Take it from me, women are NOT the romantic sex
His wife baulks at cards and candlelit dinners. But then, says one husband, it’s men who are really the soppy ones
AVALenTIne’S day confession: I’m pleased to say that romance is not dead in my 25-year marriage to my wife Jane. But, for something to be dead, it needs first to be alive.
In my marriage, romance was throttled at more or less the moment I proposed — and not by me, I hasten to add.
It was the early summer of 1992 and I chose the most romantic location open to a man on a limited budget: a wild, empty, remote beach in Suffolk.
After we’d walked along the shingle for a while, discussing the vast Sizewell nuclear power station in the distance, I paused, heart madly thumping, and popped my own nuclear question.
I already knew Jane well enough to know that dropping to one knee and producing a diamond ring out of my flowery shorts would make her snigger, not swoon. So I didn’t.
But guess what? She laughed anyway — a proper, extended chortle at the cheesiness of proposing on a wild, empty, remote beach in Suffolk.
Only when she’d stopped laughing did she say yes, and even then on the condition of a firm caveat that we must not consider ourselves engaged, still less advertise our betrothal to anyone else via a party or, heaven forbid, a newspaper announcement.
She didn’t want to be anyone’s fiancée, she said. She would go from being my girlfriend to being my wife. Getting engaged, she announced, was soppy.
That was the moment I realised for certain that my wife-to-be was no dame Barbara Cartland.
Jane and I have been together since 1990 and became husband and wife in January 1993. As the cherished cliché goes, we’ve had our ups and downs. But it hasn’t been what you’d call a roller coaster ride, more an invigorating adventure on the waltzers.
We have a strong relationship, founded on all the things that keep a long-lasting marriage reliably ticking along.
We love and respect each other, we have plenty of common interests and shared values, a similar sense of humour and three wonderful children. We have, I think, a healthy love life. We talk. We have a powerful emotional investment and a genuine interest in one another.
But we don’t do romance. If ever I try to surprise her with a romantic flourish, she is only ever at best weakly appreciative. And yet, I wonder how unusual she really is.
The cartoonish, sitcom view of married life holds that wives crave romance and husbands crave sex. The woman yearns for flowers, chocolates, the odd bit of jewellery in a velvet box, candlelit suppers, surprise weekends away, billets-doux on the pillow. The man will play ball if it means a roll in the hay, or more likely the marital bed, after dark. While this might be true for lots of couples, research suggests that it is founded on a general misconception that women are more romantic than men. They’re not.
For example, the magazine Psychology Today recently published the results of a survey of 100,000 people showing that men are almost twice as likely to claim to have fallen in ‘love at first sight’. The survey also showed that men are far more likely to be the first to say ‘I love you’ in a relationship.
There will be cynics who’ll say men use those three little words in order to elicit sex from the object of our desire. But then, the same research concluded that men report ‘greater happiness’ than women on hearing ‘I love you’ from a partner.
The explanation for this is mostly evolutionary.
For millennia, women have been more pragmatic when choosing a mate; love and lashings of romance might, after all, jolt them towards an unsuitable father to their children. So they need to be ruled by the head, not the heart, or, to put it bluntly, they could miss out on better mating opportunities.
Women are better off biding their time and choosing a mate with resources, or, at the very least, prospects. Romance, if anything, is mere window-dressing to them.
MY FRIEND Amelia certainly wishes she had listened to her head, not her heart. Twenty years ago, she fell for a dashing, dark- eyed, but destitute poet who made Lord Byron look like a stevedore.
He wooed and won her in iambic pentameter, then whisked her off to a croft in the Orkneys for their honeymoon. In March. It didn’t take long for the storm clouds to roll over the romance, too. The marriage was brief and an utter disaster. She’s married to an employment lawyer now.
Of course, the notion that men are the true romantics is undermined by the fact women are like bees to a honeypot when it comes to sitting down in front of a good old Hollywood rom-com or weepy.
But celluloid romance is safely embraced at a distance, whereas the real thing requires a streak of boldness, whether impulsive or premeditated. And that is much more of a male characteristic.
My heartstrings still sag a little at the story of a man I know whose girlfriend was flying home from new Zealand, where she’d spent two months visiting her sister, brotherin-law and new twin nephews.
He hired a brass band to meet her at Gatwick Airport, with a brief to play the theme from An Officer And A Gentleman, her favourite movie, while he proposed.
