How to Stay Married Read online

  One method of getting rid of them is to dispatch your husband to the bedroom, rip off all your clothes, ruffle your hair, and, clad only in a face towel, answer the door brandishing the Kama Sutra. The droppers-in will be so embarrassed that they’ll apologise and make themselves scarce.

  Answering the door

  Entertaining notions

  ENTERTAINING

  ALWAYS CHECK WITH your partner before you issue or accept an invitation, or you’ll get ghastly instances of double dating.

  Time and again recently, we’ve been making tracks for bed when the telephone goes, and an irate voice says, ‘Aren’t you coming, we’re all waiting to go in to dinner.’ Or we’ll be just leaving the house to go out, when a rosy-cheeked couple arrive on the doorstep having driven fifty miles up from the country for dinner.

  Keep a book by the telephone and write everything down.

  DINNER PARTIES

  Unless you’re a Cordon Bleu cook, and totally unflappable, your first dinner parties are bound to be packed with incident. Overcooked meat, undercooked potato salad, soufflés that don’t rise, guests that don’t rise to the occasion.

  If you’re a beginner, cook as much as possible the day before. Cod’s roe pâté, liver pâté, soup, casseroles and most puddings can all be made beforehand. Then all you have to do the following day is to make the toast and mix a salad dressing.

  If possible get the table ready the night before as well.

  Polishing glasses, ironing napkins, getting out plates and coffee cups all take longer than one would imagine. Get plenty of cheese, in case you haven’t given people enough — I once fell up the stairs with the pudding and eight plates, and there was no cheese in the house.

  Guests

  Don’t spend hours away from your guests. Nothing is less calculated to put them at their ease than a hostess who turns up red in the face after three-quarters of an hour, grabs a quick drink and disappears again.

  One couple we went to dinner with both disappeared for an hour to peel grapes for the Sole Véronique, and the whole meal was served to an accompaniment of piped cream.

  Be careful who you ask with whom: the day our vicar’s wife came to dinner we invited a young man who regaled us for half the evening with details of the mating habits of the rhinoceros.

  Don’t become a slave to social ping-pong. Entertaining is wildly expensive and just because you had caviar and three kinds of wine at the Thrust-Pointers, don’t feel you have to give them oysters and liqueurs when they come back to you.

  If you’re broke, warn people beforehand that it will only be spaghetti and Spanish Burgundy, then they can either refuse, bring a bottle or have a number of stiff drinks beforehand.

  If you’re worried about the food, drink for at least an hour and half before you eat, and they’ll be so tight they won’t know what they’re eating.

  Equally, if you’re supremely confident about your food, don’t let them drink too much.

  Don’t play loud background music before dinner, it kills conversation. People can go to a concert if they want that sort of thing.

  Never, never show slides.

  IF THEY WON’T GO

  The husband should make the first move by saying his wife is tired and sending her to bed. If that doesn’t work, turn the central heating off.

  If you don’t like certain people, don’t feel you have to ask them back. They’ll get the message eventually. Life is too short to bother with people you really don’t care for. You’ll work up too much angst beforehand about having to see them, and too much spleen afterwards about how bored you were.

  PARTIES

  Make a list and stick to it. We always ask indiscriminately and have far too many people, both of us trying to smuggle in people the other doesn’t like.

  Don’t send out invitations. You can’t ask everyone, and people get very sour if they see your invitations on other people’s mantelpieces. Also, if you invite by telephone, you get a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ immediately, and people are notoriously bad at answering letters.

  We once gave a drears’ sherry party — with fatal consequences. All our undreary friends found out and were furious they hadn’t been invited, and the drears discovered why they’d been asked, and were deeply offended. We were a bit short of friends that year.

  One of the secrets of a good party is a few abrasive elements. Recently we went to an outstandingly successful ‘bring-an-enemy’ party.

  Don’t expect to enjoy your own parties, except in retrospect. All your guests will be too busy getting drunk and trying to make other guests to bother about you. Your function is to act as unpaid waiter and waitress: effecting introductions, rescuing people whose eyes are beginning to glaze whether they’re bored or drunk, and watching people’s drinks.

  Do mix a cocktail that can be poured, or give them wine, otherwise you’ll get in a terrible muddle remembering what everyone wants and start giving them whisky and tonic and gin and soda.

  GOING TO PARTIES

  Don’t stand together all evening, it will upset your hostess. Check every twenty minutes to ensure your partner isn’t standing alone, doesn’t need rescuing from the local bore, isn’t pinned to the wall by the local sex maniac.

  If you want to dance cheek to cheek with the most attractive man/woman in the room, wait until your husband/wife is securely trapped on the sofa in another room.

  If you catch your partner making a pass at someone, smile broadly as though it was an everyday occurrence, say, ‘Drink always takes him/her this way, he/she won’t remember a thing about it next morning,’ and whisk him/her away smartly.

  HOW TO LEAVE

  There is bound to be a moment when you want to go home and your husband doesn’t because he’s having too good a time, or vice versa. One of you will just have to grin and bear it. Don’t get into the habit of leaving independently, it looks bad, and is very expensive on taxis.

