by Tim Dowling
It’s ironic, I think to myself as I glare through the window at a stately procession of back gardens, that a train service calling itself the Gatwick Express moves so slowly that I could keep up jogging along beside it. What a stupid country. After a few minutes the train comes to a complete halt. Twenty minutes later, it has still not moved.
I call her from the airport.
“I missed my flight,” I say. There follows a brief, unbearable silence.
“Christ,” she says, pausing to blow smoke. “Come back in on the train and I’ll meet you at Victoria.”
In comparison to the outward journey, the brisk thirty-minute ride to London is a mere flashback: suburban gardens and quilted scraps of wooded ground flash by, reversing, and to some extent undoing, the abortive first leg of my trip home. I’m prepared for her to give me a hard time for being an idiot, but as we drive back to the flat she’s in a giddy mood.
“You picked a good day to miss a plane,” she says. “Reach for the Sky is on telly.”
So we spend the afternoon sitting on the floor with a bottle of Bulgarian wine, watching an old black-and-white film. The extra day feels like a reprieve, twenty-four hours of happiness robbed from an unpromising future. Having never seen Reach for the Sky, I’d been expecting a weepy romantic saga, not the life story of double-amputee fighter pilot Douglas Bader. It appears to be her favorite film of all time. I think this is probably when I know she is the one for me.
Midway through Douglas Bader’s rehabilitation, her friend Miranda—the one she’s supposed to be buying a flat with—rings to say she’s pregnant. A little later she rings again to say she’s getting married. In an instant, the future turns fluid.
I catch a flight home the next day; the day after that, I quit my job. I write a letter to my English girlfriend, telling her that as soon as I get my tin legs I’ll be flying again.
* * *
That’s my version, anyway. My wife remembers events slightly differently, insofar as she remembers them at all. When I reminded her of this particular turning point recently, she claimed not to recollect anything significant about it.
“You missed your flight,” she said. “I remember that. Then you left the next day.”
“And then I came back,” I said. “In June.”
“That’s right,” she says. “Were you made redundant or something?”
“No, I quit.”
“Oh. With a view to what, exactly?”
2.
Are You Compatible?
Compatibility is a trait one tends to divine only in hindsight. Most relationships are themselves just a very slow way of discovering that you are incompatible. Or the other person may come to believe that you are incompatible, while you still think you’re both perfectly compatible. That, of course, is the worst sort of incompatibility.
In my twenties I don’t think I really believed in a level of compatibility that could withstand a punishment like marriage. If I liked someone and they liked me back, that was reason enough to embark on a romance for me. A relationship predicated on no other basis could easily last a year, or two, or until the girl in question decided she was more compatible with the guitarist of the band I was in.
I don’t remember any of my prior relationships beginning with a sense that there was something predestined about its nature. They never kicked off under circumstances that could be described as auspicious—just opportune. Nor was there any particular sense of progress as one relationship followed another. That I went out with two Cynthias in a row proves I had no grand design. I agreed to go out with the second one minutes after she made the same offer to my friend Mark and he turned her down. Later she said she actually fancied me more, but I never understood why, if that was the case, she asked him first. I suppose it’s the kind of thing that happens to lots of fourteen-year-old boys. I was twenty-one. It took her a year to realize her mistake.
We are none of us in a position to select a partner based on the length of the relationship desired, the way you choose an airport car park based on the duration of your holiday. You can’t predict a “long stay” or “mid stay” boyfriend (“short stay” is perhaps easier); the future will simply refuse to conform to your itinerary. And yet when a relationship does somehow manage to stand the test of time, casual observers will naturally assume that the seeds of its sustainability were sown at the start, that these two people were somehow destined to be together. What makes such a couple so perfectly compatible? Is it their many shared interests? Their similar backgrounds? A mutual sense of purpose? Are the two people in question polar but complementary opposites? Was the alignment sexual? Political? Delusional?
You cannot be married for twenty years without other people thinking there must be some trick to it. And for all I know, my marriage does have some secret knack for longevity. While I can’t necessarily tell you what that secret is, I can tell you what it isn’t.
We do not come from similar backgrounds. My wife is from London and the child of divorced parents. I am from suburban Connecticut and my parents stayed together. It is rare that a month goes by without my wife informing someone that I am not, on paper, her sort of thing at all.
When we met we didn’t like the same music and there was barely a single book the both of us had read. We had no shared interests beyond smoking and drinking, and although we remained devoted to both for some years, we abandoned one of these key planks in our marital platform halfway through. It may not be long before we have to give up the other.
We are sexually compatible in the broadest sense, but from the very beginnings of our marriage there were the usual disagreements about the minimum number of “units” per calendar month that could be said to constitute connubial health. I’m sure my wife would say that we eventually reached an agreeable compromise on this delicate matter. She is, I suppose, entitled to her opinion.
Neither of us actually believes in anything as romantic as an instant connection, although I didn’t even know this about my wife until recently, when I asked her for the purposes of this book if she believed in love at first sight. “No,” she said. “I don’t even believe in love after several repeat viewings.”
If we had any shared notion—indeed, any notion at all—about what the future held for the pair of us, it was a strong premonition that ours was a union doomed to failure, cursed by circumstance, geography, financial constraints, and the lack of any of the above compatibility signifiers.
In spite of all this, we did later learn that our mutual friends—there were two—had long been intrigued by the possibility of our meeting. The people who knew us both beforehand divined some potential spark between two strangers who lived on different continents, raising the possibility of a native affinity that was apparent, if not necessarily definable.
There are theories about the evolutionary advantages of monogamy—it helps with child-rearing, and the practice may stem from the threat of infanticide from competing adult males—but there isn’t much hard evidence to suggest that biological imperatives lie behind a couple choosing one another, or help determine a relationship’s success. In fact, the persistent belief that certain people are destined to be together may itself be a reason that relationships fail.
Long-term studies in the United States have suggested that married couples who subscribe to a “soul mates” model—a shared sense that their compatibility rests on some special romantic connection—are not only less likely to stay married than couples who take a more pragmatic view of the institution, but are also less happy. When an insistence that you “belong together” is the main plank of your relationship’s contractual platform, it stands to reason that the reality of married life will prove disappointing. The feeling of belonging together is not self-sustaining. Nothing good about a marriage happens by itself.
The PAIR project, which examined 168 married couples over fourteen years, found that it was precisely this sort of dis
illusionment that led to people divorcing around the seven-year mark. The same study seemed to show that the most successful marriages are made between people whose personal contract emphasizes mutual respect, a frank appreciation of each other’s weaknesses, and realistic expectations from the institution itself.
The psychologist Robert Epstein’s ongoing study of arranged marriages suggests that a brokered match generally works out better than a relationship between two people who have chosen each other. In arranged marriages the amount of love a couple reports feeling for one another tends to increase over time. In most Western marriages, you will not be surprised to hear, the opposite happens.
Epstein isn’t necessarily an advocate of arranged marriage; he just believes virtually any two people can deliberately teach themselves to love one another, as long as they’re both fully committed to the project. In practice my own marriage probably subscribes less to the “soul mates” model and more to a “cell mates” one, but I realize I’m not really selling the idea of wedded bliss with that admission.
And anyway, neither model quite dispenses with the notion of compatibility: an attraction strong enough to allow you to think about the daunting prospect of marriage in the first place, an affinity that makes your relationship a better bet than some others, an irrational emotional response that makes you break up with your girlfriend of four years a week after meeting an English girl in a red duffel coat. Could there actually be something deeper at work, something chemical? Something genetic, even?
In his book The Compatibility Gene, Daniel M. Davis reported on a curious study—the so-called sweaty T-shirt experiment. First performed by the Swiss zoologist Claus Wedekind in 1994, the experiment involved a group of students, forty-four males and forty-nine females. Wedekind first analyzed the students’ DNA, in particular their major histocompatibility genes (MHCs). The group was then divided along gender lines. The men were told to wear plain cotton T-shirts for a certain period while abstaining from anything—soap, sex, alcohol—that might alter their natural scent. After two days the shirts were placed in unmarked cardboard boxes with holes in them, and the forty-nine women were asked to rank the boxes by smell using three criteria: intensity, pleasantness, and sexiness.
Wedekind’s initial results showed that the women preferred the T-shirts worn by men whose compatibility genes were most different from their own. Your MHCs contain the code to make your immune system, and the range you inherit—one set, or haplotype, from each parent—is, in a sense, your genetic identity. It’s the “self” that your immune system checks against when distinguishing between your own cells and something “nonself” like a virus.
Although the results were controversial, the sweaty T-shirt experiment seemed to indicate that we unconsciously select mates whose MHCs would diversify the immune systems of any potential offspring, thereby increasing their chance of survival against disease.
No one quite understands the mechanism by which we might sniff out the individual genes of someone we meet at a party (especially through a fog of perfume, soap, and alcohol), but this hasn’t stopped dating agencies from employing MHC typing as a matchmaking tool. One lab offering such testing to online dating services claims that “with genetically compatible people we feel that rare sensation of perfect chemistry.”
I’m not sure there’s a geneticist on the planet who would stand by that statement, but the advent of DNA testing for genetic compatibility raises the intriguing possibility that one might, for the sake of argument, find out if two people who had already been married for twenty years were actually meant for each other at the molecular level. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it. But I did do it. It’s okay—I’m a journalist. I did it for money.
To test your marital compatibility after two decades together seems, to say the least, a bit reckless. While I might well think that the length of the marriage itself constitutes proof of compatibility that no DNA sample can contradict, I am also worried about my wife reading the test results and saying, “Well that certainly explains a lot.”
My wife’s only fear has nothing to do with our possible incompatibility; she just doesn’t want any needles stuck in her. Fortunately, to test your DNA all you have to do is put a little bit of your spit in the post.
“If I have to watch you do that,” says my wife, “I’m going to be sick.” I turn my back and continue drooling into the test tube. An attached lid flips over the funneled top, piercing a membrane and releasing a measured amount of blue preservative. After shaking up the samples and labeling them according to the instructions, I seal them in a pre-addressed envelope while quietly admiring how idiot-proof the whole process has been made. I’m halfway to the post box before I realize I’ve left out the signed consent forms.
It takes two weeks for the samples to be processed by a method I cannot begin to explain, during which time I worry ceaselessly. Without ever quite admitting it to myself, I have long suspected that romantic love—or at least the first flush of it—is some kind of biologically triggered delusion, one you might sum up with words as empty and meaningless as “that rare sensation of perfect chemistry.”
As the date for the test results approaches I am seized by an irrational fear that the natural smell of my genes is actually quite off-putting, and that twenty years ago my wife fell in love with the brand of deodorant I used to use. Do they even still make it?
On further investigation I learn that the hormones in the contraceptive pill can interfere with a woman’s response to olfactory signals. In the sweaty T-shirt experiment, women who were on the pill actually preferred the smell of men with compatibility genes similar to their own—they were getting it exactly wrong. I go in search of my wife, who I find sitting in the kitchen.
“Were you on the pill when you met me?” I say. She looks up from the newspaper she’s reading and stares at me.
“It’s a bit late to ask me that now,” she says. “But yes.”
Oh my God, I think: Are the people at the lab going to tell her that she picked the wrong husband? While I don’t actually believe you can find the perfect partner by sending your spit to a company in Switzerland—or that body odor is the start and finish of attraction—I do not underestimate the psychological force of being told there are rather better genetic matches out there for you than the git you married. Such news might not be easy to dismiss. Who knows? I’m finding it hard enough to imagine my reaction, much less my wife’s. What have I done?
At the end of the fortnight we are both summoned to the Anthony Nolan lab in Hampstead to receive our results from Professor Steve Marsh. They don’t analyze DNA for dating agencies at Anthony Nolan, but they use the same sort of testing to match tissue types for bone marrow transplantation. As we sit down in a conference room with Professor Marsh, I steel myself to receive bad news I won’t understand.
Marsh explains a bit about the specific genes the testing looks for—genes that contain instructions to make proteins called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs). HLA proteins don’t exist to facilitate online matchmaking, nor are they there to make bone marrow transplantation a pain in the arse. Their job is to fight infection.
“If you have a virus,” says Marsh, “these are the molecules that are taking little bits of the virus and showing it to other cells and saying, ‘Is this me? Or is it foreign?’ If it’s foreign, the cell is killed.”
Some HLA molecules are better at snatching up certain protein fragments than others; people with a particular HLA type have increased resistance to the HIV virus. Some HLA genes, however, make you more susceptible to certain disorders. None of this sounds terribly sexy, but it makes sense that a decent spread of HLA types would be of benefit, and that a member of the opposite sex who’s got some HLAs you don’t have would make a good partner, and therefore might possibly smell more attractive to you.
Marsh has good news. My wife and I share just one HLA type (an allele, as it is called)
: HLA-A*32:01:01. The rest are different, a level of diversity which makes us a good genetic match, and allegedly highly desirable to one another. “If the whole sniffing-your-mate-out thing is to be believed,” says Marsh, “then you’ve managed to sniff out a good mate.” It’s not clear which one of us he is talking to.
My overall HLA makeup turns out to be fairly common, which means, I suppose, that a broad range of women of European Caucasian extraction would, upon meeting me, find me inexplicably unattractive (a lifetime of anecdotal evidence does, to some extent, support this theory). Conversely, it also means there are two perfect tissue matches for me on the bone marrow donor register in the UK, and five more in the US. Being common has its advantages.
Fortunately for our progeny, my wife comes from less common stock. So uncommon, in fact, that her HLA-B*27 allele doesn’t end in a bunch of numbers, but with two XXs. A footnote at the bottom of her report says, “The HLA-B locus appears to be novel, with the novel allele likely to be a new B*27. Further work is currently being undertaken to confirm this finding.” Professor March confirms that this means what I think it means: my wife has a B*27 allele that no one has ever seen before, one that does not exist on a worldwide database of twenty-two million recorded tissue types. She is, as I always suspected, more than rare: she is weird, unique, a one-off. And I smelled her first.
3.
Getting Married: Why Would You?
In my first summer in Britain I get taken to a lot of weddings. I feel out of place for a number of reasons. Back in America I had never attended the wedding of a friend. Nobody I knew had ever got married. Here in the UK, people my age hardly seem to be doing anything else. I’m happy for them, but I do not feel like someone heading in that direction at all. I’m at the very start of a relationship, and its long-term prospects are a little shaky. I’m not embarking on a new life so much as running away from my old one. Responsibility, commitment, adulthood: I’ve deliberately put as much distance—an ocean—between me and all that stuff as possible. I’m here to have fun. I’ll go home when it all goes wrong, and suffer the consequences then.