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GUIDE TO ROMANTIC LIVING

Chapter Six | Chapter Eight

Chapter Seven: Holding the Dream: Romantic Marriage

It should only be in romantic novels that marriage marks the end of romance: marriage should be the beginning of a richer, deeper romance based on shared moments, shared memories, shared family: on listening, flirting, paying attention to his feelings as well as his words. Don't behave like a wife, behave like a mistress.

Nevertheless, a wedding should be something special. Find some way to make the wedding service your own. Perhaps include a favorite poem, or a piece of prose, and certainly choose your favorite hymns. Make it mean something to both of you. Perhaps you could borrow from another culture. After Greek Orthodox marriages, they dance in the street, and Yugoslavian weddings include stealing the bride's shoes and auctioning them. The money goes to the newly wedded couple. Or you could do what friends of ours did: they let off thousands of helium balloons at the end of their wedding service, as an offering to the sky.

But don't end the romance there, on the marriage night. It's the beginning of the greatest romantic adventure of your life. On anniversaries, re-create something memorable from the wedding. One friend, who loves flowers, had especially fabulous flowers for her wedding. One anniversary her husband arranged for a florist to re-creat one of the most beautiful of the bouquets to surprise his wife. You could prepare some of the same foods that were eaten at the reception, or you could reproduce the cake, or you could wear your wedding dress.

Of course, it's not always easy to keep a partnership as a love affair if you don't have help and you have children banging on your doors who want to crawl in bed with you in the morning and wake up all night long. The point is, you must make time for each other. That is a priority. However little money is available, you can find a way round the problem. Make sure you leave the children with a friend sometimes, so you have the house to yourselves. Make sure you go out to dinner together. Make sure you take those weekends away. It doesn't have to be a weekend at the best hotel in town. Find somewhere pretty, and have a meal served up in the bedroom, with some chilled wine. Behave like the wicked, adulterous couple people will no doubt think you are.

In a new place you can discover each other again undistracted by the ironing, the telephone, all the things that wear you down. You can concentrate on each other. Make the time to talk, and to hold hands. Don't let your marriage drift: take hold of it and guide it.

Even if it's just one night away, just a few times a year, the children won't suffer if they're left with relatives or friends. They'll probably love it. As children, we always had plenty of friends stay with us when their parents were away, and we all loved it. Sometimes there would be as many as twelve children staying the night, crammed three to a bed. I can remember one midnight feast that included a hockey match and pop music at 3:00am. The neighbors were not pleased. So don't worry too much when you leave your children occasionally. They'll probably love it as much as you will. Even if they're very young, a separation won't do them any harm.

Women often fall completely and romantically in love with their children. But it is important to make sure that you don't fall out of love with your partner, and he with you. So don't feel selfish when you leave your children. It is your happy marriage that will give them strength and security. That is far more important than being with them all the time. It is my loving family---my dear sisters and father and mother---who have given me the strength to be what I am. I know that whatever I do they will be there, loving me, loving each other, providing the fabric over which I can embroider my own life. Give your children that strength: make your marriage work. Put your husband first, for your children's sake as well as your own.

The greatest gift anyone can have is a happy relationship. Whatever disasters strike you, if your relationship is happy you can cope. It is worth working at. It is worth more than any number of dollars in a bank, any amount of success at work. Two people, sharing everything, in love, year after year, spending their lives together, supporting each other, encouraging each other.

I know that. My parents have a happy marriage. Though they're in their seventies, they still hold hands, watch sunsets, look after each other as they travel adventurously together all over the world---Malaysia one week, Los Angeles the next. He is the intellectual, she is the organizer. They make a great pair. My mother's love for my father and my father's for my mother have given my sisters and me great support and inspiration. He treasures her and looks after her, and she does the same for him.

I don't blame people who have affairs outside their marriage. But affairs are not an easy option. They can tear you apart and leave you with nothing. In every relationship you have to examine what is constructive and what is destructive. There is so much about affairs that can be destructive. What is constructive and exciting is, of course, the mystery and the romance of having only a short time together. Think of your work as your marriage and your marriage as your affair-make the most of what you have, think positively, think creatively, keep your love alive.

