sort it out as soon as possible. “I love you” can equally mean “You can come now—it’s starting to chafe” and “Don’t come yet—this is amazing. Let’s do it for five more hours!” Even I don’t know how you can tell the difference, and I’m the one saying it. Sex “I love yous” are absolutely demented bleatings from someone not at their intellectual best, and are probably best, in the long run, ignored.
Then there are the sad “I love yous”—said when I’m feeling down, or anxious, or bad in my body. “I love you” from a hotel room, far away, where I’m hoping for the reply, “And I love you—you work so hard, and we all miss you, and can’t wait for you to come home.”
“I love you” comes in a conversation when it’s clear we disagree, and I want to end it before it gets brutal.
“I love you” comes when the dog’s being amusing, or the kids are happy, or the house looks clean and shiny: then, it means “I love us. I love our family. I love our life.”
As we can see, the poets were right: “I love you” is the most important phrase in the English language. It does mean everything. Just in a more complicated way than they intended.
COUGHING, SNEEZING, AND BEING SICK
When I gather with my women, and we discuss our brilliant, lovely, caring, emotionally expressive, gentle, burden-sharing partners, and rejoice in how we have found most excellent men, there is always a moment where—having spoken fulsomely in tribute to all we adore about them—we turn to the small, nigglesome things about them that astonish us. We presume they are in the pub doing the same about us (“She’s a powerhouse high court judge with unequaled dance moves and an ass that won’t quit—but why does she have a box in the bathrooms with ‘EYEBROWS’ written on it???” “Mate, my wife has a bathroom box with ‘PORES’ written on it. I’m too scared to ask why.”) so we feel free to vent in a mutually respectful safe place.
And the topic that most commonly arises? Violent yet everyday physical releases. Coughs, sneezes, and vomiting. The coughs, sneezes, and vomits that we signed a legally binding contract to be married to—until death do us part—without really realizing all that would entail, but we now fully realize and find it difficult to handle without regular reporting to sympathetic ears.
Let me illustrate. For instance, when I sneeze in public, first of all, I try to suppress it—as I feel it ungentlewomanly to expel the contents of my head over other bus goers. Pinching the nose is very effective—you can subdue 90 percent of sneezes down to a minimal “P-th.” If the sneeze is a surprise sneeze, and arrives too quickly to be mitigated, then it arrives as a slightly more strident “P-thoo.” And that’s it. That’s my sneeze business.. It’s over. Sneeze come, sneeze go. Easy sneeze. On with the day. My sneezing is done.
On the other hand, when my husband sneezes, it appears to be a lengthy, borderline berserk process that involves him, essentially, exploding—like a head in Scanners. I have witnessed sneezes that seemed to take up half the afternoon, would have been heard by everyone in our postcode, and which have left my husband so exhausted, subsequent bedrest seemed to be the only solution.
First, the sneeze announces itself—in the middle of a pleasant conversation, whilst chopping onions, say, my husband will suddenly stop talking, pull a face of impending horror, and look off into the middle distance—like one of the rabbits in Watership Down, on spotting a looming hawk. There will be a series of preliminary shudders and violent inhalations—“AH! AH!”—during which he will slam the knife down onto the countertop and, if I am near, grab my arm, as if he is trying to tether himself to something in advance of an impending storm. Sometimes, in this phase, he will utter a little, wracked groan of “Oh no” or “Oh God”—like those of Edward Woodward, just before he’s burned alive in The Wicker Man.
Then there will be a tiny silence—as if the whole thing has suddenly, and miraculously, passed, which the unversed might unwisely use as a chance to relax—which is then followed by an eruption so mighty, the dog runs away.
“FWRARGH-CHAAAAAA!” he will scream—striking his foot down on the floor, as if warning everyone: “Evacuate! Unsafe area! SNEEZES ARE HERE!”
“FWRARGH-CHAAAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA! FWARGH-CHAAAA-AAAAA-ARGHHHHH!”
Car alarms go off; children cry, “Are you okay?” down the stairs, in consternation.
In order to preserve my hearing, I will usually, at this point, have removed myself to the doorway, where I then witness a man who appears to have been pushed to the limits of physical endurance shakily mopping his entire head with a series of handkerchiefs and tissues, and then sitting down; drained of all life.
In 50 percent of cases, after a brief breathing space, the sneezing will start again—as if a portal to hell has opened up in my loved one’s sinuses, and he is birthing a spiraling vortex of ebullient demons, one by one, through his nose, in a way that cannot be stopped until all his life force is spent. As my husband has hay fever, you may imagine what a yearly trial summer is.
Coughing involves a similarly involved and performative approach—a build-up of throat clearing and what can only be described as “intolerable nose noises,” leading to mad hunching and barking, before tailing off in a minutes-long series of “HmmHHHHHH, hmmmmHHHH” sounds, some of which can last, with slight variations, all the way through an episode of Naked & Afraid. The depth, variety, and sustain of these sounds are truly notable: it’s as if the BBC Radiophonic Workshop had assembled a Men’s Cough Orchestra, who are now making a pretty decent fist of re-creating the sound of a landing TARDIS.
