Introduction to revised edition
MORE THAN FORTY years ago, I dined next to Godfrey Smith, the gloriously convivial editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, and regaled him with tales about the screaming domestic chaos of my first months of marriage. I explained that because we made love all night and I spent all day, except for a scurrying shopping lunch, at the office, then rushed home to wash, iron, clean the flat, cook and eat supper, make love all night, go to the office – a pattern that was repeated until one died of exhaustion and our flat was so dirty I found a fungus growing under the sink.
On one occasion, I told Godfrey, my red silk scarf strayed into the washing machine at the launderette, so my husband Leo’s shirts came out streaked like the dawn and he claimed he was the only member of the rugger fifteen with a rose-pink jockstrap. Our attempts at DIY were just as disastrous, as we stripped off the damp course in the drawing room, then found we’d papered our cat to the wall like the Canterville Ghost. Godfrey laughed a lot and commissioned a piece called ‘A Young Wife’s Tale’, which appeared in the Sunday Times colour mag.
My poor mother was subsequently besieged by telephone calls from her friends: ‘Darling, what’s a jockstrap?’
Shortly after I had the miraculous break of a column in the Sunday Times , which lasted thirteen and a half years. At the same time a publishing friend asked me to write a little book called How to Stay Married .
I was so unbelievably flattered that even though I’d only been married seven years, I said yes, and was soon merrily laying down the law on everything from sex on the honeymoon to setting up house, from in-laws to infidelity. With a deadline of three months, however, as well as my new weekly column to write, a six-month-old baby to look after and a newish house in Fulham to try to run, my poor neglected Leo got very short shrift and grumbled the book should be called How to Get Divorced .
He was, in fact, a huge help with the writing and, as can be seen by his photograph on the jacket, was the handsome hero of the book, which amazingly was published on time in October 1969 and even received some kind reviews.
Forty-two years later, when I blithely suggested reprinting How to Stay Married to coincide with our approaching golden wedding, my gallant publishers – to whom I have been happily hitched for almost as long – suggested I write a new foreword (or backward) from a fifty-year perspective. This entailed re-reading How to Stay Married for the first time since it was published, whereupon I nearly died of horror. What a smug, opinionated proselytising little know-all I was then. For a start, I announced sternly that men detested seeing women slaving in the house, so their wives must arrange to work from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. so they could rush home and clean, iron and cook before their husband returned.
‘If you amuse a man in bed,’ I went on, ‘he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it,’ or even more hubristically, ‘be unlikely to stray.’
How could I have insisted that ‘a woman should be grateful her husband wants her,’ and suggested that if a wife refuses her husband sex then she has only herself to blame if he’s unfaithful. Ouch, ouch! Amending this bit is one of the only changes I have made to the text.
More shamingly, I have never practised what I preached, advocating total honesty about money being essential in marriage, and that ‘couples should always know what the other is spending’. And that from a wife who regularly smuggled new clothes into her wardrobe, ripping off the price tag, lying: ‘This old thing.’
‘No wife has the right to go to seed,’ I thundered, when I myself become a positive hayfield when I’m trying to finish a book, not washing my hair for days, hairy ankles sprouting out from ragged tracksuit bottoms. Yet not a word did I add urging husbands to exert
MORE THAN FORTY years ago, I dined next to Godfrey Smith, the gloriously convivial editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, and regaled him with tales about the screaming domestic chaos of my first months of marriage. I explained that because we made love all night and I spent all day, except for a scurrying shopping lunch, at the office, then rushed home to wash, iron, clean the flat, cook and eat supper, make love all night, go to the office – a pattern that was repeated until one died of exhaustion and our flat was so dirty I found a fungus growing under the sink.
On one occasion, I told Godfrey, my red silk scarf strayed into the washing machine at the launderette, so my husband Leo’s shirts came out streaked like the dawn and he claimed he was the only member of the rugger fifteen with a rose-pink jockstrap. Our attempts at DIY were just as disastrous, as we stripped off the damp course in the drawing room, then found we’d papered our cat to the wall like the Canterville Ghost. Godfrey laughed a lot and commissioned a piece called ‘A Young Wife’s Tale’, which appeared in the Sunday Times colour mag.
My poor mother was subsequently besieged by telephone calls from her friends: ‘Darling, what’s a jockstrap?’
Shortly after I had the miraculous break of a column in the Sunday Times , which lasted thirteen and a half years. At the same time a publishing friend asked me to write a little book called How to Stay Married .
I was so unbelievably flattered that even though I’d only been married seven years, I said yes, and was soon merrily laying down the law on everything from sex on the honeymoon to setting up house, from in-laws to infidelity. With a deadline of three months, however, as well as my new weekly column to write, a six-month-old baby to look after and a newish house in Fulham to try to run, my poor neglected Leo got very short shrift and grumbled the book should be called How to Get Divorced .
He was, in fact, a huge help with the writing and, as can be seen by his photograph on the jacket, was the handsome hero of the book, which amazingly was published on time in October 1969 and even received some kind reviews.
Forty-two years later, when I blithely suggested reprinting How to Stay Married to coincide with our approaching golden wedding, my gallant publishers – to whom I have been happily hitched for almost as long – suggested I write a new foreword (or backward) from a fifty-year perspective. This entailed re-reading How to Stay Married for the first time since it was published, whereupon I nearly died of horror. What a smug, opinionated proselytising little know-all I was then. For a start, I announced sternly that men detested seeing women slaving in the house, so their wives must arrange to work from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. so they could rush home and clean, iron and cook before their husband returned.
‘If you amuse a man in bed,’ I went on, ‘he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it,’ or even more hubristically, ‘be unlikely to stray.’
How could I have insisted that ‘a woman should be grateful her husband wants her,’ and suggested that if a wife refuses her husband sex then she has only herself to blame if he’s unfaithful. Ouch, ouch! Amending this bit is one of the only changes I have made to the text.
More shamingly, I have never practised what I preached, advocating total honesty about money being essential in marriage, and that ‘couples should always know what the other is spending’. And that from a wife who regularly smuggled new clothes into her wardrobe, ripping off the price tag, lying: ‘This old thing.’
‘No wife has the right to go to seed,’ I thundered, when I myself become a positive hayfield when I’m trying to finish a book, not washing my hair for days, hairy ankles sprouting out from ragged tracksuit bottoms. Yet not a word did I add urging husbands to exert
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