Why we all have a marriage crush
Don’t know if you have noticed, but it is no longer the done thing to lust after single celebrities. Phwoar, Ryan Gosling, Chris Hemsworth, Emily Ratajkowski! Not any more. Now we have couple crushes. We have graduated from the days of “it could have been me” and “what does he see in her?”, to “don’t you love them and their lovely married lives?”.
Amal Clooney is on the cover of American Vogue this month – that’s nice, of course, but 100 times better if husband George is in there, too (yes he is!) and it’s about the two of them. What we want to know is, which one of them cooks at home in Henley? Do they keep chickens, or ducks? Is he the grass cutter? What is “their” song, and can we get a look at their converted boathouse?
If the Clooneys are the golden couple we drool over, we can’t actually imagine being them. That’s Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, currently starring in A Quiet Place, a film that’s getting a lot of attention at least partly because it features a couple we like the look of, who we
would quite like to be (he directed her, so that’s like doing your marital advanced driving test).
These two score extra crush points because he is American and she is English and we’re partial to the unexpected and slightly unequal pairing: him tall, beardy, not that famous; her beautiful, posh and witty. We like that he has said “I married up and don’t I know it?” and that – after a false start with Michael Bublé – she had the common sense not to rush into the arms of any old Ben Affleck.
Coincidentally, we also have a crush on her sister’s marriage, to Stanley Tucci, which has the hard-to-beat appeal of a mended broken heart (he was a widower) and a shared love of hearty cooking (they wrote a cookbook together). And it doesn’t hurt that she is in publishing, not an actress who has meals delivered in miniature boxes.
Oddly, you don’t need to have seen your couple crushes together in order to be a fan. We don’t even know what Chris Shaw looks like but, since Martha Kearney has been promoted to the Today programme, we’ve found out a lot about their relationship and now it’s slotted into our top 10, just below DJ Jo Whiley’s and one above Helen Mirren’s.
If you wanted to break down the reasons for this, they would go something like: Martha and Chris fell in love at university, they went to punk gigs, they took a year out to travel in their 30s, he’s just paid for her to have a tattoo of a bee on her wrist at the age of 60. These are the kinds of details that inspire a couple crush. The little clues that reveal a rock-solid, enviable marriage.
But we’re not stupid. There’s a big difference between being glued to a marriage, Truman Show style, and believing in it. We didn’t have an actual crush on Brangelina, or Gwyneth and Chris. We don’t care for the showoffs, the vow-renewers, the anniversary junkies or anyone in the business of “making memories”.
And we can’t be pushed or persuaded. Some marriages, like Tom Hanks’s, look like good news but we haven’t got enough information to spark a devotion. Some, like the Cleggs’ or the Camerons’, tick the boxes, but it’s just never worked for us. And generally, you have to be mad about at least one of the couple.
We don’t tire of couple crushes often. And we have a wish list of people we would really like to get back together – even though we know there is less than a snowball’s chance in hell – namely, Lindsey Buckingham (who has just left Fleetwood Mac) and Stevie Nicks. Perhaps we are a bit stupid sometimes.
Couple crushes
We’ve moved on from wanting to marry that single celebrity to wanting to know all about their perfect marriages ‘Which one of them cooks at home? Do they keep chickens, or ducks? Is he the grass cutter?’