But, without telling him, she had changed her flight, arriving in Manchester via Amsterdam at about the moment the trombones were tuning up 250 miles or so south.
Callously, she had half-suspected he might make a big romantic gesture and wanted to swerve the crashing embarrassment. They never did get married.
Of course, there are those couples who fit the stereotypical view of marriage, where men are forever forgetting their wives’ birthdays or — heaven forbid — the wedding anniversary. But in our marriage, I never forget to mark the day we tied the knot. Jane, however, hardly ever remembers it.
If I’d had a dozen red roses delivered to her today, she would think I had taken leave of my senses. Britons spend £1.6 billion every year to mark the Feast of St Valentine, to which Jane and I routinely contribute . . . zilch.
early in our married life, I attempted the card and flowers thing, but she said she’d really rather I didn’t indulge in such nonsense. Her actual word was more vulgar. She told me firmly that a romantic gesture would feel more meaningful on any of the 364 other days of the year.
With that partly in mind, in a recklessly affectionate moment last week, before leaving the house at 6am, I did stick a Post-It note on the fridge door declaring: ‘I love you’. But when she later acknowledged it on the phone, I felt compelled to laugh it off, no doubt conditioned by years of practice.
Last month, we celebrated our silver wedding anniversary. I use the verb ‘celebrate’ very loosely.
I had booked a night at The ned, a swanky hotel in London. But when I mentioned it, Jane said she wished I’d asked her before making the booking. She didn’t like my assumption that she would cheerfully drop everything to leave our Herefordshire home and come to London with me, even to mark 25 years of marriage.
She’s a novelist, beavering away on her fifth book. Her time is
precious. Sure, she wanted to stay at The Ned sometime, she said, but didn’t see why it had to be on our ‘landmark’ anniversary.
She made the word ‘landmark’ sound preposterous. The other word, ‘cheesy’, wasn’t uttered, but it hung in the air like, well, the smell of cheese.
When we woke up that Sunday morning, still at home, I wished her a happy anniversary. ‘Oh, yes, happy anniversary,’ she said, her memory usefully jogged.
I opened my bedside drawer to give her the card I’d written.
‘Oh, we’re not doing cards, are we?’ she groaned. ‘I haven’t got one for you. I thought that going to a hotel was enough.’ Then I gave her the sweet little charm bracelet I’d bought her, something appropriately silver.
She sighed: ‘You really should have married someone else.’
‘I only want you,’ I replied, with ripe-Camembert sincerity.
I knew she wouldn’t have anything for me in return (though I still think that for the big 25, she might have managed a card), but that didn’t matter.
Over the years, it’s become a joke between us that I remember our anniversary and she forgets it. Her defence, when she feels she needs to mount one, is that it comes so soon after Christmas, and since it always used to coincide with the children going back to school, when her mind was taken up with sports kits and train passes and lunchboxes, she is conditioned not to remember it.
Fair enough, I suppose. I would have remembered the anniversary and forgotten the lunchboxes.
I sort of understand where she’s coming from, which, in a literal sense, is a mining community in South Yorkshire, near Barnsley. It’s not the most romantic part of Britain; it might be the least romantic. And yet, when we spend time up there with Jane’s parents, who are fit, energetic octogenarians, we both think how sweet it is that they always hold hands when they’re walking together.
And we love watching them dance, doing the jive properly, Fifties- style, rather than our makeshift version.
HOLDING hands, incidentally, came top of a poll recently conducted by the publishers Mills & Boon to find the 20 gestures considered most romantic in the UK.
Jane, though she likes to see her mum and dad doing it, doesn’t really go in for holding hands in public. She would much rather I demonstrated the enduring strength of my feelings for her by putting the bins out and emptying the dishwasher.
looking through the Mills & Boon list, I can see plenty of other suggestions to make her wince.
But then, romance is not about checklists — it’s what fits a particular couple and their unique relationship.
Nonetheless, it’s still hard to see how I can romance her. For example, breakfast in bed, number eight on the list, is practically her definition of misery.
Why anyone would want to tackle their breakfast semirecumbently, getting crumbs on the sheets, when they could be comfortably sitting at a kitchen table is, for her, one of the mysteries of the universe.
All this has saved me plenty of money and bother down the years. getting scrambled eggs and smoked salmon upstairs on a small tray, with a single rose in a wobbling vase, has never been a great skill of mine.
So, maybe, this Valentine’s day, I should actually salute my wife’s defiantly non-romantic streak. It’s one of the reasons I love her so.