Love and Marriage

Love and Marriage

U

nrequited love is a form of masochism. The sensible thing is to smile ruefully, shrug and walk away. This is the only way to retain one’s self respect. It may even impress the rejecter, if t is done with good grace.

            Thucydides relates that Sicilian pirates used to bind their captives face to face with a freshly killed corpse and leave them to rot together. I can think of no better analogy for a bad marriage. Swinburne may have had this story in mind when he wrote of marriage turning “our loves into corpses or wives” (Dolores).

            In 1875, Trollope observed in The Way We Live Now that “love was like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it”. This opinion still prevails in the Third World, where love, as defined by Westerners, is still a luxury for everyone except the very rich, who can afford it, and the very poor, who have long ago given up hope, cannot expect charity and so have nothing left to them except love.

            Good marriages entail small sacrifices. Most divorces (not all) spring from stubborn selfishness masquerading as ‘incompatibility’.

            My wife’s family were wholesale food importers. From this springs her lifelong preoccupation with and encyclopaedic knowledge of food. She is not only a superb cook, but can always remember precisely what she ate at a dinner or luncheon party, even though it took place fifty years ago. I, who can barely recall what I had for breakfast this morning, find this daunting and incomprehensible. One of her numerous sisters rings her up most mornings to discuss what they have been eating. These gourmets remind me of the White Knight of Alice, who claimed that the cleverest thing he ever did was to invent a new pudding during the meat course.

Hard, shallow, sluttish and yet hail-fellow-well-met with all and sundry, Lillian would have been in her element running a brothel. But she had a dangerous streak of violence in her make-up. Easily provoked, she would hurl heavy objects at her husband’s head with such force that they could have killed him had his reflexes been slower. Once a heavy iron doorstop narrowly missed him and smashed clean through the panels of the kitchen door. Another time, she struck at him with a sharp knife, which embedded itself in the table. She ended up after their divorce owning a gun-shop, after having tried her hand at pest-extermination, both revealingly destructive occupations. Marriages like this sometimes end in homicide. When they do, the woman generally receives only a nominal sentence. It is interesting to note that the children of the marriage have all taken Lillian’s side and will have nothing to do with their father. This filial chauvinism is endemic. ‘My mother, right or wrong!’

Einstein treated his wife badly. This may account for the comparative intellectual sterility of his later years, for a bad marriage saps one’s creativity. Frau Einstein had her revenge, relatively speaking.

My father was engaged to a young woman who contracted tuberculosis of the lungs. He was with her, holding her hand, when she died. A couple of years later, still grieving for her, he met my mother and proposed to her. My mother never forgave him for his devotion to his former fiancée, feeling, rightly, that she had been chosen faute de mieux, as she put it. The marriage was thus doomed from the start. A cleverer man would have kept silent about the relationship. Women brook no rivals, especially dead ones, romantically enshrined amid candles and incense, preserved forever in their husband’s heart, agelessly.

Few intercultural marriages are successful, sociologists tells us. My father was inspissatedly English. My mother came from an eccentric Welsh nationalist family, whose members disdained to speak English at home and sent my mother to be educated in a Belgium convent, so the detested English would not contaminate her. When she met my father, she spoke better French and Welsh than she did English. No sociologist would have given such an ill-matched alliance much of a chance of surviving. It didn’t. A shared cultural is the necessary, though not the sufficient basis of a good marriage.

Zoologists tell us that promiscuity among female primates is the rule, not the exception. I am always astonished at how faithful, on the whole, the human female is. Not wholly, however. Studies have revealed that over twenty per cent of the children born in wedlock do not spring from the husband. The actual figure may well be higher. This is another version of Cheats Always Prosper, known as Fooling Round in the Gene Pool.

Most women are quietly resolved to have the upper hand in marriage. Outside fundamentalist Islam, or certain other primitive societies, they almost invariably get it. This is not surprising. Men need women, for they have all sprung from a woman; most women do not need men (do ‘fish need bicycles’, as the feminists put it?) even though they may want them, for a time at least. For many women, men are simply a convenience or an insurance policy, who must always be kept in their place. This game is Matriarch.

