WHAT I LEARNT ABOUT MARRIAGE
Clover Stroud reflects on strengthening the bond
An older, wiser, twice-divorced friend once told me, ‘You know you’re a grown-up when you no longer make the same mistake twice.’ She threw it into conversation after I told her I was getting married again. I was 34, with a mortgage, two children and a growing career to my name, but somehow I felt she was suggesting I was still a child, walking headlong into a second divorce that would surely follow my second marriage. Was she trying to tell me I still needed to learn the lessons that would make me an adult? Perhaps she was simply nervous about second marriage. Statistically, marriage is a fairly precarious place to find yourself. Having done it once, I knew it required a certain leap of faith. None of us really know how we’ll feel in five, 10 or 20 years’ time, so promising yourself to one person for the rest of your life is a rash thing to do. I dislike the flat claustrophobia of the term ‘settling down’ when the gamble of marriage feels more like a beautiful, terrifying, crazy moment of jumping into the unknown with one another.
But my friend who offered me the advice may have had a point – since I’d already failed at marriage in my 20s, shooting for a second seemed reckless.
The point is that although both relationships fall under the institutional term ‘marriage’, they’re playing out in a very different way, and this isn’t just because I’ve been married to very different men. Neither, I hasten to add, is it because I think I got it ‘right’ this time having got it ‘wrong’ last time. I am, I realise, a different woman now to the girl who first married at 24, and the way I navigate my second marriage is also different.
In a way, the circumstances haven’t changed much. My second husband, Pete, and I still face the usual problems that erode a relationship – too much stress and daily demands but not enough sleep, time alone or as much money as we’d like. I once had a boyfriend who remarked that I had so much baggage I needed my own baggage handler. It was a criticism, but to me that ‘baggage’ is the suitcases of life packed with precious lessons, and I want you to know I have absolutely no regrets about my first marriage, least of all because it gave me my eldest two children, now 14 and 17. So, here’s what I learnt along the way…
1 RECKLESSNESS IS ONLY EXCITING IN THE SHORT TERM
My first husband was – and still is – a wild and deeply compelling musician. He went to bed at dawn every day and had a singing voice that could make a grown man cry. I fell madly in love with him; his recklessness both excited and scared me. The truth was that I was 24 and didn’t really think about the future, or whether his character would suit fatherhood, or indeed being a husband. I didn’t think about these things because I just wanted him and wanted his children; nothing else mattered. If I’d been older, I might have been more careful to make sure my expectation of life was matched to my potential partners, but I also know that sometimes life just doesn’t work like that. Sometimes, giving in to the magnetic pull of the human heart is all you can do, which is exactly what happened to me with my first marriage. Time and experience, however, have taught me that wild living and reckless choices are romantic and exciting, but usually only in the short term.
2 YOUR PARTNER ISN’T RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR HAPPINESS
It wasn’t just romance I was looking for, though. I know now, with lots of therapy behind me, that my early marriage was also driven by a powerful, almost overwhelming need to recreate a family I’d lost. At 16, my childhood was shattered when my mother had a riding accident, leaving her catastrophically brain damaged. I wanted marriage and babies to take me back home, but the first lesson I needed to learn was that placing such responsibility for my own happiness in another person’s hands was wrong. That responsibility fell to me alone.
3 SELFISHNESS WILL WEAKEN A MARRIAGE
I was happy on the morning of my first wedding, pregnant and wearing a pink dress. Our son was born four months later and our daughter less than three years after that. Things changed, then unravelled quickly. Looking back, I see we were both too young, too selfish, too driven by what we personally wanted rather than what we wanted as a team to make the small, daily shifts and huge, life-changing accommodations that a lifelong relationship demands. We both wanted things to go our own way, refusing to acknowledge the effect this would have. For my husband, that meant holding on to the life he had before we met, where music and carousing defined him. At home, I champed and fought against the unfairness of my new role as a permanent babysitter, seething with resentment and frustration.
4 HARBOURING ANGER AGAINST AN EX ISN’T CONSTRUCTIVE
Divorce was painful. For a while, blaming my ex-husband for everything that had gone wrong was easy and probably inevitable.
