In marriage, most of us have some red lines. Photo / Denny Muller, Unsplash
In marriage, most of us have some red lines. This isn’t about them stacking the dishwasher incorrectly or making a weird noise while sleeping. It’s about the serious stuff: infidelity, say, or setting up a fraudulent pyramid scheme without telling us.
Once one of your red lines has been crossed, it follows that you must decide on a suitable course of action. For the Emmerdale actress Amy Nuttall, whose actor husband Andrew Buchan was allegedly unfaithful to her with fellow actress (and his co-star in BBC drama Better) Leila Farzad, a choice apparently had to be made: whether to take him back, and on what terms.
Nuttall has opted for reconciliation, reportedly on condition certain rules are met. These include no contact with Farzad; to check in via FaceTime when working away; to provide full access to his phone; to commit to a date night every seven days, a night away together every seven weeks and a holiday as a couple every seven months (known as the 777); and their work, she has reportedly stipulated, must be on an equal footing.
Ammanda Major, a sex and relationship therapist who works at UK counselling service Relate, agrees it can be useful to establish rules for marriage, as long as they’re mutually agreed. “The basic one is be kind,” she says. “It sounds so simplistic but counts for so much. Be prepared to say sorry [but] make sure you’re not the only person who ever says sorry. Own stuff when it goes wrong and learn from mistakes.”
If you think it all sounds onerous, and believe true love requires no rules, then perhaps you’ve been doing your marriage all wrong for years.
From Justin Timberlake’s admission in 2012 that he and his now wife Jessica Biel have a couple of rules – “that I make her feel like she’s getting everything… [and] that I actually do let her have her way in everything” – to the “Live, Laugh, Love” school of marriage guidance, in which rules are printed on to driftwood and hung in the home (“Always kiss each other goodnight, be willing to compromise, say ‘I love you’”, etc), there is evidence to suggest that many of us find rules useful.
Here are the marital rules some of our journalists live by:
‘Trust each other’
Rosa Silverman has been married for nine years
Be broadly in agreement on parenting styles. Failing to do so not only allows your children to play you off against each other, it can also be a source of simmering resentment.
Trust each other. Think how exhausting it would be otherwise. No one really wants to spend their waking hours trawling through their partner’s social media accounts for signs of suspicious behaviour. It’s tedious.
Share all your money. If you’re in it for the long haul (arguably the point of marriage), then why waste time totting up who spends how much? Does any of it ultimately matter, if you’re planning to stay together until you are dust and your respective accounts are emptied by your children?
‘Do a control test’
Jennie Bond has been married for 41 years
Do a control test. My husband Jim and I spent 10 years living together before we tied the knot. During that time, we parted ways three times – on the last occasion for almost a year.
And then we got wed! That was 41 years ago and we’ve been on solid ground ever since. Prince William and Catherine adopted much the same approach, splitting up for a few months before realising that life together was much more fun than life apart.
Laugh – a lot. It always makes the world a better place.
Be tolerant. This is a rule I learned from Prince Philip, who said tolerance was one of the most important ingredients in a happy marriage. He added that the late Queen “had tolerance in abundance”. It’s also important to apologise as soon as possible after an argument. It doesn’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong… it was probably a bit of both; just say “I’m sorry”, and move on.
Listen to each other. We all spend so much of our time on our phones that we have almost lost the art of conversation. At least once a day, sit down with your partner, put down your phone, and talk to one another. Properly.
Never argue about things that are essentially trivial but necessary. Don’t fuss about how the dishwasher is stacked, just get it done. And make sure that whoever cooks the dinner gets to sit down afterwards while the other one cleans up.
Cuddle each other at least once a day. You don’t always have to say “I love you”… but it never goes amiss.
Help each other out. Jim is amazing at finding things. Whenever I lose something, he’s on it like a bloodhound and won’t quit till he finds it. I, on the other hand, am good at shovelling s*** (pony poo if you prefer). It’s not something I particularly enjoy, but his three miniature Shetlands are his pride and joy – and the paddocks just have to be cleaned. So I do it. For love… and a happy marriage!
