Celia Walden

On the unexpected pleasures of a silent marriage

Because it’s only when you settle into your double casket – predicting not just the end of each other’s sentences but the start of them – that you understand marital harmony

That is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ announces my neighbour’s 14-year-old daughter, gesturing with her chin at a couple in the corner of the restaurant. Katie’s not known for bursts of great feeling, having had her senses dulled, her reactions stunted and her opinions banalised by the iTeat. So I’m curious to see what, in a rare foray into Real Life, could have inspired such vehemence. The couple are in their early 30s. They are sharing the calamari entrée and what looks like a blush zinfandel. ‘Some people don’t understand that rosé shouldn’t look or taste like Ribena,’ I shrug. But it’s not the wine; it’s that they aren’t speaking. It’s that they haven’t said a word since the fried tentacles arrived. ‘If I ever get married,’ she sighs, back to Photoshopping the nailfe she took earlier, ‘please kill me.’

You don’t have to be married to become a member of the Dining Dead. It just happens over time, as the chatty muscle withers. I don’t tell Katie this because it seems unnecessarily cruel, like telling anyone of her age that they will one day have folds in their knees and spend their days perusing the Waitrose yogurt aisle muttering, ‘Why do the kids never call?’ But also because I remember feeling disgusted by the Dining Dead myself, right up until I became an occasional member (we’ll get to the fully paid-up ones later). And you know what? It’s not so bad on the other side. Quiet, yes, but peaceful, too.

At frst you’re just playing at being married. You giggle every time you say ‘my husband’ and wear ‘I’m a Mrs’-embroidered bikinis, and your dinner table is as noisy as an Indian call centre. You tell each other what you ate that day and what you’d like to eat, what you did and what you’d like to do. You’re basically still firting – and it’s exhausting. Then comes the frst time one of you recycles an anecdote. It’s one of fve anecdotes that will get rolled out at every dinner party for decades to come, and after the initial bafement (‘This one again?’) it becomes kind of reassuring. As is the silence. Again, not the frst one, which sends your mind spiralling out into teenage terror, and which you feel the need to fll with panicked and pointless jabbering (incidentally more likely to prompt divorce than anything else), but the natural conversational hiatuses that occur regularly from then on.

Not so regularly that you become one of the real Dining Dead, however: the ones you see in the kind of fve-star cemeteries where dishes are served in their own ‘jus’, and where every silence is flled with venomous undercurrents, but regularly enough to make you what you now are: family. Because it’s only when you settle into your double casket – predicting not just the end of each other’s sentences but the start of them, and pointing wordlessly to a phrase or picture in the paper to shared hilarity – that you understand marital harmony. A harmony Katie and her generation will only ever experience with their iPhones. You see, they’re already the Dining Dead – and that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.