a day are spent searching for credit cards, paper knives and spectacles, or a glass of wine left in an alcove in another room. The other day, we spent an acrimonious half-hour missing Downton Abbey as we searched frantically for the remote control, only to find Leo was sitting on it.
Having never mastered the metric system, I am utterly defeated by grams in cookery. Last week, as his red pair of cords plummeted to the floor, Leo announced he’d lost ten kilometres in weight.
Invitations and letters disappear in chucked-away newspapers, so people roll up unexpectedly for drinks or even dinner.
‘You never told me they were coming.’
‘I did, I did, but you never listen.’
But though domestic chaos is come again, I still believe that a happy marriage is the best thing life has to offer, cemented as much by the moments of irritation as of tenderness.
‘For everyone, particularly children,’ claimed Cecil King in 1969, ‘the essential basis for security and happiness is a loving home.’
To counteract this, hideous recently released statistics reveal that 50 per cent of children today can expect their parents to split up by the time they are sixteen. More tellingly, a vast 80 per cent of these splits happen to unmarried couples. Marriage, for all its limitations, makes people try harder.
Children above all long for their parents to stay together. When a teacher asked one little girl to define love, she wistfully replied: ‘Daddy and Mummy getting married.’
So I hope, despite some arrogance and smugness, that by charting the very real joys as well as the pitfalls – and panic stations – of our early years together, I may reassure and encourage more couples: married, unmarried, gay and straight, to stay together more happily.
God speed and good luck.
Jilly Cooper 2011
jilly cooper
drawings by Timothy Jaques
to Leo
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.
Here comes the bride
THE WEDDING
THIS IS BLAST off – the day you (or rather your mother) have been waiting for all your life. It’ll pass in a dream and afterwards you won’t remember a thing about it. It helps, however, if you both turn up. Dope yourself with tranquillisers by all means, but watch the champagne later: drugs mixed with drink often put you out like a light. And don’t forget to take the price tags off your new shoes, they’ll show when you kneel down in church.
Brides: don’t be
Having never mastered the metric system, I am utterly defeated by grams in cookery. Last week, as his red pair of cords plummeted to the floor, Leo announced he’d lost ten kilometres in weight.
Invitations and letters disappear in chucked-away newspapers, so people roll up unexpectedly for drinks or even dinner.
‘You never told me they were coming.’
‘I did, I did, but you never listen.’
But though domestic chaos is come again, I still believe that a happy marriage is the best thing life has to offer, cemented as much by the moments of irritation as of tenderness.
‘For everyone, particularly children,’ claimed Cecil King in 1969, ‘the essential basis for security and happiness is a loving home.’
To counteract this, hideous recently released statistics reveal that 50 per cent of children today can expect their parents to split up by the time they are sixteen. More tellingly, a vast 80 per cent of these splits happen to unmarried couples. Marriage, for all its limitations, makes people try harder.
Children above all long for their parents to stay together. When a teacher asked one little girl to define love, she wistfully replied: ‘Daddy and Mummy getting married.’
So I hope, despite some arrogance and smugness, that by charting the very real joys as well as the pitfalls – and panic stations – of our early years together, I may reassure and encourage more couples: married, unmarried, gay and straight, to stay together more happily.
God speed and good luck.
Jilly Cooper 2011
jilly cooper
drawings by Timothy Jaques
to Leo
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.
Here comes the bride
THE WEDDING
THIS IS BLAST off – the day you (or rather your mother) have been waiting for all your life. It’ll pass in a dream and afterwards you won’t remember a thing about it. It helps, however, if you both turn up. Dope yourself with tranquillisers by all means, but watch the champagne later: drugs mixed with drink often put you out like a light. And don’t forget to take the price tags off your new shoes, they’ll show when you kneel down in church.
Brides: don’t be
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