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 favourite 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?’
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 us 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 might itself be a reason why 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 disillusionment 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 one another’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 one another. 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