Buy a paper, keep a partner

By TERENCE BLACK

LONDON - The pink card I received tells me I have just made an excellent decision, particularly if I happen to be in a long-term relationship. I have bought a newspaper.

It is a small thing in itself, but that investment is apparently the first step towards a better and closer understanding with your spouse or lover.

Not long ago, Britain observed National Marriage Week. Over seven days, that battered and beleaguered institution reached out to couples, perhaps also battered and beleaguered in their own way, in a sustained campaign which combined charity with self-promotion.

All over the country, pink postcards were slipped through letter-boxes by marriage activists. The cards extended to couples what is known as "the 10 Minute Challenge".

Step One is to buy a newspaper.

Step Two: "Arrange a time when as a couple you have 10 minutes together without interruption. Face each other."

Step Three is trickier: "Chat about any story in the newspaper, sharing your views and thoughts for 10 minutes - no more or less. Avoid straying into discussing any other issues during your 10-minute session."

Finally, and most importantly, "do this every day during Marriage Week".

Was it a joke? My first suspicion was that the newspaper industry had come up with a cunning form of generic advertising, but National Marriage Week and its challenge proved to be genuine.

Chatting about a news story, the pink card revealed, would allow husbands and wives "to make positive emotional deposits, a bit like putting money into a savings account".

The idea is rather daring. Erotomania in the media, the urgings of late-night advice shows and the presence of an ever-growing army of sex counsellors, therapists and crisis managers eager to provide the nation with the appropriate number and quality of orgasms have skewed priorities within long-term relationships.

Couples who are not at it like rabbits are made to feel maritally dysfunctional, and a variety of faintly disgusting cures for flaccidity or aridity are on offer.


It seems that the organisers of National Marriage Week hit on something important. They've dared to stress the importance of talking.

Words are all around us as never before - we live in a golden age of vacuous, self-serving chatter.

But a serious exchange of views on a neutral subject has become a rare and difficult thing to achieve for a couple who know each other well.

Each gender has its conversational hang-ups. Men have a tendency towards an edgy, self-protective facetiousness; women can allow a general argument to be dragged down into a whirlpool of the personal and the specific.

Most lasting relationships may have started with a measure of intellectual curiosity, a tangling of minds as well as bodies, but somehow sharing humdrum and domestic concerns day after day has whittled away what was once interesting and strange.

Under these circumstances, exchanging views about the outside world can seem almost perverse, a transgression against some unspoken new taboo.

It turns out that the problem in many relationships is not too little intimacy, but too much.

Now and then, a marriage needs those involved to become the exciting semi-stranger that each of them once was.

It is a process which can occur after some profound crisis in a marriage or even after separation - how many people rediscover after the divorce the interesting person they once knew before over-familiarity took its toll?

Next year, the people behind the pink cards might consider an idea even more daring than their 10 Minute Challenge.

National Marriage Week could discourage intimacy and promote the idea of time spent apart, so that a person who has become that dispiriting entity, the other half, reveals his or her inner stranger.

In the meantime, words and ideas are the hot new thing between couples.

The newspaper has been bought. The story - about how cohabiting men and women can eventually grow bored with one another - has been told.

It is now time to make that positive emotional deposit.

- INDEPENDENT