‘Be honest – up to a point’
Nick Curtis has been married for 24 years
First things first: make sure you marry your thrall. I met Ann in 1995 and we married in 1999. She was and remains quite the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known but I also found her fascinating from the start. Recently we discovered a shared but hitherto unspoken passion for Marx Brothers movies. I remain enthralled.
Realise your limitations. Three months into our marriage Ann was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer and there was nothing I could do or say to make those early weeks of tests and waiting less frightening.
You won’t always be able to help or console your spouse: the only thing you can do is hang on and simply be there. (Despite two subsequent scares, Ann is cancer-free and extremely healthy today.)
Separate lives help – up to a point. We don’t have children and we work to different timescales, to the point where I joked that, 10 years into our marriage, we’d spent about four years together.
Ann’s an early bird with a proper office job for an advertising agency. I’m a theatre critic who often writes into the early hours. Weekends therefore feel extra special and are to be guarded against work intrusions wherever possible.
Sometimes you just have to suck it up. There are things Ann and I find exasperating about each other, and some of those things will never change. When they come up you have to bite your tongue and wait for it to pass. No, I’m not going to tell you what they are.
Be honest… up to a point. We share just about everything and when either of us is in the wrong we admit it. That said, I reckon there’s about two per cent of our independent lives we don’t discuss or divulge. And that’s fine.
Surprise one another. We’ve done grand gestures in the past – I once hired an E-Type Jaguar for Ann’s birthday, she hired a houseboat for one of mine – but the smallest thing can also show you’re still thinking about the other person. On my last birthday, for instance, Ann got ChatGPT to write me a poem, which was hilarious.
‘Have separate beds’
Ed Cumming has been married for four years
My wife and I didn’t live together until we got married, which sounds less old-fashioned if you know that she was six months pregnant at the altar. If you must live together, have separate bedrooms if at all possible. If not separate bedrooms, separate beds. The idea of sharing a bed is a function of squalid poverty and urbanisation.
If it weren’t for the threat of wolves, Ugg and Ogg would never have shared a cave in the first place. As with “raising your own children”, nobody who has been able to afford to sleep separately from their partner ever has. If you don’t believe me, look around a stately home. You think those guys were sharing beds for longer than five minutes at a time? No. The wives had their own wings. See also: separate bank accounts.
Outsource everything. Hire a cleaner, gardener, masseuse, croquet coach, whoever. You are boosting the economy, allowing people to focus on their specialisms and saving yourself labour. Yes, it’s expensive, but so are therapy and divorce.
Separate social lives. An off-shoot of point one. You might think your partner likes your friends, but they don’t like them as much as you do. See also, separate TV/films/music/sport/books. Your relationship with your favourite band is a precious thing. Why risk contaminating it?
Find bearable faults. Partners are like used cars, in the sense that they all have something wrong with them. The trick is to work out which faults you don’t mind: perhaps you can tolerate subsidence, rising damp or proximity to a prison? In a human sense. A rare exception to this rule is my wife, who is perfect in every way, which leads us to the most important rule of all: be lucky.
‘Say sorry when you should’
Anna Maxted has been married for 26 years
Take responsibility for your own rotten behaviour and try to be reasonably self-aware; say sorry when you should. The 12 months following our wedding 26 years ago were purgatory.
My father had recently died, and I was selfish with grief. Phil, struggling with then undiagnosed depression, was unreachable. I was 27, he was 23. We considered ourselves emotionally articulate, but couldn’t communicate. The inside of my head felt like a big black scribble.
We probably would have divorced had my husband’s GP not referred him to a consultant psychiatrist. Joint therapy sessions helped us see that we were blaming each other for discrete issues dragged in from our past, nothing to do with the relationship.
If you have a problem, pipe up. Fight for the relationship to be better. Ignore a resentment, and like black mould it silently poisons the atmosphere. Awkward, difficult, painful as it may be, (kindly) address what you’re scared to broach.
Agree to couples therapy even if you’ve just said “I do”. Good therapy helps you better understand yourself, and your partner.
Be happy with intermittent happiness. Unrelenting, unremitting love is difficult in the context of the distractions, knocks and pain of real life.
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