But, when the drama went quiet, I needed to acknowledge the role I’d played in our broken relationship. ‘It’s easy for divorcing couples to lay blame on one another,’ says Janet Reibstein, visiting professor at Exeter University and author of The Best Kept Secret: Men And Women’s Stories Of Lasting Love. ‘But harbouring anger against an ex-partner isn’t constructive, and means you haven’t
‘BLAMING MY EX WAS EASY AND INEVITABLE’
‘I’M BETTER AT TRYING TO FIND A WAY TO WORK THINGS OUT’
processed those feelings.’ Letting go of blame was crucial if I was to find a new relationship. Professor Reibstein agrees, adding, ‘Anyone thinking of second marriage should be realistic about what goes on over a lifetime between two people. Understanding your tolerance levels is a good start, as is being frank about how you can change your imperfections.’
5 WITH DIVORCE COMES SELF-AWARENESS
Professor Reibstein feels a second marriage has higher chances of succeeding if you look at the first as a circle. ‘Think about what caused cracks in your first marriage,’ she says. ‘Think about what negative characteristics the other person brought out in you, rather than telling yourself the failures were the things they did.’ I’m not saying scrutinising myself was especially pleasant. I could see that I’d held on to anger when things didn’t go my way, and I’d avoided responsibility when it should have been mine. Married or single, those were parts of myself I didn’t want to nurture. For a while, learning to be alone in the new status quo, to support my children and myself and find some stability, was all that mattered. But, as my new life unfolded as a single mother, acknowledging the parts of my marriage that had been happy was important, because it helped me to understand how I might find that happiness again with another person.
6 WORK OUT WHAT YOU NEED AND WANT IN A PARTNER
‘People make the mistake of overcorrecting when it comes to choosing a second partner,’ says Professor Reibstein. ‘If you’ve been hurt, it’s easy to think you want to go for someone completely different. But that means a lot of good stuff is forgotten, so think about what you want more of in a second marriage.’ My first husband was funny and clever; I realised I liked sparky conversation and a life lived outside convention, too. But the resentment that was born from our relationship showed me how much I hated being stuck in a role – the trapped mother, the domestic nag – and that, instead, if I was to find a new relationship, I wanted it to be something malleable, something that would grow as our lives changed. I think I was lucky when I met Pete, someone I’d known at university but had not seen for well over a decade. I had an overwhelming sense that he was someone I could share real intimacy with – and I’m not just talking about sex – for as far into the future as I could imagine.
7 CONFLICT IS INEVITABLE, BUT SOMETIMES VALUABLE
We’ve been married for six years and together for eight. We have five children – two teenagers from my first marriage and three younger children who are all under six. We hit the ground running as a family unit, as there was never any time when it was just Pete and me. Our marriage has the potential to be loaded with as much conflict as my first; it’s not without its challenges, but what marriage is? The main change between the two marriages is that conflict, when it inevitably comes, is less destructive. At its best, it can even be used as a trigger for working things through together.
8 TAKE A DEEP BREATH IN A FIGHT
When Pete and I fight, I’m aware of how high the stakes are, and that’s constructive. I slam the door less, flounce off less often and I’m better at trying to find a way to work things out. I still feel just as irritated by the usual demands that erode a relationship – the stress of working hard, sleeplessness wrought by small children, often a complete absence of time together – but
I’m calmer about them, too. I know the children will eventually sleep, that the demands of that work task will pass and that life will change.
9 A MARRIAGE IS A PROJECT
Experience and watching years pass has given me a sense that marriage is a project that will go through many stages. As a younger woman, I always wanted to be in a heightened state of ‘in love’, but that’s too static. I know it will change and I shouldn’t be afraid of that. I understand, too, that there’s no such thing as a ‘happy ending’, however much we all long for it. I understand that stepping up to the moral high ground and refusing to budge from there is the way a toddler thinks, and I know that a few kind words and a tiny gesture – a hug, a smile, even a cuppa – are probably more valuable to a marriage than any of the ‘romance’ that is peddled by Hollywood. And when I look back at my friend’s advice, I think she was wrong; you can make the same mistake again, but knowing how to react to it is the real sign of becoming a grown-up.
The Wild Other: A Memoir by Clover Stroud (Hodder) is out now