2006-07-24
However you look at it twenty-five years is an immense amount of time. Being a divorce lawyer, my brother pointed out that to have been married that long really is an achievement and Jo asked me today whether I considered it to be one. Being honest, my answer was that from inside it doesn’t really feel like something remarkable at all. When something has been largely effortless then all you can feel you have ‘achieved’ is to exist for that long, and that isn’t exactly difficult is it? When you don’t ever feel that you have to work hard at keep something going then it’s almost as natural and simple as breathing.Which I suppose, is just me failing to recognise that the fact that it has been pretty much ‘effortless’ is where the sense of achievement should lie. Or alternatively, you might argue it sounds like I take the thing for granted because I don’t see much need to keep it alive. (To which I would I would counter with a topical analogy that just because I wholeheartedly disapprove of what Israel is doing in Lebanon at the moment does not make anti-semitic. If you see what I mean). And there could be a few raised eyebrows around the fact that you all know how my heart has roamed from its one true home over the last few years.
We didn’t really celebrate. Take that back a little – I didn’t really celebrate. I was a little taken aback by Lynne getting me a card and a gift since that was the first anniversary she hadn’t acknowledged in any way – I kind of assumed that this would be how we dealt with this one too. And before you chastise me and tell me (as Jo did) that obviously Lynne would want to celebrate something as significant as a quarter of a century together I should relate the fact that we actually argued about this three years ago when she definitely did not want to celebrate.
We were away for a weekend with a group of friends – three other families on a kind of activity weekend. What I knew, and what Lynne definitely did not, was that the Saturday would see the twenty-fifth anniversary of our relationship. Not the marriage obviously – the night it all started. The night since which we have mostly lived together. To mark the occasion I took champagne with us which I intended to produce and open at an appropriate time, to share the moment with our friends. But when it came to it Lynne didn’t want that, seemed not to want to be reminded and eventually it came out that she has virtually no memory of those early days. They were not happy times for her, struggling with depression.
Her mental instability continued for years but we saw it through, eventually reaching some form of stability by the time our first son was born. I assumed that the marriage was in the same category for her – part of almost a decade she would happily have wiped away.
There is perhaps some irony, or maybe it’s something completely comprehensible, but through those first ten years together she needed me so much, and I loved her so much that it never ever occurred to me to be absolutely committed to her. Looking back it was a hell of a struggle to cope with her mood, her intense unhappiness, but God I always knew how much more of a struggle it was for her. And there were times that I was grateful she had still just enough strength to carry on, it was that bad. So, as I say, ironic or understandable, I didn’t come close to straying, even mentally, until long after that episode was over.
And that’s why I express it as effortless’. ‘Effortless’ in the sense that there was never a time I doubted that I should always be with her; even through those years when I also had similar feelings about Jo. Never a time when I was with her and thought I didn’t want to be; even through those years with Jo. Never a time when I didn’t want to share a meal, share a conversation, share an experience, share a bed with her ; even through the years when I felt the same when I was with Jo. Never a time when I wondered whether I’d be with her forever. Until just recently, after the years with Jo.
So I suppose I would say the journey we have taken together hasn’t been easy all the time, but we’ve always been going in the same direction. And all that time – twenty eight years – I’ve not been looking to go anywhere else, nor at a different pace. And I thank her for that. And I love her so much still.
But it isn’t that surprising, is it, that eventually I started to wonder what an alternative route might have looked like (with no concept at all of what it would have been)?