Can kindness futureproof your marriage?
Nice’ is the most mundane word but it’s what women want from their husbands – or is that an idea that’s wildly outdated, shockingly sexist and disempowering of women, asks
IT WAS a subtle drifting apart, like boats that had slipped their moorings. Harry was immersed in his job as a pilot while Kate stayed at home in Bristol with their two young daughters, Rosie and Polly, running the local playgroup.
If it wasn’t for the crush she developed on the youth minister at the local church, their marriage would have simply coasted on like this, with Kate feeling a bit lonely and Harry becoming more detached until they were strangers under the same roof.
“We were sleepwalking towards separation,” Harry Benson says. “When Kate told me about her feelings for this other guy, it was a bolt from the blue.”
That was more than 30 years ago. Today the Bensons have four more children, Grace, 19, Sizzle, 17, Charlie, 15, and Johnnie, 13, and live in a beautiful farmhouse.
They love each other passionately and – close your ears, kids – fancy each other like teenagers.
“Ours is a story of a marriage brought back from the brink,” says Kate.
“When it started to improve it did so very quickly, like an open wound.”
Their secret? Harry started being nicer to his wife. “‘Nice’ is the most mundane word but it’s what women want from a husband,” explains Harry who is now a marriage counsellor and research director of the Marriage Foundation, a British think tank championing long-lasting stable relationships within marriage.
“When women become child-orientated, dads have to learn to become mum-orientated.”
“Happy wife, happy life”, is the contentious premise of the Bensons’ new book, What Mums Want (and Dads Need to Know).
The Bensons’ story of a marriage drifting into oblivion is representative of countless couples.
Research by the Marriage Foundation (marriagefoundation.org.uk ) suggests that in the year leading up to divorce, two out of three couples in Britain had been to some extent happy and not quarrelling.
“These relationships should never have got into a mess,” Harry says.
“These aren’t foul, abusive partnerships, but people allowing the process of drifting apart to overtake them.”
Their book should be, according to Sir Paul Coleridge, a retired high court judge who founded the Marriage Foundation, required reading for every married person.
It aims to stop unnecessary divorces by showing couples how to future-proof their marriages.
There are two main steps: “Both parties have got to buy into it, to be on the same page as far as commitment is concerned,” says Harry. “And then you’ve got to be kind.” Kindness was missing from the Bensons’ marriage and is what, according to his research, wives value most in a partnership, above sex and financial security.
It took a letter from Kate to make Harry see this. “She wrote that what she really wanted was a friend and I suddenly got it,” he says.
Their marriage had become a living cliché.
Kate was a devoted, natural mother and Harry a loving, involved father, but he never thought to be proactive, to take the children out while Kate had some downtime, or to book a holiday.
Instead he waited for instructions, so she started micromanaging him (he’s too much of a gentleman to call it nagging) and he began to make himself scarce, for fear of being jobbed. “The end result was disappointment, anger, resentment and drifting,” says Kate.
It took some effort. Harry, a Falklands War veteran, wasn’t a “friends with girls” kind of guy, but after some one-to-one counselling and a bit of soul-searching, he learnt to show her he cared, to notice when her sciatica was playing up, remember her birthday and Valentine’s Day.
“She laughed when I stuck a Post-it note on my computer reminding myself to compliment her, but two years later it had become habit,” he says.
Kate, feeling loved and cherished, gave him more freedom.
“If someone’s thought to bring you a cup of tea you don’t mind that they’re then sitting down with a paper,” she says.
What about Harry’s needs, though?
They were met, he says, when Kate was happy and began to tune in to the things that made him tick.
“We all have our own love language,” Kate agrees. “For me it is time, hanging out together, going for a coffee, and for Harry it is touch and actions.
“And he likes it if I do his chores for him occasionally.”
It’s a modus operandi that divides marriage experts.
Sir Paul supports their “simple, age-old, tried and tested solutions”.
Leading divorce lawyer Ayesha Vardag, meanwhile, insists it is wildly outdated, shockingly sexist and disempowering of women, and she believes focusing on the happiness of one person is a recipe for disaster. “Both partners have a big job to do,” she fumes.
“The approach that women should be treated with kid gloves while men earn the money and do the washing-up when they get home isn’t helping anyone.”
But the Bensons’ philosophy has certainly worked for them.
Once they’d got their marriage back on track they made a pact to go away together without the kids for at least a night a year and to go out for dinner often, and they still have regular Saturday morning coffee where they’ll discuss their marriage.
What about the elephant in the room: how much does a happy marriage depend on sex? The Bensons coyly maintain this kind of intimacy will almost certainly follow kindness and openness.
We have no reason to doubt them if their own procreation is anything to go by. The third baby was planned, Kate says, and the next three were “blessings”.
“We discovered what all doctors know: safe sex is only 97% safe.” — The Daily Telegraph