The quiet sorrow of a ‘ships in the night’ marriage

MosT people have never heard of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the 19th-century American poet, scholar and translator of Dante. But there is one fragment of his writing everyone will be familiar with, namely the phrase ‘ships that pass in the night’.

Isn’t there something timeless about the notion of us all adrift in isolation on the sea of life, with ‘only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness’?

It certainly struck a chord when the Newsnight presenter emily Maitlis told a magazine earlier this week that she and her husband Mark Gwynne, an investment banker, are so busy with work commitments that inevitably they ‘don’t see enough of each other, we’re like ships that pass in the night, but it works’.

How many couples will have identified with that scenario? rushing off in the mornings, struggling to get the kids to school, walk the dog, load the dishwasher, put out the bins with barely time to exchange a glance, let alone engage in meaningful conversation.

THeN home late at night, exhausted, prioritising homework and washing, cooking supper, before collapsing onto the sofa, just enough energy left to climb the stairs and fall into bed.

You don’t have to be high-fliers like Maitlis and Gwynne either. Almost all marriages, all relationships, experience the same pressure in their different ways. We struggle to carve out meaningful time with our loved ones. We live life along parallel lines, reconnecting at weekends, holidays, Christmas and easter, before clambering back onto life’s endless rolling stock.

’Twas ever thus, as Longfellow reminds us. But there is something more acute about the phenomenon in the modern world. I honestly don’t think it has anything to do with more women entering the workplace — it’s just as easy to feel isolated from your spouse when one of you is at home all day and the other out at work.

It is instead to do with the

blurring of boundaries between work and home life, the way one seeps, inexorably, into the other.

Thanks to the internet and mobile phone, the working day begins the moment we wake up and check the device by our bed. And it doesn’t end until that final scroll of our emails while brushing our teeth before bed.

Where once the boss, colleagues, news were kept firmly in check by clear boundaries, now the outside world with all its troubles seeps into our every waking moment, sliding down optical fibres, following us wherever we go.

And it takes its toll. It’s hard to have a normal conversation over dinner — if you’re lucky enough to be able to eat together — when the phone is pinging away.

Is it any wonder, then, that we are all increasingly ships that pass in the night? so few couples I know really interact with one another on a regular basis — talk, laugh, debate the big questions of the day, shout at the telly together, sit on a garden bench with a cup of tea and good book.

I know plenty of couples who exist side by side, not truly engaged with one another because the 21st century has turned our lives into a helter-skelter of long days and constant distractions.

My parents are probably the best example of a couple who really are deeply emotionally involved on all levels. They are always in each other’s pockets, which is probably the reason they’ve been married so long: more than 50 years and counting.

Call me a hopeless romantic, but that’s what marriage should be: two people with hearts and minds inextricably intertwined. Not ships that pass in the night, but a port for each other — come rain, shine or stormy weather.