IS LIVING APART THE SECRET OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE?
After a separation of five years the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk are back together. DAVID ROBSON looks at the benefits of having a break from your marriage
THESE days we expect a great deal from our relationships. We are encouraged to believe we live in a world of options. We want high standards not just from our supermarkets and mobile phone suppliers but from our life partner too. This is not an age of grin and bear it.
There are so many reasons why it’s difficult to be a couple and, as many sooner or later find out, just as many why it’s difficult not to be. We separate from partners because we think we can’t live with them, then we get back together again because we feel we can’t live without them. Sometimes it’s the recognition that actually we love each other after all. There are problems, even big ones, but time apart has allowed us to understand what they are and they can be resolved. Sometimes we try again only to realise they can’t be resolved after all and now we’re sure we shouldn’t be getting together again. Better off out of it.
For them real separation is ultimately a relief but “trial separation” is an interesting phrase. On the one hand it doesn’t suggest you are attempting to be together, it suggests you are trying to be apart. In other words you would only collapse back together if you couldn’t make a go of separation. Or else it could also mean separation is itself a trial, an ordeal. There’s any amount of advice online or in books or from counsellors and mediators about how those asunder can bring themselves together again. As often as not it doesn’t work. Some couples come back together, some drift back together, others would have to be forced back at gunpoint.
Most people part with no intention of getting together again but then give it another go.
Elizabeth Taylor, you will remember, married Richard Burton in 1964, divorced in 1974 and married him again in 1976. (It has to be said the remarriage only lasted for a year and those two marriages represented only 25 per cent of her grand total).
Actress Pamela Anderson married the same man twice (two divorces). The brilliant, troubled American comedian Richard Pryor was married to two women twice – one involved marriage and divorce twice in five years, the other he returned to after 30 years apart and she outlived him.
BUT there are happier stories closer to home. Last Friday in Whitby, Yorkshire couple Stephen and Sue Tarr remarried in the same place and on the same date – August 19 – that they had first married 16 years ago. They split up and divorced after four years.
Stephen, a tree surgeon and artist in wood, had carved a seat with two hearts on it. He decided to take a picture of it round to Sue at her house in June this year. He hadn’t been there since the divorce. Within a week they had fallen in love again. Their divorce had turned out to be a trial separation. Togetherness is wonderful but you can have too much of a wonderful thing. Some find bliss in full-time coupledom, others’ equilibrium depends on separate interests and separate lives. How many lives have been disturbed by retirement and the presence of a spouse in the house all day?
Journalist Angela Neustatter has written about restructuring her long marriage to husband Olly. She calls it “living apart together”. Things reached a point when they thought they were seeing too much of each other so they moved into separate floors in the same house.
“We began inviting each other for a meal,” she writes, “suggesting a trip to the cinema, an evening in Olly’s flat where the television was, a glass of wine with my books in mine. We invited each other for sleepovers and out of that came a Tuesday August 23 2016 refreshed intimacy.” John Betjeman and his loving friend Lady Elizabeth Cavendish (who grew up at Chatsworth which makes Arundel Castle look like a lean-to) lived side by side in separate houses in Chelsea.
Film director Tim Burton and actress Helena Bonham Carter were a couple for 13 years. They have two children and made six films together but they lived in adjoining houses. “My house looks like something out of Beatrix Potter,” Helena said, “but if you go over to his house you’re in a totally different place. He’s got slime balls and dead Oompa-Loompas lying around.”
To Their Graces the Duke and Duchess we send our congratulations and the wish that their reconciliation is no trial at all.