Caitlin Moran: ‘After 25 Years, Here’s What I’ve Learnt About A “Good Marriage”‘

What is a ‘good marriage’? What does love look like when it’s lasted decades, weathered crises, forsaken all others, and still looks like something that, on balance, you’d want to be part of ?

We know how it starts – a lovely wedding, hopefully quite cheap; friends and family dancing on the lawn at 3am; and people sighing,‘You two–you just work together. If you two can’t make it, no one can.’ That’s how it starts.

And we know one, later scene, right at the end: an old couple, sitting on a park bench, holding hands. Laughing at some in-joke about the ducks on the pond that started in 1992. Fingers swollen around the wedding-bands – as if they’ve been worn for so long, the bodies are starting to absorb the gold into the veins, and the marriage is now a physical thing, inside, that it would be impossible to lose. That’s how, ideally, you want it to end.

READ MORE: Caitlin Moran On How To Deal With Life When You’re Still Figuring It Out

But what about ... all the stuff in the middle? The actual marriage? All those long decades together, when ‘together’ can encompass so many things: agreeing on new plates, and helping each other through physical and mental ill-health, and dealing with fleas, and raising children, and getting rained out of a camping holiday in Wales, and parents dying, and getting jobs, and losing jobs, and disliking his new haircut, and the front door always sticking, and being burgled, and choosing a rescue dog, and arguing about politics, or who the best one in Queer Eye is, and waking him up in the middle of the night, when you can’t sleep, saying, ‘Can we have a cup of tea and talk?’

Long-term relationships are an odd thing, in that they are generally mysterious to everyone – save the couple involved. What happens in other people’s marriages? We don’t know. There are no movies about how to keep a marriage together, over decades. All myths and archetypes about love are about finding it – not keeping it alive. Not all the rest of it.

What goes on behind closed doors is left virtually silent. Is that why one in three marriages end in divorce? Because we have so little information about how good ones actually work, problem by problem, hour by hour? What are our templates, man? What can we copy?

I’m a chronic over-sharer who never heard a secret I didn’t want to instantly repeat to others. I see myself less as an ‘information container’ and more an ‘information conduit’, which is why you must never tell me a genuine secret – and so I want to relate what I have learned about a ‘good marriage’ over the 25 years I’ve been with my husband.

Firstly, I feel it’s important to actually say, out loud, ‘I have a good marriage,’ if you do have one – for I find it a rather dolorous trope to pretend your relationship is worse than it is. All that ‘25 years: you get less for murder!’ business. You’re not supposed to boast if you genuinely like your partner; but I like knowing people are still happily in love. I find it comforting. I find it useful.

Before I met my husband, I just presumed that, at a certain point, you inevitably started finding your partner a bit irritating and intolerable, because... that’s what people kept saying. For the first 10 years, I kept... waiting for the shit times to start, with a sad resignation. As we headed towards 15 years, and I was still genuinely happy to spend all evening talking to him, I thought we were... weird? I didn’t know it was an option to still joyously love this person you were getting older with. This was new information for me.

So, how do you pick the right person to grow older with in the first place? How do you know they’re The One? Movies and books are full of dangerously incorrect information on this – claiming that it’s about passion and intensity; braving the storms, being intoxicated. That’s all balls. You’ll know when you’ve found The One because a) they smell right – a smell that just seems to relax you as soon as you sniff them; as if they’re a gigantic love spliff that you’re smoking, in your pyjamas, on the sofa and b) you’re so relaxed you become silly. Ridiculous voices, terrible jokes, finding a tiny saucepan really amusing – this is a low-effort, high-reward vibe you can ride, in great comfort, all the way to your pension and beyond. Life is frequently vexatious. Find someone you can laugh at it with and you’ve got a solid chance of making old bones together.

Once you’ve gigglingly selected The One, how do you then Keep The Love Alive? What are the secrets of marital longevity? Obviously, I could give a very long list here, but the two most crucial ones boil down to this: 1) Remain, at all times, polite to each other. A little bit of deference and respect go a long way. For instance, my husband and I unfailingly say, ‘Thank you for the sexual intercourse. It was very satisfying,’ after every shag. It’s good to keep things slightly formal. And 2) GET A WHITEBOARD IN YOUR KITCHEN AND DIVIDE UP ALL YOUR TASKS 50/50, ABSOLUTELY NO EXCEPTIONS.

Long-term love is impossible without fairness. Even if your partner is shouldering a very reasonable 47% of the load, that’s an extra 3% of your actual life that you’re spending on his bullshit that you will never, ever get back. Why does this matter? Because 70% of divorces are instigated by women – and the number one reason they give is, ‘I felt held back.’

Without exception, at the age of 45, the female peers I know flying high in their careers have partners who are scrupulous about equality in housework and childcare. Without exception, the ones who are struggling are the ones whose partners, for example, find laundry ‘too confusing’. All too often, women marry their glass ceiling. And then, eventually, divorce them.

If you want a good marriage – if you want to end up on that park bench in 2050 – it’s all, ultimately, down to laughing and fairness. And, if you can, buy one of those robot hoovers. They’re amazing.

‘More Than A Woman’by Caitlin Moran is out now (£20, Ebury Press)