Gordon’s daughter-in-law, Amy, told her mother before she married his son, Kevin, that she was marrying him “because she could manipulate him”. This did not surprise Gordon as much as Amy’s mother divulging this to him on the eve of the wedding, ostensibly because she thought it amusing (!), but really because she wanted him to know who was going to run the marriage – herself, through her daughter. She was right. This game is called Power Behind the Throne.

Melissa regards men as her personal slaves, to use as she will. She made her first husband, George, hold two full-time jobs, one during the day, the other at night. He slept only four hours before going on to work as a musician in nightclub, finishing at six and then heading off to work at his day-job. She went home and slept all day, to prepare for another arduous eight hours of drinking in the club. She eventually divorced him, when he was completely worn out and prematurely aged. He promptly found another woman, who treated him in exactly the same way. Most of us were surprised by this, not realising that he enjoyed being a slave. This game is Flog Me Again Massa.

Melissa then too another husband, Ben, rejected by his first wife in favour of his best friend, whom she treated like his predecessor. He too enjoyed playing Flog Me Again Massa, for, like his first wife, Melissa had chosen him carefully, rejecting other more affluent suitors who would not have given her the opportunity to play the role of slave-owner. She herself, as befits a slave-owner, has never worked, except for a brief period as a part-time schoolteacher and the giving of desultory clarinet lessons. Slave-owners and slaves, like sadists and masochists, seek each other out. George and Ben both exemplify the adage that a hen-pecked husband is like a dead tooth, being all that is left of a man when the nerve has been removed. This game should be called Dentist.

Jodie, who had been beaten severely as a child and later spent some time in a mental hospital, grew up to hate her father. She eventually married a quiet, brilliant man, Bernard, who, subconsciously she equated with her father. Since her father was dead, she was forced to avenge her wrongs on her husband. She proceeded to destroy his career by making him give up his well-paid and prestigious job and take another, which paid him very little. This enabled her to upbraid him daily for being a failure. Since Bernard is not a natural slave, but merely made a mistake in marrying a woman who saw all men as hated father figures, he has twice tried to commit suicide. She uses the children to force him to stay with her, since she enjoys punishing him. This game is called Revenge is Sweet or Got You at Last, You Worthless Bastard! Jodie plays it like the expert she is. Should Bernard eventually commit suicide successfully, Jodie and her relatives will undoubtedly excoriate his selfishness and cowardice. Jodie will be the object of everyone’s sympathy. Nobody has thought to ask the children what they think of the situation.

Brenda hated her philandering father, for her long-suffering mother had taught her to do so. She married Terence, a medical specialist, but continued to pursue a successful academic career. Her husband was the only son of a doting mother and the only brother of a gaggle of adoring elder sisters. Such an upbringing, in which he had always had his own way, had not prepared him for Brenda, who was determined to have her own way in everything and saw Terence as the embodiment of her hated father. This clash of mighty opposites produced a great deal of fire and smoke. The battle has been going on for years for irresistible force has met immoveable object. The upshot of this war of Titans and Asuras is a wasteland. Terence’s career has been completely destroyed. He is no longer a specialist but has been reduced to a lowly GP. Brenda herself is a neurotic wreck. Deeply troubled, unhappy and fearful, she spends her time travelling the world in the course of her job, but has failed to get the promotion she longs for. The couple will not divorce since both are deeply religious, thought, of course, they do not belong to the same denomination. Mothers who teach their children to hate their fathers are commonplace. But not every mother could achieve the stunning success that Brenda’s mother must be credited with. This game is called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Andrew has spent his life travelling the world, for his job as marketing manager of a multi-national demanded it. His passport bore the stamps of one hundred and eighteen countries, he would say. He lived a lonely life, out of a suitcase, in myriad hotels, for over thirty years. Suddenly retrenched at fifty-five, he found himself confined not just to his home town but to his apartment, where his wife, Sheila, complained shrilly that he was ‘under her feet all day’ and told him to find another marketing job quickly, not an easy thing to do at his age. Disconsolate, Andrew would henceforth leave the house every day at nine, as though he were off to the office, to spend the day in the public library typing fruitless job applications or wandering aimlessly about the streets. At home, he lived a Spartan life, for Shelia insisted that they had to economise in everything and fed him sparsely. “Ice cream only on Tuesdays. You know the rule!” she would remind him. Andrew eventually grew so unhappy he decided to end it all by developing cancer. He died, with characteristic thoughtfulness, just after his sixtieth birthday. Sheila promptly sold the apartment, collected Andrew’s superannuation and life insurance and moved triumphantly to her own home town, where she bought an expensive town house close to her mother’s and furnished it with well-chose antiques. She now spends her time travelling the world on luxury liners and has ice cream every day. People admire her courage. Her game is Survivor.

