Telegraph title: How to have a good marriage: say yes to sex and split the housework
Telegraph subtitle: A new guide to marriage suggests putting your partner’s desires first — even at 3am
Publication date: 3 june 2019
“Belinda Luscombe thinks we have been sold a whopper when it comes to marriage. “Almost every fairytale ends with a wedding. Even most of Shakespeare’s plays — the happy ones — end with some kind of a banquet or a wedding,” she points out. “So people think the wedding is the end and after that it’s all plain sailing.”
This is in spite of a divorce rate that hovers around 42 per cent in the UK. “We still have this beautiful myth that marriage is somehow effortless,” she says. “But it is far from effortless. To get up every day and say, ‘I’m going to love this other person,’ is an act of will.”
Australian-born Luscombe, 55, is an editor-at-large at Time magazine in New York and has specialised in writing about relationships for more than a decade. “I probably get two or three books a week about parenting across my desk, but I get very few about marriage,” she says.
So she decided to write one. Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together is divided into six areas she believes are the common fault lines that fracture a marriage: Familiarity, Fighting, Family, Finances, Fooling Around and Finding Help. It is densely packed with data, statistics and studies, but a total page-turner, thanks not only to Luscombe’s many colourful anecdotes, but also her candid personal learnings from 25 years of marriage to a man — Jeremy Edminson, an architect — who she says is “very different from me”.
She is an extrovert with, she says, a habit of offending people with about 50 per cent of her wisecracks. He is “a bit weird and quiet”. They were friends for seven years before he finally told her he fancied her. She had absolutely no idea. Nevertheless, by the age of 28 they were newly married and relocating from Sydney to New York. They came for a year or two — for Edminson to study for his master’s degree at Columbia University — and almost 30 years and two children later they are still here.
It’s a soggy spring morning when we meet for coffee in Luscombe’s neighbourhood, the not yet fully gentrified flower district in Manhattan. It’s a far cry from her upbringing on Sydney’s North Shore, “a solid gold-plated idyllic suburban childhood” with “three brothers, a pool and a cricket pitch, and the bush out the back”.
Her British mother was an heiress whose family lived in Belgravia in London until the outbreak of the Second World War, then moved to “one of those stately homes in the English countryside where the address is just three words: house name, village name, county name”. Her father, by contrast, grew up in the Australian countryside during the Depression and was forced to leave school to help to support the family.
Luscombe writes of how “the heiress married the miser” and that she “didn’t really understand what they saw in one another” until she recently discovered an academic study that revealed that “the spender/frugal marriage my parents had is quite common” and, moreover, “that spendthrifts might be drawn to tightwads to mitigate their own tendencies”.
Yet money, she says, is far and away the biggest cause of conflict within most marriages. “It comes with emotions attached and can reflect the power and balance of a relationship.” She cites studies — including one from the progressive utopia of Denmark — that suggest that men whose wives earn more than them are more prone to infidelity and erectile dysfunction.
Which brings us to one of the thorniest — and the sometimes scarcest — elements in long-term relationships: sex. In the book Luscombe relates an anecdote of a recent night on which she was woken at 3am by her husband wanting to have sex. “I was not in the mood,” she writes. But she got on with it anyway. “Wanting to do something is not the same as being willing to do it and seeing what happens.” It is, she notes, the difference between spontaneous desire — the intense, urgent, lustful need to have sex, aka “the mood” — and responsive desire “that arrives after the party has started”. The latter, she says, “does not make sex fraudulent”.
In an era of extreme sensitivity to any suggestion of coercion, her approach to sex, I suggest, has the potential to invite flack. “You are under no obligation,” she asserts. “However, you might, as an act of cherishing and generosity, say, ‘I’m willing to give it a go,’ [and] see if you could push the boat out into the water.”
If there is an overall theme to Luscombe’s theory of what makes a marriage work, it is this: “Can we choose this person’s desires over our own?” Or, in the phrase of a wise friend of mine — which I stole and pull out for every wedding speech I am called on to make — marriage should be “a competition of kindness”.
I wonder out loud if one of the particular struggles of modern marriage is that it involves embracing a subjugation of one’s own needs and desires, something that my parents’ generation seem to take as read, but that feels contradictory to much of today’s messaging about individualism, empowerment, self-realisation.
“Absolutely,” Luscombe says. “It’s a tricky line to walk, particularly as women, as we are generally the ones who always put other people first, because we’re either biologically inclined or socialised that way. You want women to have their own interests, but at the same time, without that kind of mutual forbearance — this ‘competition of kindness’ — it just won’t work.”
But back to the sex. With astonishing honesty, Luscombe confesses in the book that she has always suspected she is “a substandard lay”. I press her on this: what on earth makes her think she’s rubbish in bed?
“I don’t know,” she muses. “I don’t like my body very much.” (For the record, she is very slim with — and I really don’t mean to be reductive here — a great rack, and she even admits the thing her husband compliments her on most is her body.) “The sex that I have been sold in the movies seems to not resemble the sex that I have. And I think we don’t have honest conversations about how sex goes for us.” She pauses. “Do you think you’re great at sex?” Yes, I reply, without hesitation, then blush furiously. I’m not bragging, I add, hastily. It’s just what I’ve been told. Of all the self-doubts and complexes I lug around, that isn’t one of them. And I went to Catholic school for 14 years, which proves you really can overcome anything.
One of the other prominent threads running through the book is how slowly gender norms change, often seriously skewing the division of labour. In the early days with their children, now aged 19 and 21, her husband, she attests, “did 300 per cent more than his father did as a hands-on dad. He certainly did 300 per cent more than my dad did. But that still added up to not nearly enough.”
She cites an 11-country study that suggests that the most foolproof way to get the household labour to be divided up more fairly is for men to take significant amounts of time off — ie take that shared parental leave, which only 2 per cent of fathers in the UK do — in the first few months of a child’s life. “Once they’ve been home with the kids for a while, they are much more likely to share duties after returning to work,” she says.
However, she cautions against putting children at the centre of a marriage. “Often parents get so invested in the enterprise of parenting that it moves from an activity they were undertaking as a team to the point of the team’s existence,” she says. The children, she points out, were not the reason you got together in the first place.
It’s a lesson that Luscombe learnt the hard way. When their children were under eight and she was “very focused on them”, Edminson suggested they see a therapist. He believed he was unloved, that his wife only cared about work and the children, and that they were now “just room-mates”. The therapist was a last-ditch attempt before he called it quits.
“I felt that it came out of the blue,” Luscombe tells me. “It threw me for a loop and I was mad. I was, like, ‘How dare you? This is not what I signed up for at all.’”
She was, initially, reluctant. “I thought, ‘Why do we need to do that? That’s for people who are on their last legs.’ Which is the mistake that everybody makes.” She points to research suggesting that most couples finally go to therapy six years after they should have done.
Two years of twice-weekly sessions with a therapist followed. “It was difficult, but it was very, very helpful. I don’t think you need to do it all your life, but for working through your misunderstandings, it’s incredibly helpful.”
Sometimes therapy might lead you to conclude that you’ve made a terrible mistake, she acknowledges. But, with no-fault divorce looking likely to become law in the UK, a little therapy to be sure of one’s decision before severing ties might be prudent.
Luscombe’s admissions of her own marital challenges only serve to strengthen the validity of her belief in the institution as valuable. “I am an advocate for finding a partner and committing to them for life,” she enthuses. “You don’t have to be married to have sex, you don’t have to be married to have kids, you don’t have to be married to buy a home. It’s now entirely a choice. So what I’m really an advocate for is if you do choose to get married, then get married. And let it be as good as it can be.”
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