As for vomiting—vomiting seems to strike terror in the heart of men. To them, it seems to be an unbearable physical voyage to a land of horror—like being deported to some manner of Puke Colony on the say-so of an evil king.
On the mornings my husband rises with a bug, he walks around the house looking as if he’s waiting for a knock on the door that will see him press-ganged into a seventeen-month voyage to the Indies.
“I think . . . I think I might be sick, in a bit,” he will whisper, every so often, in a manner that suggests that the whole house should pre-emptively don black mourning gear, before covering the road outside with sawdust to dampen the sound of horses’ hooves.
This will go on for many, many hours, before the Time of Vomiting finally arrives—heralded by him wailing, “This is it!,” running from the room and throwing up in the toilet with a technique that makes it sound like he’s fighting the vomit, even as it comes out.
“I hate being sick,” he’ll say, returning, clearly traumatized—hair on end, eyes red, breath still ragged.
I’ve studied this for many, many hours, in medical textbooks, and there is absolutely no physical difference between the male and female reflux system. The guts, throat, and spasms are all the same. I cannot, therefore, understand this massive divergence in male and female vomiting. Women puke easily, rapidly, and with minimal fuss. We are very businesslike about it. When I am struck with a vomiting bug, and the moment of release approaches, I will slip out of the room, go to the bathroom, prop up a copy of Cosmo on the toilet bowl, and leaf through the “Recommended Summer Shoes” section whilst briskly hoiking up whatever needs hoiking. I might even take a pen with me, to mark a particularly fetching pair of espadrilles. On occasion, I have remained on Twitter throughout the puke—making lolz-some comments about e.g., Sherlock or Bear Grylls. To me, vomiting is a simple piece of admin I can tackle whilst going about my normal business. If I’m lucky enough to do it in a bathroom, I can make the experience comparatively luxurious—a nice folded towel for the knees, and another on the toilet seat to rest my head on, in between retches. There’s no need to suffer.
However, I—like every other woman I know—would not be overly dismayed if puking struck when access to a toilet was difficult. Every woman I know is proficient in the “Lady Sick” or “Disco Vom”—that moment on the dance floor when you suddenly realize those five Jägers are sitting uneasily on top of your impassioned twerking. Who among us has not simply vommed into a pint glass, or a handbag, whilst still dancing—not even missing a beat? If we are dancing in a circle, we wouldn’t even mention it. Not until the end of the song, anyway.
Vomiting need not interrupt your day. I once had champagne and oysters react terribly during a business lunch, and I simply carried on the meeting—occasionally leaving the table to wargh up my bad business, spray a bit of perfume, and then return to close the deal. You just crack on. I’ve had long, intense conversations at festivals with friends interspersed with several of us simply turning to the side, having a bit of a huey, and then continuing with the matter at hand. One friend, during appalling morning sickness, used to vomit into the sleeve of her coat, on the bus. It’s scarcely any cause for drama.
I guess, in the end, it’s all down to your baseline experience. Women are so used to things happening to us that would register as “illness”—cramps, bleeding, morning sickness, bloating, madly achy balloon tits from hell—that are, in fact, merely by-products of being alive; so that when illness comes, we do not fear it so much. Our bodies are constantly spasming and expelling things. We’re like the fucking turnstiles at Wembley, bodywise. In and out, all the time.
By the age of sixteen, an otherwise healthy woman has, simply and unavoidably, experienced a thousand times more discomfort, pain, and random fluid than an otherwise healthy man of the same age—so a bit of a sneeze, cough, or puke is but a mere bagatelle. As Kristin Scott Thomas’s character, Belinda, tells Phoebe Waller-Bridge in the second season of Fleabag, as they sit in a bar in their amazing outfits, “Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny. Period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves, throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out, they invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars, so they can feel things and touch each other, and when there aren’t any wars, they play rugby. And we have it all going on in here, inside. We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years.”
And if your husband isn’t into wars, or rugby, he has sneezing, instead.
IN THE INTERESTS of balance, I ask Pete what mad, intolerable woman things I do that he has to deal with in our marriage.
“Oh, there’s nothing,” he said, not even looking up from the pile of vinyl he’s sorting. “You’re perfect.”
“Oh, come now,” I say, leaning in the doorway. “That can’t be true. I must do loads of berserk and irritating things. Millions.”
“No. I have absolutely no complaints. You can’t attribute a single critical quote to me about your behavior as a wife.” He pauses for a moment—creating a breakaway “Birmingham reggae” section—then continues. “Which means, when you write this up, I will look like the far more tolerant, pleasant, easygoing partner in this marriage. The one who adores his wife, no matter what. The one everyone sides with. The good guy. The—dare I say it?—winner.”
I whistle, admiringly. This seemingly mild, amiable, mad-sneezing man is actually a gold medalist tactician and mind-fucker. We are totally equally matched. I can best him at nothing. The game continues.