I’m Marrying a Man I Sometimes Hate, But I’m Pretty Sure That’s a Good Thing

Living with an intransigent partner is both an irritant and an inspiration. But acknowledging your significant other's pitfalls is a non-negotiable for successful long-term partnerships.

Fear for me not my friends, this story has a pretty good ending and I promise I won’t spend the next 15 paragraphs bashing my boyf (although I’m sure I could conjure the material if you really really twisted my arm). No, this piece is an exploration of what long-term partnerships are about and why when we reach half time on our planetary days, it’s worth remembering that many of our expectations were always wrapped up in ribbons of dust.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a dinner party with a group of friends. There were five couples invited and everyone except my boyfriend accepted, making us an uneven nine. I am very happy to seek my enjoyment without my other half and I’m fortunate to have never been needy. But when I arrived, the first question was, understandably, ‘why couldn’t Hade make it?’ Agh.

So hard to know where to go with this one.

The basic truth is that he is very careful not to deplete his energy reserves and operates immovable boundaries when he’s decided there’s not enough juice in the tank. But it’s also true that he is similarly unbending when he can’t be fucked with something or someone. Sometimes he ducks out because he is protecting his mental and physical health, but sometimes it’s because he simply doesn’t want to go. He is a man who lives almost entirely without fomo and has zero tolerance for social presenteeism.

When we first got together, this troubled me deeply. I used to implore him to change his mind when he’d decided to RSVP in the negative. These days, we rub along pretty normally – you know, nudging and poking fun at each other here and there with the occasional explosion, as is the way of these things. But in our relative youth, we would row about this topic a lot. My central issues were always that a) I feel keenly even the mere modest hint of social pressure and b) I used to feel responsible for his behaviour and that it some way reflected on me. If he were to ask me to any event with his friends, I would be there—no matter which hurricane contrived to sweep me up in its path. When the same energy wasn’t always reciprocated, I felt mugged off and that his attitude represented an inherent selfishness.

At the dinner, one of my friends asked, ‘why didn’t you just issue the three-line whip?’ I understand that this power of couple’s veto is something which commonly circulates. ‘Pulling rank’ is another way I’ve heard it termed. Wives will be corralled into hours-long golfing lunches, husbands given mandatory instruction to attend cousin Susan’s daughter’s christening. I have just personally never worked out how to wield this kind of authority. Over the years, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have absolutely no control over my boyfriend’s decisions and have arrived at the point where I know I am not his keeper. If people find him rude or conclude that he is difficult or indeed selfish, that’s his lot not mine. If people feel sorry for me that I go to things stag, that shouldn’t really have any bearing on how sorry I feel for myself.

I would say that I’ve come more around to his way of thinking as our relationship has progressed. As much as it pains me personally to disappoint or let anyone down, we should all put ourselves first more and since he couldn’t give a fig what any other person thinks, why should he be forced into doing anything just because I want him to? In theory I’m more or less on board. But in practice…. I can’t lie. Sometimes I hate him for it. ‘Can’t you just do it for me?’ was a former refrain. I think we can all predict the answer to this one. Knowing that my hurt feelings or embarrassment is not enough to change his mind is something I’ve had to learn to accept. On the flipside, he has to deal with a partner who is willing to use emotional blackmail to get him to compromise his mental and physical health or will otherwise pressgang him into doing something he very much doesn’t want to do. That ‘aint a particularly attractive portrait either and I know his disdain for my approach rivals mine for his.

When you get divorced at 25 or 30 like I did, it’s pretty clear that the union was catastrophically misjudged. But when you split later in the game, something else is generally afoot. Rather than obvious incompatibility, mostly it seems to be the chip, chip, chip, slow realization of each other’s flaws which eat away at the bedrock of a partnership, gradually eroding all that was once solid and good.

Having lived with my husband-to-be for ten years, there is no mystery, no surprises. I already know what I hate about his personality and habits and have a laser focus grasp of his (at least in my eyes) personality pitfalls. He has an equivalently strong lens on mine. I think one of the traps of marriage and long-term partnership is that we are encouraged to concentrate on everything we love about each other. It would be so much more valuable to spend our time ferreting out our peeves, because those are the ones we will need to reckon with. Those are the creases we will, most likely, never be able to iron out.

The average married couple dates for 30 months before putting a ring on it, with a further year to a year and a half before tying the knot. So, we’re talking three and a half years between that first smile and the aisle. This is all well and good—a fair proportion of your life to work out if you’re going to be each other’s ‘person’. The variable is when those years fall. When you are young and pleasing yourself is something which is fairly straightforward, it is easy to see all the good in each other. Everything is an adventure, very little feels heavy or particularly pressured. While you bask in the sunny side of life, why pay attention to flies in the ointment? When compounded with the unrealistic montages of long-term love created by every single ‘happily ever after’ you’ve been fed since nursery, the fantasy of finding your perfect fit seems credible.

As the calendar flicks forward, perspectives change. For those who aren’t immediately betrothed, experience in multiple relationships introduces ‘red flags’. You learn more about yourself (and the lengths you will go to), while the pressures mount from fertility to finances. It’s no longer so easy to miss the things you may one day resent about your partner—your eye has become too trained.

Radical honesty is, I have learnt the hard way, one of the most vital factors in keeping a partnership going and with that honesty comes admitting that you don’t tesselate like two jigsaw pieces. You might have some perfect grooves here and there, but your corners don’t meet and jagged edges ruin your connection at several junctures. This isn’t a catastrophe. What is catastrophic is when we lie to each other about it. The most important factor in the longevity of a relationship isn’t how hot your partner is, or how many times you touch on a daily basis. It’s how effectively you handle the conflicts that come like clockwork. Part of that is being able to communicate your frustrations, but it’s also learning to take the criticism and disparagement—even character assassination—that your individual quirks are bound to inspire.

While chewing this through with a girlfriend this week, she mentioned that she knew of plenty of partners who may toe the line in terms of turning up to a rank-pulled events, but end up behaving like sullen teenagers once there. That certainly doesn’t seem worth all the coaxing, better to be AWOL than awful, right? While I have tried to keep this piece as gender neutral as possible, I do also think that there is something gendered at play. We still raise our young girls to believe they are the ones who need to paper over cracks and provide the glue for social harmony, whether or not this means compromising themselves for the greater good. Doing the proper thing, or at least appear to be doing so, is subtly placed on female shoulders at such a young age. I feel like I have always at least implicitly recognized what was expected of me and I struggle to this day to wriggle free from ‘doing the done thing’. Courtesy, politesse and manners, are all of course, rules which govern a kind of social contract and I still find myself hamstrung by them.  Conversely, the ‘who gives a crap’ about social norms and obligations energy does seem to originate disproportionately from manfolk. This is something that goes far beyond kitchen supper parties – a study last year showed that female board members increased a company’s commitment to social responsibility simply because women are more socially responsible. Men aren’t raised to believe that it’s their role to foster social harmony, either within or beyond the home, leaving this labour to land in the ever-growing knapsack of a woman’s emotional load.

Look, we all have to do things we don’t want to in order to survive (commute, stand in line at the post office, speak to the HSBC helpline, wear clothing in public, delete as applicable), so it’s probably better to reduce the duties we impose on each other. It is toxic to ask anyone, man or woman, to do anything they feel incapable of, or simply just don’t fancy because you are bound by a set of invisible commandments which most likely don’t serve you either. Often I just want to scream, suck it up mate! I suck it up the entire bastard time! But maybe it’s an inspiration to everyone to break free from some of those chains. Ergo, I hate you, but I absolutely respect your right to do the things that make me hate you too.