Too much togetherness?

Press, 6 February 1986, Page 12

Too much togetherness?

By

KATHARINE WHITEHORN

“Everyone we k’now seems to be splitting up!” is a common cri du coeur at some stage in most people’s lives. By now I count like beads on a rosary the couples that have clung together. But recently I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon: the number of mature couples who seem to be living in some sense apart — yet they haven’t exactly split up. One lot nearly separated, and their jobs kept them for a while in different towns; but after this apparently muchneeded breather, they’re together again. Only there’s no guarantee she won’t still be spending a week in the hills, while he licks his whiskers in the depths of his club. For another set, it’s the other way round; the bloke stays morosely in the country, his wife saves what’s left of her sanity by spending time in town with her sister. If the alternative were always a golden wedding cosiness, one might be saddened by their semidetachment. But maybe what they’re avoiding is that awful denigration, that ill-tempered till-death-do-us-part scratchiness that makes you cringe to listen to it. Openly awful marital relations are upsetting

enough in the relatively young, but at least you feel ‘“lt can’t go on like this.” In older couples it fills you with despair: will they never be nicer to each other? Are they stuck like this forever? Why are they stuck like this forever. A state of semi-detach-ment may be infinitely preferable to that. And after all, no one finds it odd if unmarried couples don’t live in each other’s pockets.

Even the live-for-the-minute young can cheerfully part for months if one of them is off to college or Katmandu (actually half the illicit young couples I know lead lives of stodgy domesticity, but that’s their problem).

And busily married people don’t spend every minute together: jobs distract, children clamour; they can safely say they wish they could spend every second together, because they know very well they can’t. When the outside pressures ease, though, there’s nothing to give you a breathing space. I’ve had more than one exasperated woman on the phone citing the old adage. "I married him for better or worse but not for lunch;” now the man’s

at home all day and it’s driving her frantic. Even those who can stand unlimited amounts of each other’s company, like my parents-in-law, still miss the comings and goings. I remember my mother-in-law saying years ago, that though she hated her husband working away all week: “other people didn’t have those awful Mondays; but they didn’t have those Fridays either.” In the retired state, none of that happens automatically, and it’s considered unfeeling to seek time out on your own. I must say I have my doubts about too much togetherness at any stage — and not just because of those tiresome couples who clog up the supermarket on a Saturday, lovingly asking each other if they need more jam. Obviously, if your mate’s . doing something you’d like to do too, you’ll be glum if you’re left out. But the wife who finally decides to let herself off being sick in a high wind may give her sailor husband a far warmer welcome home; there comes a time when dragging your other half off to the golf course or the opera with missionary zeal seems senseless.

Far better to do your own thing on your own, and join up for the things you really have in common. The semi-detached marriages I’m talking about may seem to lack a good deal to those of us still busy enough not to have to decide how much we see of each other. But in one vital respect they’re certainly preferable to drifting apart altogether. There is no need to deny the past. One New Year’s Eve I was moved beyond measure by a recently divorced man; he wasn’t really sorry to see the back of his impossible wife, but he said “that was 20 years of my life, that was the babyhood of my children”; in breaking with her he felt he was stripping out a whole piece of himself.

The semi-detached couples, even if they only come together for essential purposes like marrying daughters or getting grandchildren out of jail, at least have no need to write off their years together. When so much is changing outside marriage, it’s odd we respect so few variations within it. People are peculiar, in every sense of the word;

no two marriages are the same. A marriage shouldn’t be assumed to be useless, just because the couple aren’t always in each other’s arms. It may be all they want, or all they can manage; the best they can do.

There ought to be something between a 24-hour-a-day involvement, and an achingly final break. People may still need a sheet anchor or someone to care about, a sparring partner or an old companion; not necessarily a Siamese twin. Why shouldn’t the married have some of the freedoms of the unmarried, the older some of the flexibility of the young?