One day, at the age of 17, I was musing with a friend about what we’d be when we Grew Up. “What do you think you’re really good at, Janet?” he asked, having already established that he was really good at spatial thinking, organisation and football.
Being notably deficient in all three, I stumbled, replying (surprising myself as I did — why didn’t I say “English” or “History”?): “Thinking about relationships.” At which my friend grunted noncommittally and dismissively.
I know now where that came from: about then I’d begun closely observing my parents’ relationship. For they had been “in love”. It wasn’t just that I grew up an American in the Fifties and Sixties, when television Mums and Dads were always in love in a world devoid of divorce. My brothers and I believed in “in love”: we lived within it. Our parents adored and enjoyed each other, even kissed in front of us, though they were also regularly bad-tempered with each other. We knew what day-to-day “in love” meant.
Then, when I was 16, my mother got breast cancer and thought she would die. Her two sisters had died. So had everyone we knew who’d had it. She lived; breast cancer killed her in a second bout years later. But her desperation and bitterness, and my father’s inability to contain them, eroded their relationship that first time round: adoration and enjoyment faded into memories.
So what was this “love” thing? My parents did not split up, and remained inextricably bound together: was it love that characterised that clinging? My parents, in the end, recovered love: as my father became ill, they forged a tensile new bond, remembered their original meaning to each other, and uncovered their mutual capacity to nurture.
That became a new question: how can love be resilient? Why, for some, does it die, but for them it bloomed anew?
Just before my parents’ marriage became troubled, a friend tried to live at my house. “I just want to be around your parents,” she explained. “Mine hate each other.”
She wanted to explore the mystery, too. Happy love stories are hidden. Intimacy is not public. Real love stories are, therefore, private and secret. Moreover, the rhetoric around intimacy is that it ought to be private — unless you’re in trouble, and then the troubles ought to be “talked about”.
So happiness gets lived out behind closed doors, while troubled relationships become part of the discourse we hear publicly. In consequence we’ve come to believe that happy relationships are fairy stories; real relationships disappoint or fail.
During their bad patch my mother confided, resentfully, about my father. Into the breach between them, out of her pain and loneliness, my mother’s stories became tales of anger and rejection. In doing so she broke their implicit pact of privacy; and thus began a tale of unhappiness, overwriting the one she’d lived by with my father for years before, of happiness. Telling it to me, on her own, without him, was significant: she was beginning to reinforce its growing credibility to herself through another’s listening to it, through telling it aloud.
The very act of telling it apart from him underlined their estrangement at that point, increasing and verifying it. Indeed, this marks the process of estrangement: separate stories growing and told apart from the other, which have as their theme the very estrangement itself. I see this, as I work with couples on the edge of divorce, in my clinical practice: two divergent accounts of the same lives.
Then, as my father’s illness drew her back to him, as she watched him become thin, white and helpless, she deeply regretted her confidences to me. Their story, melded together again by their shared commitment to each other, their pleasure in their mutual support, their resumed daily conversations and satisfying routines, went underground, bounded off again. They were once again a couple bonded together, once again their private world was sealed up. The essential secrecy of such a strong bond is why my friend wanted to live inside my parents’ private house: she peeked in and spotted it, behind closed doors.
This is what I’ve branded “The Best Kept Secret”, the title of the book I’ve written that has grabbed the happy stories of long-enduring couples whose relationships have been central and transformative, before their inbuilt silence, pitted against the public nature of the unhappy ones, kills off the very idea that such relationships can exist.
Stories like that of my parents. I, too, have been in a strong partnership of more than 30 years, which has produced two adored, now grown, sons.
Watching it regenerate despite huge differences and bumps between us, including illness like my mother’s, has been part of my wonder. (And our sons’: one commented recently that he pictured his father and me as “rocks together”; at a similar age to me, he witnessed deep difficulties.) All the stories include dramatic tribulations and periods of distress, even trauma, to their love. As a recent reader remarked: “They’re like little minidramas.”
Yes. With happiness together emphasised, in the end.
I did manage to turn that “thinking about relationships” into a profession. I am a psychologist and academic who is both a clinician and researcher on couples’ relationships. I start with what works in couples, rather than what doesn’t, to help couples whose relationships aren’t going well. But how was I going to get people to go public with stories that I’ve argued are inherently private?
