How to Stay Married

Introduction

IT IS EXTREMELY easy to get married — it costs £4.5s. and takes two days to get a licence. It is much harder to stay married.

My only qualifications for writing a book on the subject are that I have had the example of parents who have lived in harmony for nearly forty years, and I myself am still married extremely happily after eight years. In eight years, of course, we’ve had marvellous patches and patches so bad that they rocked our marriage to its foundations, but I’ve come to realise that if you can cling on like a barnacle during the bad patches, your marriage will survive and in all probability be strengthened.

Anyone else’s marriage is a dark unexplored continent, and although I have observed far too many of my friends going swiftly in and out of wedlock, I can only guess at what it was that broke the marriage up, Since the word got around that I was writing this book, my task has been made doubly difficult by the fact that married couples either sidled away or started behaving ostentatiously well, whenever I came into the room.

One of the great comforts of my own marriage, however, has been that my husband was married before, knew the ropes, and during any really black period, when I was all for opting out and packing my bags, would reassure me that such black periods were to be expected in marriage, and it had been far worse for him the first time round.

Similarly I hope that by pointing out some of the disasters and problems that beset us and how we weathered them, it may reassure other people either married or contemplating marriage.