Adversity can make marriage stronger — as I know
Clever of the BBC to broadcast Andrew Marr’s documentary, My Brain And Me, next Tuesday — aka valentine’s Day.
Because while the programme promises a fascinating insight into Mr Marr’s road to recovery after a stroke in 2013, there’s a romantic dimension to the story, too.
The fact that Marr’s wife, journalist Jackie Ashley, not only stood by him following the revelations of an extra-marital affair, but also forgave him a subsequent drunken clinch with a colleague would have been proof enough of her devotion.
That she then nursed him back to health, taking nine months off work to care for him, is practically the stuff of Mills & Boon.
Marr, who has said their relationship became ‘warmer’ following his stroke, is a very lucky man.
But then, in marriage, as in so much else in life, the old saying is true: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In Andrew Marr’s case, quite literally.
There is something about confronting adversity together that creates a unique bond.
Provided the experience doesn’t break you, it adds to the general grout of a shared existence, joining the broken bits to create something new, yet at the same time recognisably true to the original.
I’ve no idea whether this matches the Marrs’ experience, of course, but it certainly matches my own.
Beforelast year’s eU referendum vote, in which my husband made the decision to stand on the opposite side of the debate to David Cameron, I had never appreciated the extent to which serious upheaval can bring two people closer — even though the nastiness it provoked still haunts me.
I wouldn’t, of course, compare thee experience to serious illness, norr would I wish to repeat it, yet it was, , in many ways, one of the best thingss that’s happened to our marriage.
That kind of thing — facing the music together and not only surviving, but thriving — is, , ultimately what love is all about.
Knowing when to leave a thing g unsaid; telling someone things theyy would rather not know about them- selves, and accepting the same in n return; and, above all, learning too listen and forgive.
The trouble is, no one teaches youu any of this in school. We’re veryy good at explaining to children the e mechanics of sexual relationships, but they receive not a single word of advice about one of the most important challenges of all: staying together.
Be happy, we tell them — and then wonder why their relationships fail. Because no one can possibly be happy all the time, and yet somehow that has become the modern expectation.
So many couples go through life doing their best to ensure that everything looks peachy on top, but never daring to delve too deep beneath the surface.
And then they’re surprised when, over time, their paths slowly diverge. They still live together, eat together, even sleep together — but neither is truly present in the other one’s life.
Conflict, whether through illness or otherwise, can change that.
Under stress conditions, your antennae become super-attuned to each other in a way that perhaps they haven’t been since you first met and sat up all night setting the world to rights.
You are alive more than ever before to the subtle changes in mood, the tiny ripples in the air that signal danger.
This is a new kind of connection, one that perhaps, after years of familiarity, you haven’t felt for a while. It can be unexpectedly thrilling.
It can cast the person with whom you may have shared a sofa and a curry on a Sunday night for the past ten years in an entirely different light. What could be more romantic than that?