  Overcome with lust

  If you’re both bored, intimate to your hostess that you’ve been overcome by lust and must leave. She will think her party has been a contributing factor and be delighted, particularly if you leave murmuring about the seductive atmosphere.

  The office

  OFFICE PARTIES

  IF HUSBANDS AND wives aren’t invited, be extremely careful. This is the moment when Mr Chalcott in Accounts, who has been eyeing Mrs Pointer in Personnel all the year, suddenly gets too much drink in him, makes a pass at her and the whole thing erupts into an affaire. Try not to get home too late, be careful to wipe lipstick off your cheek if you’re a man, and replace your make-up carefully if you’re a woman. The fact that Mr Prideau in Packaging saw fit to pounce on you may be just Christmas high spirits, but it will worry your husband, who’ll think it is normal procedure for the rest of the year.

  If you go to your wife’s or husband’s office party, be as nice as possible to everyone. These people may seem draggy to you, but your partner’s got to put up with them all the year round, and will get tremendous kudos if you’re a success.

  Be prepared for anything — my mother went to my father’s office party once when he was in a very senior position. She was hotly pursued by a man from the boiler division in a Mickey Mouse mask, who kept tracking her down in the Paul Jones, tossing her up in the air, and crying, ‘I am your demon lover.’

  Hotly pursued

  Be careful what you wear, look pretty but not out-rageous. When I was newly married, I went to the Author’s Ball at the Hilton in a party of my husband’s grandest business colleagues. Very brown from the South of France, I wore a white strapless dress which was so tight, I didn’t need a bra. The five-course dinner was too much for it. As I stood up to dance with one of the directors, it split, leaving me naked to the waist.

  OFFICE RELATIONSHIPS

  A husband spends far more of his waking life with his secretary, and the people he works with, than with his wife. It is the same for his wife if she goes out to work. It is very easy to get crushes on people you
work with. There’s natural proximity, there’s the charm of the clandestine (we mustn’t let anyone in the office know), of working together for a common purpose, and finally, because men basically like to boss, and women to be bossed, there is the fatal charm of the boss/female employee relationship. For if you are used to obeying a man when he says ‘take a letter’, or ‘make me a cup of coffee’, you may find it difficult to say no when he says ‘come to bed with me’.

  Bear in mind before you either pounce, or accept the pounce across the desk, that people aren’t nearly so easy to live with as to work with, and you’d probably be bored to death with your boss or secretary if you had to spend twenty-four hours a day with them. It will also make things very awkward later if you go off them, while they still fancy you, or vice versa. You may be forced to leave a job you like.

  Be very careful, too, not to let your husband or wife think that you are keen on someone in the office, or they will go through agonies of jealousy during the day, and raise hell every time you are kept late — even if you are working.

  HAVING YOUR HUSBAND’S BOSS TO DINNER

  The wife should pull out all the culinary stops and look as beautiful as possible.

  But don’t flirt with your husband’s boss too much or you’ll have him sending your husband abroad and coming round on his own!

  Invite another amusing but socially reliable couple to meet him. Then when you and your husband have to leave the room to dish up or pour drinks, he won’t be left alone to examine the damp patches or the peeling wallpaper.

  Give him plenty to drink but not too much, or he may become indiscreet about company politics, regret it the next day and take against your husband.

  General marital problems

  COMMUNICATION

  ONE OF THE beauties of marriage is that you always have someone to look after, and to look after you, to share your problems, and to tell — without boasting — when something good happens to you.

  It is vital that couples should get into the habit of talking to each other and be interested in each other’s activities, be it a game of cricket, an afternoon at the WI, or a day at the office. If you are able to communicate on a daily level, you will find it much easier to discuss things when a major crisis blows up — like a husband losing his job, a sudden sexual impasse, or the television breaking down.

  Nothing is more depressing than seeing married couples on holiday or dining together gazing drearily into space with nothing to say to one another — at best it’s a shocking example to unmarried people.

  I feel strongly that married women should try to set a good example to newlyweds or people about to get married. Nothing is more morale-lowering for the engaged girl than to be taken aside by a couple of bored and cynical married women and told how dreary marriage is, the only solution being infidelity or burying oneself in one’s children. Rather in the same way that women who have children often terrorise women who are pregnant for the first time with hair-raising stories of childbirth.

  SEPARATION

  In long separations from your husband or wife, there are all the problems of loneliness and fidelity. Even short separations — a week or a weekend — have their own difficulties.

  When her husband goes away, a wife steels herself not to mind, and although she misses him, unconsciously she builds up other resources. She finds it is rather fun to read a novel until three o’clock in the morning, have time to get the house straight, watch what programmes she wants on television, not have to cook and wash, and be able to see all the people she is not allowed to see when her husband is at home.

  Gradually, as the time for her husband’s return approaches, she gets more and more excited. She plans a special homecoming dinner, she buys a new dress and goes on a twenty-four hour diet so she will look beautiful. In her mind she has a marvellously idealised picture of his homecoming.

