WHAT IS THE difference between a faithful husband and an unfaithful husband? One gets caught. Boom, boom.
I realise that this sounds like something from the Bumper Book of Rubbish Marriage Jokes (available from bargain bins nationwide) but it is a direct quote from a new polemic. In Marriage and How to Avoid It, Guy Blews argues that happy marriage is impossible, that human beings (predominantly males) are not programmed to be lifelong partners and will inevitably have affairs. To pretend otherwise is to self-deceive.
As I am weeks away from standing in a register office to make my vows, I suppose I should be worried. After all, the evidence is stacking up. Look at the 40 per cent divorce rate. Look at that study this week from Hamburg-Eppendorf University, which claims that as soon as a woman gets her man her libido drops dramatically. Look at the track record of Darren Day: men aren’t going to stick around if overnight their sexy bride becomes a frigid trout who sighs “Pull my nightie down when you’ve finished”, are they? But rather than making me depressed I find books like this to be quite amusing.
Does Blews not see that much of what he says states the bleeding obvious? Of course men are preoccupied by sex; of course you are not the same person at 50 that you were when you got married at 25; of course people have affairs. But why does that render all marriage hopeless?
I fully agree that if most heterosexual men were offered a bunk-up with Kirsty Gallacher and a cast-iron guarantee that their spouse would never find out, 99 per cent of them would probably fill their boots. Guess what? If you swapped Gallacher for Johnny Depp or similar, so would a great many women. But so what? This tells us nothing.
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The fact is that in real life there are no such cast-iron guarantees. By and large, people know that in reality actions have consequences and they make a choice. A great, great many of them choose not to commit adultery — not because they stopped being attracted to other people the second there was a ring on their finger but because they fear losing something they value. A quick vox pop of married men I know reveals that they are often tempted but cannot be bothered with the trauma and disruption they would cause themselves if they were caught. They make a utilitarian decision that they think will bring them, on balance, the most amount of happiness and the least amount of pain.
Despite the time-honoured jokes (Kinky Friedman, candidate for the Texas governorship, recently said: “I support gay marriage because I believe they have the right to be just as miserable as the rest of us”), the psychological and physical benefits of remaining married are well documented. Perhaps it was unfortunate timing for Blews’s book that this week yet another US university study was published, this time claiming that marriage alleviates depression.
I am not, believe me, a naive romantic. But to suggest that all men are physically incapable of fidelity is not only absurd but patronising. It is like saying they are all physically incapable of icing a cake. All men may feel like straying occasionally but I simply don’t believe that they can all have the inclination and energy required to act upon it.
Consider this spectacularly inane question from Blews: “Can anyone look at their friends and say they know someone who is 100 per cent happily married?” Erm, can anyone say they know someone who is 100 per cent happily single? Or 100 per cent happily cohabiting? Is the human condition conducive to absolute happiness? And if you’re 99 per cent happy with your wife but wish she’d walk the dog a bit more, would that not cut it with Blews?
Yet, this is not the main flaw in Blews’s argument: the main flaw is him. For starters he was a boarder at a single-sex public school and in my view nothing is more certain than single-sex education to reinforce the notion that the opposite sex is a mysteriously irresistible distraction around which one cannot trust oneself. Secondly, he suffered terribly as a child watching his own parents’ unhappy marriage disintegrate until they finally divorced when he was 21: understandably, this has given him a jaundiced view of wedlock. Thirdly, he has never been married. Neither have I. So I reckon that makes both of us ill-equipped to make sweeping judgments about something we’ve never experienced.
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Isn’t it less hysterical to say that some marriages work and some don’t, just as some people are faithful and others are not, whether they are married or cohabiting, gay or straight? Nobody has a perfect marriage but a great many people do their best and one cannot do more than that.
Besides, look on the bright side. As P. J. O’Rourke once said in a much funnier one-liner: “Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.”