Playing against privacy is the desire to tell about happiness. We carry around accounts, or mini-stories, in our heads. If they’re positive, an airing is unsurprisingly welcome; summoned, they spill forth. People can talk for England, or America, the two main sources of participants in my study, about happy relationships. As one 72-year-old man pronounced after our interview: “I didn’t know I had that all in me! I think everyone should be made to do it!”
Calls for participants in national media, along grapevines and through organisations brought forth more than 200 participants.
“All happy families are alike,” wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, but he was wrong. Each story is different, despite core commonalities. One is a fizzy beginning, or “charisma” in one participant’s description: falling in magical love provides glue. It’s the necessary, but not sufficient condition, for long love stories. I’ve been told that this book is a smart wedding present, taking things beyond stars in one’s eyes. The individual stories tell how people manage to pluck the thorns of daily life from their desire, pleasure, and appreciation for each other. Each story shows how life gets in the way. But underlying each are core themes that show how love survives.
These couples frame their tribulations and differences as inevitable and they learn from their past. The present distress is never the total picture: they remind themselves of the other’s virtues, on the one hand, and also what has worked for them previously. So in one couple’s story the Evil Mother-in-Law remains evil over 30 years, still undermining her daughter-in-law, still testing her son’s loyalty. The couple no longer seek to change the mother-in-law, nor expect the issue to die. As it arises, they remember what they’ve tried, and come to understand about each other, try something new, build on what went before. Each time, with each new wrinkle, there’s a new tweak to lessen the blow.
The resources of time, energy, and attention are monitored, learning from periods of their neglect that the liveliness of the relationship withers. One couple actually sets an alarm an hour before their young daughter awakens, having realised that sex had gone by the wayside during the first two years of her life.
Overwhelmingly, there is a “privileging” of partnership. It’s often the partner who can get lost in the sea of other demands (he/she is a “grown-up”, after all, isn’t he/she?): these couples make sure that their partner remains in the forefront of their lives, along with children and, frequently, jobs, and are not sidelined with other demands. Attention and physical closeness are stoked. Even late in life, when physical problems have led to infrequent or impossible penetrative sex, couples adapt their physical language of love, rather than lose it altogether.
Strikingly, the stories told by these couples are very similar, even though they spoke to me separately. This can happen only if couples have given each other time, listened to each other, been open, and shared both important times and “core” values — “core” varying according to the couple. One couple’s life, disrupted as it has been by severe illness and children’s dramas, is rewardingly organis ed around deeply fulfilling political activism. Yet another couple’s politics are poles apart. For them, beset by recurring step-family problems, it’s not politics that define them, but raising a cohesive family: children in the great outdoors, fostering family connections, travelling to interesting places and sharing ideas around books and films.
Like my parents, these couples come back from hard times to adoring and enjoying each other, living out that secret which I’ve begun to decode.
The Best Kept Secret by Janet Reibstein, Bloomsbury, £12.99. Available for £11.69 from Times Books First, 0870 1608080, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksbuyfirst
Get married, be happy, look younger: what the research shows
The “honeymoon period” lasts for a year, according to new research investigating the relationship between happiness and marriage. The study, which followed the experiences of 15,000 Germans between 1984 and 2000, found levels of happiness rose as the wedding approached and peaked a year later. In the second and third years they fell. There was a slight improvement between the third and fifth years, but by the tenth couples were less happy than before they married.
Despite this the study, published by Dr Alois Stutzer and Professor Bruno Frey, of the University of Zurich, concludes that for most of their lives people who marry are happier than those who do not. It was not until they were 60 that single people began to report the same levels of happiness as married couples.
A successful marriage can have unexpected benefits. In January, Danish researchers found that a happy marriage made women look an average of two years younger than their real age, and men a year younger. A recent American study found that people in unhappy marriages had lower levels of overall heath than their happily married peers.
In Britain the number of marriages has been rising steadily. Figures released last week by the Office for National Statistics showed that 270,700 were recorded in England and Wales in 2004 — the third increase since hitting a 104-year-low in 2001, at 249,227. However, the number of divorces rose to 153,400 in 2004, the highest since 1996.
ELLA STIMSON
Six top tips for a successful relationship
Pleasure: do things that the other enjoys. If you do things separately, talk about them and take delight in the other’s pleasure.
