Jilly: I didn’t take my own foolish advice on How To Stay Married
WHEN Jilly Cooper was first asked to write a guide to how to stay married, she was just 32 and had been wed a mere eight years.
But now, after re-reading the book for the first time, the author has said she feels ‘foolish’ for offering ‘ smug and opinionated’ relationship advice.
The 81-year-old admitted she did not follow the rules in her 1969 bestseller How To Stay Married, which insisted a good wife could not ignore her husband’s amorous approaches more than twice in a row or risk him straying.
In the book, the author, who went on to pen a series of racy novels, also advised that a wife must wash, clean and cook for her husband, even if she has her own career.
Describing how she ‘ nearly died of horror’ after reading the book five decades on, Mrs Cooper said: ‘ What a smug, opinionated, proselytising little know-it-all I was. More shamingly, I have never practised what I preached.
‘I advocated total honesty about money being essential in marriage and that “couples should always know what the other is spending”.
‘That, from a wife who regularly smuggled new clothes into her wardrobe, ripping off the price tag and lying, “This old thing?”’
Mrs Cooper, who has sold more than 11million books in Britain, said that despite declaring ‘ no wife has the right to go to seed’, she could often be found ‘ not washing
‘What a smug know-it-all I was’
my hair for days, hairy ankles sprouting out from ragged tracksuit bottoms’ while working on her novels.
Writing in The Lady magazine, she added: ‘Yet not a word did I add urging husbands to exert self-control to avoid a beer belly.
‘In mitigation, I suppose I was writing in a different age. No one had dreamt up “new men” or paternity leave, and two-career marriages were a rarity, particularly if the couple had children.’
The novelist married publisher Leo Cooper in 1961. The couple adopted two children and stayed together until Mr Cooper’s death in 2013 at the age of 79, following a battle with Parkinson’s disease.
However, their 52-year marriage was strained in 1990 when a woman came forward to claim she had an affair with Mr Cooper for six years.
Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2003, Mrs Cooper described the affair as ‘crucifying and cataclysmic’ but admitted she had had a ‘ fling’ with someone else. She said: ‘In the early days of our marriage, I fell in love with somebody else and had a fling. Afterwards, Leo just opened his arms and said, “Come back”.
‘He was wonderfully forgiving and now everybody slags him off for behaving badly.
‘But an affair can happen to anybody. I don’t think it’s a reason for a marriage to break up. And nobody really has any idea what goes on between a couple when the door is shut, do they?
‘Often, when a husband or wife gets vilified for behaving badly, the other half has been behaving far worse.’