I can forgive my husband for Brexit – but not the dishwasher!

LIVING with someone before getting hitched prepares you for a lot of things – and the marriage tutorials our lovely vicar gave us in the weeks before the wedding helped me and my now husband prepare for a few more.

We talked about how we might cope if one of us had an affair, got ill, lost our job or if a parent died. But somehow the question ‘what if the UK decides to take itself out of the European Union after a closely and emotively fought referendum and you found yourselves on opposing sides of the most profound change in national circumstance since the Second World War?’ didn’t come up.

Now it has – with the upcoming British election adding yet more fuel to the raging national bonfire. And I find myself, a Remainer, married to a die-hard Leaver as the flames lick ever higher.

People (especially those who couldn’t understand why I married a Tory in the first place) are horrified. ‘What are you going to do?’ they ask me, wide-eyed and sotto voce. ‘How will you manage?’ Lawyer friends skip straight to drawing up the decree nisi.

But why? He is the same man I married, and the reasons I married him remain unchanged. He is clever, funny, faithful, thoughtful, devoted to his family and, while I find his take on dishwasher-loading (and fridge-filling, and what constitutes a neatly made bed or a tidy sitting room) insane, my love for him somehow endures.

No couple agree on everything. I consider Brexit to be the same type of disagreement as we have about filling domestic appliances efficiently – different in scale, not kind – rather than a moral schism as some seem to think I should.

Thanks to the rants about the EU’s infelicities he had scattered so generously throughout our 12-year relationship, I knew why my husband would vote to leave by the time the referendum came around. I knew they were respectable reasons even if I didn’t see them as persuasive myself.

And he knew and respected my arguments for wanting to stay. (In 2016 they derived mostly from my basic life philosophy that unless something is broken absolutely past repair, Don’t. Fix. It. I have added much more detail since).

What became harder after that, of course, was to separate ourselves from the emotions swirling increasingly violently round the issue. I was upset, for example, not so much by the result of the referendum but the path by which we got there – to my mind strewn with misinformation and appeals to people’s worst instincts from politicians who cared more about their own position than the national interest.

In the morass of confusion and upheaval that has followed, it has been hard not to join in with the growing tribalism and start to see everyone on the opposing side – including my husband – as The Enemy who plunged Britain deliberately, maliciously into this horrible mess.

BUT of course they – and he – aren’t and didn’t. Not all of them anyway. And Leave Remain is not the unbridgeable chasm between me and my husband that our friends think it must, or should, be.

We are not required to align on everything. We are two people, not one. I understand entirely the impulse to make Brexit some kind of ethical test – it shades into that very easily – but it’s one that should be resisted.

I think Brexit was and remains a bad idea. Mr Mangan remains in informed disagreement – unlike with the dishwasher where his position is one of simple pig-headed ignorance (combined with the utter depravity of regularly turning it on half full to, as he puts it, ‘stay ahead of the game’). And so, on we go…