Mindful marriage
Clemmie Telford explains the secret to wedded bliss in 2019
Getting married and hoping for the best is a little like buying a car in your 20s, never servicing it, and hoping it will still be running OK by the time you reach old age.
Two years ago, my husband Ben and I began seeing a therapist. Things had reached a crisis point. Ben, who ran his own business, had got into financial difficulty and had filed for insolvency. I knew things weren’t great, but he hadn’t been truthful about exactly how bad it had got. At the time, we had a two-yearold and a baby – we now have a third – and now I can see he was just trying to protect me.
We were in a dark place and staring down the barrel of divorce. But the therapy, which we did for a year, helped us scrabble through the mess and realise our marriage was worth fighting for. So I’m not surprised the number of women divorcing their husbands has dropped to its lowest level in a generation. A total of 62,712 filed for divorce in the UK in 2017, almost half the number who did in 1993.
Experts suggest this is down to an improvement in husbands’ behaviour. Harry Benson, who worked on the latest study and is research director of the Marriage Foundation, says: “At a time when men’s past bad behaviour towards women is being challenged, and quite rightly, we are now seeing clear evidence that men’s behaviour, in marriages at least, has improved substantially over the past 25 years.”
My generation – I’m 36 – sit in a weird place. Many of my friends’ parents are divorced, as are mine. Our mothers’ generation often gave up their careers to raise families. Traditionally, husbands were expected to work every hour under the sun to support their families, which meant they couldn’t be as involved as modern fathers. And if you are doing it on your own, child-rearing, while joyful, can also be lonely, relentless and exhausting. I can see how frustrating this must have been for marriages, and why these traditional structures lead to unhappiness and marital breakdown.
The generation that followed saw this and thought they could and should work as hard as their husbands. But they almost killed themselves with stress in the process.
Each generation learns from the next, and our ambitions for marriages and family life are shifting. Among the married couples we know, we no longer talk about wanting to climb the property ladder into the bigger house, on the nicer road, closer to the better schools, at whatever cost (the cost being more stress). We talk about finding balance and working together to do so. Success now, for men and women, means feeling fulfilled and happy at work, but not to the detriment of seeing our children or the happiness of our homes.
Most parents I know work harder at their relationships and want their work to suit a balanced family life. Ben has given up work to be a full-time stay-at-home dad, while I’m the main breadwinner in my job as a creative strategist and social influencer. This means we can empathise with each other in a way our parents’ generation never could.
Unlike either of our fathers, Ben knows what it’s like to be at home with young children all day, which makes him more mindful of how I felt when I was doing the same. And, unlike my mother, I can understand the pressure of being responsible for all the bills, which helps me be more mindful of how Ben felt when he was going through difficulties at work.
Throughout a marriage, things and people change: sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. A marriage isn’t just going to work and you need to check in with each other every now and then. When we first went to therapy, it was because we were in crisis, but now we go to fine-tune things. It’s like a marriage MOT.
We’ve learnt how to be mindful of how we speak to each other. My parents stayed married longer than they perhaps wanted to, “for the sake of the children” – but that can be damaging, too, because children hear the way their parents speak to each other. We’ve also learnt to be more mindful of each other’s triggers: when the going gets tough, I get busy and all over stuff. Ben, on the other hand, buries his head in the sand. Each trigger exacerbates the other, and I can easily burn out and become horrible to him.
The big lesson from our marriage MOT is that we need to keep
‘We can empathise with each other in a way our parents never could’
communicating. Like most mothers, whether they work or don’t, I still carry the “emotional load”. One day I sat Ben down and reeled off every single item on my emotional load, from watering the plants to buying a birthday card, to getting new school plimsolls for our eldest. If the washing pile stacks up, I get stressed. It may not be rational, but it makes me feel out of control. Now I’ve turned my emotional load into a real list and stuck it on the fridge, and Ben is happy to work through it.
Lastly, we know to play to our strengths: who is good at doing bills, or hates the ironing, or enjoys buying presents for friends and family? These are divvied up according to what we are good at, rather than along gender lines.
So, would I agree that these latest statistics are down to men behaving better and more responsibly in a marriage? Yes, having a successful marriage in 2019 means being mindful of what the other is feeling and experiencing. And if it means learning from the generations who went before us, we seem to be doing pretty well.
As told to Maria Lally