Edith was promiscuous, even as a fifteen year-old schoolgirl. She continued this promiscuity into both her first and her second marriages. At one time, she was running four lovers simultaneously, one for each of her four young children, as it were. She stopped sleeping around only when, after her husband divorced her for adultery, she took as her de facto a man twelve years younger. One concludes that (a) she regarded marriage and children as a license to be unfaithful, like an insurance policy against being thrown out in the street (b) she valued only a man who made her feel much younger than she was, for she was incorrigibly vain. Did she grow out of her genetic programming for infidelity, or did she give it up reluctantly, like a reformed alcoholic? Oddly, both her parents and her brother were sexually inhibited and prudish. One cannot always form an estimate of a woman’s character by scrutinizing even her closest relatives. Edith’s game is known as Living Dangerously, a variant of the popular game, Cheats Always Prosper, although she called it Stolen Sweets are Best, borrowing a line from the poetaster, Colley Cibber (1671-1757).

Richard’s wife, Rosemary, was always threatening him with ‘a lonely old age’. Unknown to him, she was systematically blackening him to their young children behind his back, to ensure they would have nothing to do with him once they grew up. Nobody could ever accuse her of being short-sighted. Her game was Undermine.

Early on in the marriage, Christine, her mother and her daughter, Emily, formed a powerful Triple Alliance against Christine’s husband, Ian. Grandma lived in the same suburb, only two blocks away. Battered and bruised, Ian at last recalled the Chinese says, “Of the thirty-seven possible strategies, the best is to run away”, and took a well-paid engineering job in Saudi Arabia, coming home to Brisbane only once a year for a month. During most of that time, grandma, wife and daughter go off to Singapore, while Ian goes fishing with his mates. Christine tells all her friends, who all envy her, that she has a perfect marriage, just like her mother’s was before her father’s premature death in New Guinea. The fact that she has not slept with Ian for many years does not worry her, since, like her mother, she has always abhorred sex. Emily has grown up to dislike and distrust men, as will Emily’s daughter and granddaughter. This neurotic chain may well have been unbroken for centuries. It is probably genetic. Ian calls this game Survivor; Christine calls it Strength through Unity. I suspect grandma calls it Men! Behind his back, his mates refer to Ian as ‘that poor bastard,’ claiming Christine has his balls in her pocket.

Bernadette, an arrogant, iron-willed woman with aristocratic connections, was married to Charles, an outstandingly clever surgeon with a mother-fixation. He had been orphaned when young and brought up in Dr Barnado’s home, rising to the top of his profession and a Chair in Surgery through hard work and intelligence.  Driven out of his native country by politics, Charles found a temporary, ill-paid job as Registrar in Australia. However, every time he moved to a prestigious and highly paid new post, his wife either refused to go or went with him for a month and then returned home. Unable to live without her, he would then resign. Eventually, nobody would give him a job. He then resigned from the hospital at the age of fifty-five and devoted his time to housework, dying of cancer three years later. As Sir William Ostler remarked, “Happy men seldom get cancer”. This game is called Cat and Mouse. The man is allowed to run a little way before the relentless claws scoop him back again. At his cremation, ironically, they played I Did it My Way. Hello! Whose way? His widow now luxuriates in the sympathy she receives for her unhappy plight.

