BEST BOOKS ON...

ENDURING LOVE

I RECENTLY worked out that my husband is my longest-ever housemate. We have been living together for 11 years and married for more than a decade. I shared this information with him as we were going to bed one week-night.

He emitted a surprised — perhaps even a slightly strangulated — ‘ha’, somewhere between a disbelieving yelp and a wry guffaw, then nothing more was said on the subject.

Thursday is Valentine’s Day, a redletter day for card retailers, chocolatiers, restaurateurs and supermarket booze aisles, that holds everyone else hostage, single or coupled up. If you are in a relationship, ignore it at your peril.

Equally, relationships are an everyday project, built more on the rhythm of dishwashers being unloaded and bins going out than the arrival of blowsy bouquets.

Many writers make the pursuit of love their theme. How love might endure, and in a worthwhile way, is a more mature subject.

‘Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and the sea is not within sight — that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin,’ reflects George Eliot’s narrator, in her masterpiece Middlemarch, of the disastrous first marriage of the ardent Dorothea Brooke to the desiccated, coldhearted Mr Casaubon.

But for some ‘an enclosed basin’ has a comforting familiarity. ‘I suppose we’re lucky to have each other to ignore,’ jokes Stella to her husband Gerry in Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break. A retired couple, bickering affectionately on a break to Amsterdam, they are entirely attuned to one another’s habits and foibles.

The scenes from a marriage offered in American Katherine Heiny’s darkly funny Standard Deviation are more satirical. Graham is 12 years into his second marriage to Audra when he begins to wonder if he was not all along better suited to his first wife, Elspeth.

What these books show us is that even in established relationships, there is no room for complacency.