‘I was banned from the family holiday’: How nagging can ruin domestic bliss

It can be easy to fall into the trap of persistently badgering your significant other, whether male or female.

The nagging wife used to be a music hall joke, although there was nothing funny about UK woman Joanne Healey’s relentless complaints at her husband of 37 years. Last week, she was convicted of harrassment for relentlessly calling her spouse - 59 times in just two hours - questioning his whereabouts.

No doubt Healey’s intense pestering crossed a line, but we all recognise it can be easy to fall into the trap of persistently badgering your significant other, whether male or female.

Not that everyone does. “That’s maybe why we have stayed married for so long,” one Telegraph writer mused about the lack of nagging in his 36-year marriage.

When it does happen, the triggers are inevitably trivial-sounding to others – dodging your domestic duties or calling your partner’s favourite pub to get them to come home before last orders – but could they serve a deeper purpose? Here, four Telegraph writers share the petty grumblings that are part and parcel of their marital life.

‘My husband is a micro nagger’

Judith Woods

Every marriage has its established fault lines. Which is to say, whenever one is at fault the other trots out the same lines.

At Woods Towers I’m all about the macro-nagging, as in “Why can’t we sell the house, buy a boat and sail the world, like other people?”, “How come I’m always the one who has to book the cinema tickets?” or “When did you lose all your Hopes & Dreams?”

My husband is more micro. He tends towards the “This wine glass is filthy! Don’t put the saucepans in the dishwasher!” and most reproachful of all “Did you really eat all of those biscuits?”

My respective, if not respectful, answers are invariably as follows; whatever. Yeah, sorry. And yeah but I’m not sorry; I was eating my emotions on discovering I am married to the sort of man who doesn’t want to spend £9000 (each) trekking to see jaguars in the rainforests of Costa Rica.

Once, I decided to wittily invert the whole fault line thing. I took some of our daughter’s blank GCSE revision cards and wrote various all-too-familiar phrases on them.

I then did my usual slapdash-y washing up... and waited. He took the bait. Of course he did.

“Dear God woman, can’t you rinse and dry a champagne flute properly?”

Cue my hilarious jape. I held up the first phrase.

Card One: I Knew You’d Say That

“For (insert expletive here)’s sake, what?”

Card Two: I Knew You’d Say That Too

“You’re just so - "

Card Three: Lazy and Sloppy and Selfish?

“Exactly.”

Card Four: And REALLY REALLY Childish.

Now, at this point in Love Actually, Keira Knightley and Andrew Lincoln exchange a meaningful look on her doorstep. They would surely have kissed, passionately, if she didn’t already have a husband indoors.

I did have a husband, right in front of me. But I never got to my Final Card which read, a la the movie: To Me You Are Perfect.

Because we kissed, passionately? Because we laughed, uproariously? No, because he stormed off and I ripped open another packet of Jaffa Cakes. And that, children, is what happens after the credits roll.

‘I was banned from the family holiday’

William Cash

No amount of matrimonial nagging in the Cash household has resulted in the police being called, but there is one sensitive area that is about to be tackled this week ... and this time I mean it. I refer to “sorting out” the chaos of my office, a former pig shed piled high with 30 years of cutting files, unfiled expenses, magazines, plastic storage boxes with notes for unwritten novels and piles of cloth box files containing 30 years of love letters and faxes. One blood-red box for each failed relationship (of many, including two divorces): the state papers of my heart.

"Ever since Laura and I were married in 2014, she has been imploring me to sort through literary and romantic debris of my life." File photo / 123RF

Ever since Laura and I were married in 2014, she has been imploring me to sort through literary and romantic debris of my life. I have mixed feelings about bonfiring such stuff, especially if letters or photos once had romantic meaning, however devalued of meaning after nearly 10 happy years of marriage.  “Nobody can work in such clutter,” she says at the beginning of every summer holiday.  “No wonder you haven’t written a book for four years, “she recently added a little jaggedly.  “Even you don’t know where your notes are!”

