Or are you at risk of Perfect Marriage Syndrome?
Maintaining marital bliss is stressful for everyone, says Lauren Libbert – so let’s stop peddling the ‘happily ever after’ myth
On the face of it, Louise and Jamie Redknapp had one of the most steadfast, solid marriages in the public eye. Together for 23 years and married for 19 of those, with two beautiful boys, they seemed the picture-perfect couple as Jamie, 44, sat, doe-eyed and adoring, in the audience every week while Louise, 42, danced her sequins off in last year’s Strictly Come Dancing.
“I wasn’t expecting for him to be there every Saturday in that front row,” cooed Louise at the time. “And that has made this even more special for me, because it’s something really nice to see someone you love extremely proud of you.”
In turn, that made last week’s rumours that their marriage has hit the rocks even more surprising for many. Louise’s close bond with her 28-year-old Strictly co-star, Daisy Lowe, is said to have contributed to the split, whether a symptom or catalyst of the “midlife crisis” her in-laws seem to believe she is going through.
Regardless of the specifics, why is it that some celebrity splits rock us more than others? You may have felt a similar stab of disappointment when the bubble between Demi Moore and Bruce Willis burst almost 20 years ago; perhaps you were stunned when Brangelina broke up last year. Even if you consider yourself above such things, if Richard and Judy or Kate and Wills were to split, the world as we know it would surely rock briefly on its axis. If they can’t make it, who can?
It isn’t just these celestial lodestars that many of us measure our terrestrial marriages against. Perfect couples are everywhere; clogging up our social media feeds with Happy Anniversary poems and pictures of lovingly prepared birthday breakfasts or simply walking into parties hand in hand and finishing each other’s sentences, each and every one of them perpetuating the myth of a “happily ever after”.
And – Danielle Steele fans, close your eyes now – it is a myth. According to recent figures from the Office for National Statistics, the number of couples in Britain who describe themselves as “extremely unhappy” has doubled in the past five years, while those who describe their relationship as “perfect” has gone down from 9.2 to just 5.9 per cent.
The illusion of the perfect couple is just that – an illusion – and nobody feels the pressure of maintaining this façade of marital nirvana more than the couple themselves, as Rachel, a PR director in her late forties can testify.
Married for the best part of 10 years to a good-looking, kind and hardworking man, she had it all – two children, a four-bedroom house with a huge garden, multiple holidays and a great group of friends. She constantly posted pictures of their perfect family life on Facebook to prove it. “And yet, I knew I loved my husband like a brother,” she says. “He wasn’t my match. I always wanted to tell someone I knew it wasn’t right, but how can you do that when all your friends are his friends, too, and all your family adore him? I felt like I had made my bed and I had to put up with it.
“Making my life look fantastic convinced me – and everyone around me – it was all fine, but it was such a pressure to maintain and I was incredibly lonely. We lay like strangers next to each other at night, pretending to read books. I only faced up to the reality when he became seriously ill, because I knew I couldn’t spend the rest of my life caring for him. When I told people we were splitting up, it took a long time for them to accept it as they had no idea.”
Caron Barruw, a psychotherapist who has been counselling couples in crisis for the last 20 years, is often confronted with couples who appear to have an idyllic marriage on the outside and yet are experiencing deep, sometimes irreparable, problems within. “It’s usually one party who is busy making sure that everything looks perfect, sending the kids to the right schools, going on the right holidays, obsessed with doing the things they should be doing instead of feeling things they should be feeling,” she says.
“This person is often a perfectionist who sets the culture of the couple and lives life as if it’s a presentation, unable to be truly intimate or cope if things go wrong. And if they’re unhappy, they not only don’t admit it to friends but they don’t admit it to themselves, because doing so would cause the façade to crumble. So they put up with husbands always being on the phone on holiday, for example, by convincing themselves the kids had a great time, they were staying in a beautiful place and brushing the problems away. Consequently, they live under enormous pressure.”
Cara, 55, knows this too well. Married for 21 years to an investment banker and self-made millionaire, she had a life many could only dream of; three beautiful children, luxury cars, diamonds, four holidays a year and a vibrant social life.
“People always saw us as a happy, strong couple,” she says. “Every Saturday night, we’d go out with friends, and we’d laugh and chat and nobody would have a clue what was going on behind closed doors. And the second we got into the car, this feeling of utter sadness came over me; a despair and dread to be back there, alone, with him. At that time, nobody was divorced, we all had young children and everyone else seemed happy in their marriages, so I convinced myself I was. Even towards the end, I carried on as if we were going to be together forever, looked at buying a house abroad, got architects in to extend the house again. But inside I just kept thinking, ‘How can I do this, how can I keep pretending?’”
It took the children leaving home, and meeting another man, for Cara to finally call an end to her sham of a marriage. “Our crowd of friends couldn’t understand it,” she says, because for them, it had come out of the blue.
“They thought I was mad. Even my family kept questioning my decision for a few years after. I shouldn’t have kept my unhappiness a secret for so long.” But admitting to marital woes is often not an option. In their book Holy Matrimony: An Exploration of Marriage and Ministry, Mary Kirk and Tom Leary explored the expectation by congregations that clergy couples role-model the ideal domestic relationship, noting a high incidence of depression in wives.
“Clergy wives and husbands have a tough time of it, as do politicians – they have to be role models for the community and feel they are letting the side down if their marriage is failing, which puts enormous stress on them,” agrees Suzy Miller, a divorce strategist (bestwaytodivorce.co.uk). “The danger is that it’s harder for them to openly take steps to improve the situation. We still live in a culture where instead of applauding a couple who go to counselling, we think, ‘Oh dear, their marriage is in trouble’.”
The key, according to Nicky and Sila Lee, a married couple who developed The Marriage Courses (themarriagecourses.org) to help couples prepare for – and sustain – their marriages, is a greater awareness that there is no such thing as a perfect marriage. And so there’s no need for the rest of us to feel bad about not being in one.
“We are often presented with idealised images of what marriage and family should look like, but
‘Making my life look fantastic convinced me – and everyone else – it was all fine’
we are all flawed human beings and learning how to argue well and resolve conflict is necessary to build the health of a marriage – the substance of it, not just the image of it,” says Nicky.
“People need to be real about the stress and pressures within their marriage and be transparent about them. Married couples now are often more isolated than those in the past, thanks to living away from families and traditional tightknit communities, so they need to find trustworthy support elsewhere, perhaps with an elderly person or a friend not within their immediate social circle, so they don’t feel so exposed. Just talking to someone and normalising problems instead of brushing them off can puncture the façade and release the pressure.” Pope Francis put it beautifully, and bluntly, when he recently admitted, “a perfect family does not exist”. So stop pretending, everyone. Please.
Some names have been changed