  And then he arrives — hungover, grubby, exhausted, and if he’s been to America or anywhere else where the time is different from ours, he’ll be absolutely knackered. He won’t want to do anything else but fall into bed and then only to sleep.

  The wife is inevitably disappointed — this is no god returning, merely a husband, grumbling about the rings round the bath, bringing not passion and tenderness but a suitcase of dirty shirts.

  Similarly, a husband returning to his wife after some time away will find that an ecstatic welcome is often followed by a good deal of sniping and bad temper. The wife will have stored up so much unconscious resentment at being deprived of his presence, that she will take it out on him for a few days.

  The only way to cope with après-separation situations is not to get panicky if your wife or husband acts strangely. It doesn’t mean they’ve met someone else, they are just taking a bit of time to adjust to your presence again. In a small way, it’s like starting one’s marriage over again.

  JEALOUSY

  Once your life is centred round one person, it is very easy to become obsessively jealous. Try and keep your jealousy in check: it will only cause you suffering, and make things very difficult for your partner.

  If you marry a very pretty girl, or a very attractive man, the fact has to be faced that people will still go on finding them attractive.

  Give your wife a certain amount of rope, let her go out to lunch with other men, but start kicking up if it becomes a weekly occurrence with the same man. Never let her have drinks in the evening unless it’s business or an old friend, and draw the line at breakfast. If you are married to the sort of man who’s always humiliating you by running after women at parties, you’ll have to grin and bear it. He’s probably just testing his sex appeal, like gorillas beat their chests. Before I was married, a girlfriend and I used to divide men into open gazers, or secret doers. You’ve probably got an open gazer, so thank your lucky stars you’re not married to a secret doer.

  If you have an ex-wife or an ex-lover, destroy all evidence before you get married again. Nothing is more distressing for a second wife than coming upon wedding photographs of you and your first wife looking idyllically happy.

  However much you may want to reminisce about your exes, keep it to a minimum, and if you ever have to meet any of your wife’s or husband’s exes, be as nice to them as possible. No one looks attractive when sulking.

  BOREDOM

  It was not my intention in this book to deal with marriage in relation to children, but I would like to say a brief word about Cabbage-itis, which is my name for the slough of despond a wife goes through when she has two or more very young children to look after. Invariably she’s stuck in the country or a part of town where she has few friends, her husband is going out to work every day and meeting interesting people and she isn’t, and she feels dull, inadequate and so bored she could scream.

  The family budget won’t stretch to any new clothes for her, so she feels it is impossible for her to look attractive. On the occasions when friends bring children over for the day, it seems to be all chaos and clamour. She spends days planning a trip to London, which invariably ends in disappointment: her clothes are all wrong, she’s worn out after two hours shopping, the girlfriend she meets for lunch can’t talk about anything except people she doesn’t know, and if she attempts to take the children she’s exhausted before she’s begun.

  She and her husband can’t afford to entertain much, but when they are asked out she finds she is so used to saying ‘No’ and ‘Don’t’ to children all day, she is unable to contribute to the conversation.

  If you are going through this stage — and I think it is one of the real danger zones of marriage — remember that it isn’t going to go on for ever. The children will grow up, go to school, and you will have acres of free time to go back to work, to take up hobbies, to make new friends. Whatever you do: don’t neglect your appearance. Looking pretty isn’t new clothes, it’s clean hair, a bit of make-up and a welcoming hug when your husband comes home in the evening.

  Remember that your husband must always come first, even before
the children. In your obsession with your domestic problems, don’t forget that he probably isn’t having a very easy time either: desperately pushed for money, harassed at work, buffeted back and forth in a train every day, coming home to a drab fractious wife every night.

  So don’t catalogue your woes; when he arrives in the evening, concentrate on giving him a good time.

  Try and go out at least once a week if it’s only to the pictures. Try and read a newspaper, or at least listen to the headlines while you’re doing the housework, so you won’t feel too much out of touch.

  If possible find something remunerative to do even if it’s only making paper flowers, typing, or framing pictures. Nothing is more depressing than poverty and if you can make the smallest contribution to the family budget it will be a boost to your morale.

  Clothes

  CLOTHES AND APPEARANCE

  ‘THE REASON WHY so few marriages are happy,’ said misogynist Swift, ‘is because young ladies spend their time in making nets not cages.’

  No wife has any right to let herself go to seed after she’s married. She bothered enough to look pretty while she was trying to hook her husband, so it’s a poor compliment to him if she slackens up immediately after he’s hooked.

  Remember that the world is full of pretty girls who are not averse to amorous dalliance, and if you want to keep your husband, you’ll have to work hard to go on attracting him.

  It’s a case, of course, of shacking-up ô son goût. Some men prefer their wives au naturel, others are like the husband who said to me: ‘The marvellous thing about old Sue is that she always looks as neat as a new pin. I’ve never seen her without make-up or slopping around in jeans.’