David, a rather unworldly and naïve academic, was married to Rosemary, who was anything but naïve. Behind his back, she managed to conduct a complicated series of extra-marital affairs, sometimes running several men at one time. To cover her tracks and safeguard her reputation in a small university community, she would systematically trek from house to house among her friends, often accompanied by the two youngest of her four small children, weeping convincingly as she consumed coffee, cakes and cigarettes, while telling them that David’s lascivious promiscuity was causing her to think seriously of leaving him and asking for their advice, which was sympathetically and copiously proffered. When rumours of her affairs eventually began to leak out, her friends were properly understanding, arguing that her rakish husband’s noted promiscuity had eventually driven poor Rosemary to seek consolation elsewhere. Meanwhile David, who still remained stupidly ignorant of what was happening, being totally immersed in his work and having no interest in other women, was surprised to find himself rapidly becoming a social pariah. Even his own colleagues, fearful of their wives’ disapproval, began to avoid him. His first faint inkling of the reality of his situation came only when Amira, the wife of one of Rosemary’s most recent lovers, confronted him angrily, accusing him of driving his wife into the arms of Ian, her husband, in order to further his own infidelities. Even then, David still did not understand what was going on, telling himself that Amira was deluded by jealousy. He did not even mention the matter to Rosemary for fear of upsetting her, not knowing that Amira and Rosemary had nearly come to blows in a violent confrontation that very afternoon. After the divorce that ensued some years later, David was dismayed and puzzled to find that not only did he have no friends but that even his children had turned against him. Those who do not want to see will always remain stubbornly blind. This game is called Sucker, or more precisely, Machiavelli’s Best Pupil, for Nicolo would have been proud of Rosemary.

Shortly after his marriage, my father went out, with his mother in tow as adviser, and bought a house. He was naïve enough to expect my mother to be pleased at the prospect of living in a house, chosen in effect by her mother in law, which she disliked at first sight, especially as he had bought it in that location so as to be close to his mother, whom she detested. This totally unsuitable house became a constant bone of contention between them. Even when their marriage eventually broke up, he could still not understand what he had done so wrong. My father believed he was playing Patriarch, a game now almost obsolete, except in Islamic and African countries, where it enjoys great popularity. In fact, he was a pawn in the game of Matriarch.

When my uncle George was demobbed in 1946, after five years away from my aunt while serving in the army, they found they had become complete strangers to each other. Five years of warfare and extensive travel had transformed him. Five years of freedom had matured her. Divorce became inevitable. Marriages are based on propinquity and habit. Few will survive even a year or so of separation. The exceptions are the marriages of Chinese, which seem to endure for decades even though husband and wife only meet at rare intervals. In fact, such traditional marriages survive because of the separation, not in spite of it. This Chinese game is called Keep Your Distance, Keep Your Marriage.

On his wedding eve, James, an up-and-coming young lawyer, handed his bride a pre-nuptial contract. “If things don’t work out, this will make divorce easier”, he told her. He was quite upset when she called the wedding off. Some lawyers appear to stand just outside the enclosure marked ‘Human’. It’s an occupational hazard.

My wife comes from a Manchu family (plain blue Banner) which managed to emigrate to Singapore from Amoy in the upheaval after the Opium War (1839-1842), though Manchu Banner men, the ruling class of the Qing dynasty, were theoretically not allowed to leave China. Her father, who had a legal wife and several secondary wives (qi), as permitted by Chinese customary law and the British Colonial Office, not to mention an assortment of mistresses, turned the family into a battleground through his amorous exploits, which rivalled those of Xi Men-qing in the famous classical novel, Jin Ping Mei. The Japanese occupation of Singapore, which he almost alone among his family managed to survive, had convinced him that life was so uncertain one should gather one’s pleasures whilst one could. My wife’s mother compounded the ensuing problems by putting most of the children out to a wet-nurse for several years, very much in the fashion of the English upper class and aristocracy in the eighteenth century. This enabled her to pursue her own feverish pleasures, such as mah-jong parties. To paraphrase Churchill, monogamy, like democracy, is the worst form of alliance except all those other forms which have been tried from time to time.

My maternal grandfather had been badly wounded and gassed in Flanders in the First World War, for which he had volunteered. When my grandmother died, his old war wounds, apparently healed, opened up again through grief, the buried shrapnel, which the surgeons had not dared to extract at the time, working its way to the surface. He died a few months later. Such love is rare, though one instance is recorded in exquisite, seventeenth century verse on a tombstone:

            She first deceased. He for a little tried

            To live without her, liked it not, and died.

The classical brevity and deep pathos of this epitaph has surely been seldom equalled and never excelled. Today, we would say it reveals a neurotic dependence syndrome. 

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM