How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  The main reason I feel out of place is that I don’t know anyone. I am foreign. In the past I may have sabotaged relationships through my maddening aloofness, but now—out of bald self-interest—I am as clingy a boyfriend as you could want. Wherever my girlfriend goes, I go; wherever she stands, I stand slightly behind her. But at wedding receptions we usually get put at different tables. I sit in front of place cards with the words “plus one” on them, in the company of strangers. I sit with flower girls, vicars, the groom’s nanny, ex-neighbors of the bride’s parents. People don’t believe me when I tell them that I was once seated next to a pug, and that I didn’t really mind because there was no need for small talk and he had such beautiful manners. Perhaps I am exaggerating a little. He had beautiful manners for a dog.

  I have nothing against all these people who are getting married, at my age. It just seems so heedless, this headlong leap into the future. What makes them think they’re ready for it? Why the hurry? What’s the point?

  In the meantime I am starting to wonder if my new girlfriend and I are actually compatible. Our relationship began as a sort of verbal sparring match—with me losing most of the time. Initially I was fine with this; it was amusing. In some ways it was the sort of relationship I’d always dreamed of—a spiky, muscular exchange that kept both parties on their toes. The first time I saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I was actually envious of the dynamic (I’ve seen it since, quite recently, and I now get that it’s not supposed to be tremendous fun).

  But as we spend more time in the confines of her flat, perpetually low on funds, the sparring often gets combative. She can become disagreeable and hard to reach without much warning. As much as I admire her refusal to suffer fools gladly, I prefer it when the fool is someone other than me.

  She can also suddenly turn fragile if the wrong button is accidentally pushed. I find it difficult to respect someone’s forthrightness and their feelings at the same time, and I am aware that my increasing tendency to be at once defensive, cautious, and needy is not an attractive thing in a man.

  My lack of independence doesn’t help matters. I’d run out of money not long after I’d arrived. My mental map of London is confined to a circle with a half-mile radius; I never go far on my own. The relationship is the same: everything outside its claustrophobic center, where two people are arguing about the correct pronunciation of “beret,” is uncharted territory. She’s supposed to be my girlfriend, but I sometimes feel as if I’m just trying to navigate my way round a woman I don’t understand at all.

  At the time it didn’t occur to me that I was learning, through a tortuous process of trial and error, to be a grown-up. I just thought English women were really weird.

  I have a photograph from that first summer that sits on the shelf behind my desk. It’s just a creased snap, unframed, one I rescued from a drawer full of pictures that never made it onto any walls or into any albums. It shows both of us lying side by side in the long matted grass near a Cornish cliff, on top of the same red duffel coat she wore the night we met. My arms are wrapped round her from behind. She is smiling, her half-lidded eyes gazing sleepily at the camera lens. I look as if I might be asleep.

  I like this photograph because it is a lie. I remember clearly that she woke up that morning in a tricky mood, and that we argued on and off for most of the day. We argued right before that picture was taken, and right after. It actually captures a moment of supreme neediness on my part, and her smile is nothing but a brief, wry acknowledgment of her reluctance to tolerate my display of affection even for the time it takes a shutter to open and close.

  You can’t tell that from the picture, though. It just looks like two happy people lying on some grass. That’s probably why I never put it in a frame, but it’s also why I keep it where I can see it.

  * * *

  Less than half the population is married. A total of 231,490 people got married in England and Wales in 2009, which sounds a lot but was the lowest annual figure since 1895, and not much more than half the 1972 number. Cohabiting, meanwhile, has doubled since 1996. That makes me feel old, because I was already married in 1996.

  There are many good reasons not to get married. It costs, on average, £16,000 in the UK ($28,000). Divorce, a disease for which marriage is a necessary precondition, is also expensive, and your chances of avoiding it aren’t great. Roughly 40 percent of UK marriages fail.

  If you are already living happily together as a couple, the change in status can hardly be said to be worth the outlay. There are some recently introduced tax advantages for the lawfully wedded, but you’d still have to be married for 106 years to break even. In terms of its impact on your personal life, marriage is much the same as cohabitation. I’ve tried both, and there isn’t a tremendous amount of difference. Either way, on the subject of what should happen to a towel when you’re done using it, you will always enjoy the benefit of a second opinion.

  In any case, there is nothing wrong with your cohabitational arrangement that marriage is going to fix. The PAIR project’s findings showed that among the couples who divorced soonest, a high percentage got married because they thought a wedding would somehow improve an already troubled relationship.

  Marriage will, as numerous studies have indicated, improve both your health and your longevity, especially if you’re a man (contrary to popular belief, marriage doesn’t actually reduce the life expectancy of women; it extends it, just not as much as it does for men). Never-married men are three times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than married men. Married men also have better cancer survival rates. But divorced men die sooner than married men, and you can’t be divorced unless you get married first.

  Most people have particular and deeply personal reasons for wanting to get married, and my primary motivation was, I like to think, as good as any: the Home Office forced my hand. Couples who live together without getting married will sometimes say things like, “We don’t need a piece of paper from the government to validate our relationship.” Well, I did.

  * * *

  From the beginning, being together proves difficult. Every time my six-month tourist visa nears its expiration, I have to go back to the States and make arrangements to return. It’s both expensive and heart-wrenching. Over the two years that my relationship with my English girlfriend develops, my relationship with the people at immigration deteriorates markedly. Each time I hand over my passport they seem less charmed by my tale of true love. My reasons for entering the UK strike them as implausible. They think I’m working in Britain illegally, and say as much.

  In fact, all the traveling back and forth makes it impossible to secure proper employment in either country. I am broke. The periods in America are the hardest to endure, months spent living with my parents. They are supportive, but also quite clearly of the opinion that I am fucking up my life, squandering it in six-month chunks. Whenever I’m home I take odd jobs—anything, including painting my dad’s office—until I earn enough money for a cheap airline ticket. In an effort to impress the immigration officers with my continued commitment to US residency, I always show up with a return ticket on a flight a fortnight hence. It’s usually nonrefundable, so I chuck it.

  Every time I come back, they grill me for longer, make plainer their suspicions, and threaten to send me straight home. I am a bag of nerves for weeks before each visit. Some people are afraid to fly; I am afraid to land.

  On my arrival on March 24, 1992, I am held at immigration for over an hour, left on a bench next to a guy who has no passport at all and refuses to tell anyone what country he’s come from. It does not feel like a lucky bench. The immigration officer who finally deals with me is professionally unpleasant, like a disappointed geometry teacher. He treats me to a long and disheartening lecture about my unsuitability for admission, before suddenly relenting and letting me through; it’s eerily reminiscent of the day I got my driver’s license. The stamp in my passport is extra
large and contains specific restrictions and the official’s handwritten ID number. I’m pretty certain I have exhausted the forbearance of the United Kingdom.

  This episode overshadows our reunion. I am delighted to have slipped through, but aware it may well be the last time I’ll get away with it. It seems quite possible that after two years our relationship has finally run out of road.

  There hardly seems enough time for my girlfriend and me to decide what should happen next. To start with, we do nothing. April and May drift by. Finally, in mid-June, we sit down together, me at the little drop-leaf table in the kitchen, her on the worktop, to discuss the future.

  So daunting is the prospect of a wedding, much less a marriage, that the first option my girlfriend puts on the table is that we split up and live out the remainder of our lives on separate continents. As unpalatable as this idea is, I have to admit it sounds marginally less horrible than the prospect of having engagement photos taken. After an hour of circular debate, we arrive at what seems a dead end.

  “So that’s it,” she says. “We’re getting married.”

  “I suppose,” I say.

  “Never mind,” she says, crossing the kitchen to light a fag on the stove. “We can always get divorced.”

  Given our deep mutual reluctance to take the plunge, it would be insane for me to make any grand claims favoring marriage over simply living together for a very long time. They are very different arrangements legally—at present cohabitation comes with no rights or advantages at all—and of course they are slightly different constructs emotionally. With one a shared sense of commitment agglomerates over a long period of time, as two lives become increasingly intertwined; with the other you get all the commitment squared away on a specific day, generally before you’ve had lunch. But for the sake of argument I’ll presume that in the long term the result is much the same. If you resisted the pressure to have a wedding, good for you. You probably saved a lot of money. I, on the other hand, have four salad bowls.

  I will say only this about the trauma of actually getting married: it may be something you never thought you’d be interested in, and something you imagine to be painfully embarrassing while you are doing it (you imagine right), but afterward you will consider it a life-changing ordeal from which you emerged stronger, an ordeal that, for all its hideousness, created a special, unshakable bond between you and your partner. In this sense getting married is, I imagine, a lot like agreeing to do Dancing on Ice: you’ll end up being pleased with yourself for enduring something terrifying, difficult, and unutterably naff.

  When she finishes telling her mother the news on the phone, we go to see her father. I ask him for his daughter’s hand while he is showing me the progress of the work on his new loft extension. We are alone, standing on joists, looking down into the room below us. I consider the likelihood of him pushing me through.

  “How are you going to keep my daughter in the style to which she has become accustomed?” he asks, looking stern. I don’t know that he’s been tipped off by my future mother-in-law, that he already has champagne on ice downstairs, that he’s only messing with me. I briefly contemplate jumping.

  When I speak to my mother, I try to play down the whole business as a tiresome piece of administration, an elaborate exchange of paperwork which must be done at short notice. I don’t want to put anyone to any trouble just because I am obliged to jump through some bureaucratic hoops. Because my mother is a devout Catholic, I am hoping she won’t think a register office wedding counts, and therefore won’t feel she’s missing much. I suggest that after enduring whatever dry little ceremony constitutes the bare legal requirement for marriage in Britain, we will travel to the States, where she can arrange a blessing and throw an embarrassing party for us. There is a silence at the other end.

  “You can do whatever you want,” she says. “But whatever it is, we’re coming over for it.”

  Within weeks of us setting a date—just three months hence—my mother has invited sufficient relatives to fill a minibus. In addition to our booking at Chelsea register office, my future mother-in-law has secured, on my mother’s behalf, an hour slot in a Catholic church in Wimbledon, and a friendly priest who has agreed to put us through the pre-Cana period of instruction that will allow us to be married in the eyes of God. To my surprise, my new fiancée agrees to all of this without protest. Perhaps she believes that if the marriage is going to stick it must be done to the satisfaction of all concerned. I don’t know; I’m not asking a lot of questions at this point. I think the fact that in many ways it’s no longer about what we want makes us both feel a little better.

  As we pull up outside the rectory for our first meeting with the priest, I realize I am far more anxious than she is. My stance regarding God is akin to the author Peter Ackroyd’s position on ghosts. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he once wrote, “but I am frightened of them.” I am scared of the God I don’t believe in, and also of priests. I’m worried my double agnosticism—doubt, doubtfully held—will be transparent enough to get us disqualified. She has no such fear, and this also scares me. I look over at her as she turns off the headlights.

  “You’re not going to suddenly say that Jesus is a pillock, or anything like that, are you?” I say.

  “I don’t think so,” she says.

  “And don’t say, ‘If it doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.’”

  “We can, though.”

  “I know. But he might not find your robust outlook as charming as I do.”

  “Christ.”

  “Don’t say ‘Christ,’” I say. “Not in there.”

  In fact Father Jim is welcoming, kind, and prone to reward a half hour’s earnest chat with an extremely strong gin and tonic. Our meetings with him are the only time we ever discuss topics including love, commitment, children, and, more generally, the future, with anyone. My wife-to-be, who has virtually no experience of religion and is therefore free to take from it what she wishes, finds it all rather bracing. For me, Catholicism remains an unfinished school assignment, a dropped subject. I sweat a lot during these meetings, but I am grateful that someone took the time to impress upon us the seriousness of the whole undertaking.

  He is not the only person we have meetings with, though. We have meetings about flowers, about venues, about food, booze, music, and printed invitations. I’d somehow imagined that our whirlwind engagement might relieve us of some of the stresses associated with a big wedding, but it just means we have to do the same stuff faster. We do have engagement photos taken—I look like a frightened potato in them—and our pending nuptials are announced in a national newspaper. It’s going to look terribly convincing, this sham marriage we’ve hastily arranged just so we can stay together forever.

  * * *

  I am prone to nightmares in which I find myself back at school or still in college, suddenly facing the prospect of sitting a final exam for a class I signed up for but never attended, taught by a teacher who would not recognize me (they may be dreams, but they’re based on true stories). At the point where the full consequences of my unpreparedness are about to be made plain I wake up and discover, to my immense relief, that I am middle-aged, and therefore closer to the sweet release of death than I am to tenth-grade chemistry.

  Waking on my wedding day, the reverse happens: I had been dreaming of mundane things, only to open my eyes and find myself in a foreign country where I’m about to get married. My life’s greatest test to date is scheduled for eleven thirty a.m., and I could not be less ready.

  I have borrowed a dark blue suit from my friend Bill, without trying it on first. He’s much taller than me; the trousers, it transpires, are three or four inches too long. Only the night before, my friend Jennifer had had to come round and staple new hems into place. I need to step into the trousers very gingerly in the morning to avoid undoing her work.

  My memory of the next four or five hours is dangero
usly unreliable, and full of blank spots. It’s a good thing there are pictures. My imminent wife and I spent the night apart—she at her mother’s, me in the flat. I don’t remember meeting up the next morning outside the Chelsea register office at all; only the part where I watched her write out a check to cover the cost of the ceremony in a back office. I remember stepping from the office into a venue area—a big sitting room, really—crammed with about forty people I either knew or was related to, and trying not to catch anyone’s eye. I recall a bit of the rigorously bland language in the vow I recited: “I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment why I, Robert Timothy Dowling, may not be joined in matrimony to . . .” I was basically petitioning to get married because I could not think of a solid legal reason to stop myself.

  A lunch follows the ceremony, followed by a big party in a pub and a night in a posh hotel. The first real test of our marriage doesn’t come until the next morning, when we have to get married again. After getting to bed at about four a.m., I am up and waiting for a taxi at seven thirty. My Catholic wedding is at ten, and by prior arrangement I am attending the preceding mass with my family. My wife is to arrive later for the ceremony. I am badly hungover, nervous and shaking. I am in no fit state to get married and, had I not already been married, I might have got cold feet. But I didn’t. Reader, I married her, again. I married the shit out of her.

  The next day, we fly to Naples. It seems odd to leave behind such a large collection of normally far-flung friends, relatives, and in-laws—an assemblage that will never recur—while they’re all having fun in London, but we need to go on honeymoon. It’s booked, and more important, I can only apply for indefinite leave to remain from outside the UK. We are leaving the country so I can get back in.