Is the key to a happy marriage really Love Actually?

TO be fair to Jilly Cooper, the Sixties hadn’t really got into the swing of things when she wrote How To Stay Married. Now, 50 years on, she admits she never followed her own advice and is embarrassed by the book’s ‘husband must come first’ views, and the suggestion that wives fill their days making paper flowers.

She seems a lot more candid at 81. ‘Am I boring you?’ she asked John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today programme, yesterday. ‘It’s very early in the morning and I had a sleeping pill last night and I’m probably talking rubbish.’

That’s not entirely true. Jilly’s own marriage confronted infidelity and the pain of infertility, but it survived until her husband Leo’s death in 2013.

I rather liked the bit in her book where she notes that if one half of the couple returns home after some time away, the ecstatic welcome home is often followed by ‘sniping and bad temper’ – which may chime with anyone who has come back after a few days elsewhere and griped about piles of dishes or forgetting to buy teabags.

Couples today are five times more likely to divorce than when Jilly’s book was first published, and many don’t bother marrying at all – perhaps because, without being unnecessarily bleak about it, marriage essentially yokes together two conflicting sets of beliefs until someone dies.

SLOBS marry neatness freaks. Toothpaste squeezers marry toothpaste spendthrifts. Someone who loves Beethoven’s last five sonatas may end up with someone who played the soundtrack from a zombie apocalypse movie in the car on their first date. (‘This is the sound of zombies clambering onto a boat when everyone is asleep’.)

I think we all knew Madonna’s marriage was doomed when she gave an interview saying that, unlike pubby mockney Guy Ritchie, she followed a rigidly macrobiotic diet and didn’t watch TV.

If she and Guy had spent more evenings on the sofa watching Bake Off Crème de la Crème, and The Handmaid’s Tale while working their way through a bag of Mackie’s sea salt and vinegar crisps, they could have reignited the spark. It seems to me that the basic rules for a successful marriage are loyalty, gratitude and compromise, but I’m unmarried, so hardly an expert.

However, by her own admission, neither is Jilly. Fortunately we have Professor Ronald Rogge of the University of Rochester. According to him, watching romcoms can dramatically reduce your chances of divorce.

He may have a point, although this should mean that Hugh Grant, who has finally tied the knot after what seems like some complicated and exhausting research into fatherhood, will have the best marriage ever.

So let’s see what Hugh’s romcoms can teach us about marriage.

Notting Hill: Up your chances of marrying an incredibly famous filmstar by living in Notting Hill, affordable for everyone from millionaires to billionaires, despite running an unsuccessful bookshop.

Love Actually: Up your chances of marriage by expressing the view that airports represent the very best of love and humanity, despite all evidence that they are where excited holidaymakers are made to walk unnecessary miles towards departures in the hope they’ll finally crack and buy a £7 coffee, while sunburnt, exhausted arrivals are made to camp beside a luggage carousel that runs on treacle and glue.

Bridget Jones’s Diary: The most unmarried person in the film has all the fun.

Four Weddings and a Funeral: Whatever you do, don’t get married.