The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
Why we decided to get hitched in our 70s
Maureen Paton had been living with her partner Norman for more than six years when he fell ill – and they felt the need for a more formal bond
Ihad never thought about getting hitched to my partner, Norman Jopling, until he was hospitalised last year for nearly four months. After all, we had been happily living together without the need for any formalities ever since he moved into my house in December 2016, just over 18 months after we had met on a dating website in 2015.
He had won me over with his pithy self-description: “Slightly frayed at the edges but basically sound.” In the competitive world of online dating where so many people feel the need to big themselves up as the best available option, that kind of honesty seemed a good omen for our future relationship – and so it has proved. (I should add that he forgave me the vanity of having photographed myself underneath a pendant light for its flattering effect on my wrinkles, which suggested I was shorter than the tall woman he had been led to believe that he was meeting. It just made him laugh, another good omen.)
We come from similar backgrounds – aspirational working-class kids made good – and share the same values. He’s even a cat man who only wants to watch football once in a blue moon and is a better cook than me. As Norman likes to remark, “It was meant to be.”
So why the need for a ceremony in later life? It’s not as if people didn’t know we were together. And the last time either of us had got married to other people was way back in the dim and distant 1970s; his had ended in divorce after a few years and mine after 29 years with the death of my husband, Liam Maguire.
But somehow Norman’s illness, coupled with his age, made a difference: he is 79 and I am seven years younger. During his long ordeal in three different hospitals after complications from brain-bleed surgery last August, I visited him every day for a rollercoaster ride through the NHS system at its most acute. I wanted to see him for myself, keep a hospital diary, chase the doctors and watch him valiantly waggle his eyebrows at me as his only means of communication. One day, after he had recovered the power of speech, he said he was so touched by my “devotion” that he thought we should get married. Suddenly, showing a simple public commitment to each other seemed absolutely right and proper. After two spells in intensive care and three in high dependency, he was anxious that we should get spliced before it was too late.
Yet I didn’t want a wedding as such, since I still felt married (though not in a spooky way) to Liam. Even my garage still calls me Mrs Maguire. So I suggested a civil partnership instead, the novelty of which pleased Norman. He even had a ring to hand, an 18-carat gold one of mysterious provenance that had been in his family for years and lived in a glass jar with other ornaments.
At one stage we had to decide whether to ask our local north London register office to arrange a ceremony at our home because of his frailty. Luckily he became mobile again after months of being bed-bound, so we were able to book a north London register office near our home which has significant nostalgic associations for him. His old grammar school is just a cricket ball’s throw away across the little green surrounding the place, reminding him of the sport he enjoyed as a boy. Which convinced him that our ceremony was also “meant to be”.
I should add that there was emphatically no financial incentive for us to tie the knot. Although civil partnerships and marriage render existing wills null and void, we have no plans for major changes when we draw up new ones – since we both feel that legacies are for the younger people in our lives. Somehow, though, it seems a significant step to be each other’s next of kin in a way that everyone accepts. Hospitals, for example, still ask that question and it can feel awkward if you’re not formally recognised as such.
When Norman and I told our families – my stepson Rory, and Norman’s daughter Lucy and stepdaughter Mazy – about our plans the news was greeted by universal screams of delight (very gratifying). I think they were all just tickled pink that we were being such old romantics at our advanced age; or maybe they were the romantic ones, since the announcement of a wedding or civil partnership seems to make people go starry-eyed. At least it’s a little bit of happiness in a bad world where so much is uncertain, fleeting and broken, especially on the ever-changing social media scene that seems to encourage relationships to be disposable – and not for keeps. But at our age, it is.
Nevertheless we wanted a small, simple event with only seven locally-based guests, including Lucy and Mazy along with mutual friends, and a meal hosted by us in a local restaurant afterwards. Although Norman is recovering well since his discharge from a neuro-rehabilitation hospital at the beginning of December, he still didn’t feel up to a large party. Also, it doesn’t suit our particularly low-key style. Nevertheless I wouldn’t want to rain on anyone else’s wedding parade if they want to bring on the bling; if you can’t do your own thing in later life, when can you?
I got married in white for my first wedding and invited around 70 guests. That had been a register office affair too, but there were definite differences the second time round. Today’s Bridezilla wedding industry has ballooned so much since my original nuptials that I felt even more strongly that less was more in our time in life – though again, each to their own.
I certainly didn’t want one of those beauty-parlour makeovers that might make my Beloved fail to recognise the woman he’d had breakfast with on the day. Yet every female friend without exception asked me about The Dress. As a lifelong clothesaholic, my only bridal extravagance was to buy a slinky caramel-coloured maxi-gown with shoulder pearls, a high neck and long sleeves underneath a vintage purple cashmere coat from the 1970s of my youth. As befits a war baby, Norman decided to wear his classic Lincoln Bennett trilby – a favourite of Churchill’s – along with his best brown corduroy suit.
So that was our wardrobes sorted; and my widowed friend Victoria had sent a bouquet for me to clutch. We were looking forward to getting this civil party started, yet I found myself as jittery at being the focus of all the attention as I was back in 1977 for my wedding to Liam, especially when two officials comically mistook Norman and me for the parents of the happy couple because of our ages. Although we didn’t have to say “I do” as at a wedding, the civil partnership required us to affirm our love and commitment to each other before witnesses and then say a few words of our own if wished before signing the register. This was where all that life experience kicked in: when you know your own minds and how to speak them. Reader, I finally relaxed.
With a house full of stuff jointly accumulated over the years, we were never going to send out a wedding list like a young couple starting out. But one of the best unsolicited gifts we did receive was a framed copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”, which celebrates love that never changes despite the challenges. And at our ages, we should know.
‘Two officials mistook Norman and me for the parents of the happy couple because of our ages’