Last August, I was banned from coming on a family holiday in Norfolk for a week with the children, until the mess had been cleared. I was only allowed to jump in the car towards the coast once I had sent her photos of the cleared-up office and shelves (the photos admittedly were selective). Yet, a year later, after a clearing was made last July, we are now back to chaos, much to my wife’s chagrin.

Things are not helped in that my office pig shed is next to her beautifully ordered millinery studio (a wedding gift in 2014), decorated in chic hats and flowers, where ‘smart’ clients come every week for fittings for hats to weddings, Ascot and society events. Understandably, she can’t bear the idea that next door (we have an adjoining door) to her immaculate “artisan” studio is a jungle of mess that might contaminate her work.

This summer, the nagging stakes have risen to a new level as my wife now wants to put an expensive pilates “Revolution Reformer” machine in my office on a temporary basis. So I have been told that the office now needs to be cleared by the end of this week - or else the Norfolk holiday ban will be for two weeks this year.

We are totally different in regard to creative personalities. She cannot make a hat unless her studio is orderly. I am a subscriber to Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction Theory which states that writers and entrepreneurs innovate best when left un-nagged to do their own thing. But the threat of a two-week holiday ban is too much and I’m going to start tomorrow.  Promise.

‘I do not nag; my wife tells me, I fuss’

John Sergeant

When I was asked to write about marital nagging, my next move was cautious and inevitable: I would have to ask Mary for her agreement. One reason we have been married for so many years is that I cannot be sure how she will respond to that sort of question.

Her reply was immediate, “Marital nagging? But you don’t know what that is.”

Typically, she had struck at the heart of the problem. I could not have been a victim of that sort of nagging, because my wife does not nag me. She merely suggests what I should do, and sometimes she repeats the suggestion more firmly, particularly if it involves putting the bins out.

To be fair to Mary, when I hint that it would be better if she might carry out some task, like cooking the dinner, she too avoids using that word. I am not nagging. I am fussing. And we both know that fussing can be worse, particularly if it is part of an obvious attempt to control her actions. Mary will only continue on her way into the kitchen on the understanding that she is doing as she pleases. Only fussing could stop her.

As a devoted husband, I have to be careful in the use of words. When we had a weekend cottage in the country, on happy weekends, the sun would shine and there was never a cross moment. But there were times when the burden of organising two homes became nearly too much.

Mary would stop referring to “our lovely cottage” and pointedly talk of “your second home”. It was not simply a matter of words, it was the knowing glance which went with it. This was a clear case of marital something, but luckily we seldom felt the need to go into detail.

‘I think a little haranguing was hardly surprising’

Rosa Silverman

I like to think I’m a reasonable person, just as I like to think I’m good at tennis (I’m not) and baking (definitely not). But every reasonable person has their limits, and mine were perhaps most tested during the 2016 UEFA European Football Championship.

I had just given birth to our second child, while our first was two years old, so parenting on an industrial scale was required. But my husband is Northern Irish, and when Northern Ireland qualified for the Euros in France, he explained he would need to travel to all three of their first-round games since this was, he assured me, a once in a lifetime opportunity.

I would like to say we had a grown-up discussion in which both of us came to understand the other’s position. We did not. I spent our daughter’s first weeks haranguing him about his decision to travel abroad three times in quick succession for something as unimportant as his country’s first and probably last chance at international sporting glory.

I tried a range of angles, from “don’t you love the baby?” to “this is costing us the price of a family holiday”. All my shots were off-target, deftly blocked by his defence. “It’s fine,” he insisted. “We’ll be knocked out in the first round.”

They were not. Northern Ireland surprised everyone except me (I knew this would happen) by qualifying for the second round. Which meant that after his trips to Paris, Lyon and Nice for the first-round games, my husband would insist on returning to Paris for the second round. At which point we still had a toddler and a baby and, just about, a marriage.

When Northern Ireland’s dreams were crushed in the second round, my husband was almost relieved. His team had lost their Euros battle, but at least he wouldn’t have another fight on his hands.