Don't sit around complaining that life is dreary, your marriage is dreary. Neither is. You are the one who is dreary if you think that life is dull. Life isn't, so long as you look up and around, and see and share the magic and wonder in you, in your loved ones, in the trees and the flowers, and everything all around you.

If, like so many women, you are married to a confirmed nonromantic, ask him to read this book his own sake. What I'm talking about is how to have a happy life, and who doesn't want that? There's nothing undignified about trying to live enjoyably, with a certain respect for ecstasy and exuberance. They should try it. Half the men in America are too exhausted from working hard in order to enjoy themselves at some future date to enjoy themselves at all. By the time they finally decide they've made it, they've forgotten how to enjoy themselves. And women are doing this, too. Now that there is often no one at home keeping the up quality of life, making sure that there are flowers on the table, bread in the breadbox, a clean tablecloth ready, it is even more important that men and women think about romance and living in a way that is romantic. Life is precious in their desire to achieve and to keep busy. It is important also to learn how not to be busy, to learn to stand still.

The work ethic is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. The great English Romantics of the nineteenth century were all hard workers. If you want to live a marvelous, joyful life you have to work at it harder than those who make do with something mediocre. Nothing comes ready-made. If your partner is a workaholic ask him what it's all for, and ask yourself. Make sure you find the time to enjoy the world you've been born into. Remember: you have all the time there is. It isn't enough to take a walk every so often. You have to use your eyes, and your ears, and all your senses. You have to look in order to see. That butterfly or that bird is better than any fabric your hard-earned money can buy.

Make sure you enjoy the gifts that are free. Don't spend all your time striving for the things that aren't free, and spoiling your marriage through overwork in the process.

It is our world. That is what some of us forget. We are all just a part of nature-the bare pattern of a tree mirrors the pattern of our veins-so we should enjoy nature and be at ease with it instead of hustling and bustling our way through it. A few minutes of peace the two of you spend together by the sear or in the woods will help your marriage, help you to be at ease with each other.

Look together in the same direction. Look properly. Enjoy life together. We are so used to being spoon-fed films and television programs that sometimes we don't bother to look around us, and it does require a certain concentration to look at the beauty all about-the perfection of a rose, the shape of a cloud, the smell of the air just before it rains. It is necessary to pause for a little while and be still and together allow yourselves to see and to feel.

Together run through the sand, walk through piles of leaves, hold hands, kiss in a park like young lovers, wander by rivers at night hand in hand.

The rule that runs through all of life is that nothing can be static: politics, relationships, nature. Once something ceases to grow, it is dying. In order for a relationship to stay alive, it cannot stay as it is; it has to change, to develop.

Talk to each other about things that matter, about what you both want out of life. Never leave your marriage to look after itself. It needs looking after, feeding, or it will die.

If you appreciate your world, you will communicate your joy to your partner. Together walk through the park in the early morning, or when the first snow has fallen. Don't shiver and stay inside, in the trap of your own conformity. Live a little.

Because trees don't run multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns extolling their merits, and flowers are only advertised when arranged in bunches in shops, let us not become so dazed by our money-orientated culture that we lose sight of the most precious gifts each person alive has, gifts that are presented free, at birth, on arrival on this planet. No big business offers such excellent free gifts as the snow and the wind and the sun and the leaves that toss on the trees and fall gently on the ground providing piles for you to walk through like a child.

Enjoy it all together. Don't treat life as a struggle. It's an adventure-but you have to seek out the adventures together.

Occasionally do something wildly, ridiculously romantic. Kidnap your husband, for instance. Just arrange a secret holiday for him and make sure he suspects nothing. Check with his colleagues to make sure that it is all right for him to take a certain week or few days off. Organize everything perfectly. Organization lies at the heart of a busy, romantic life if it is to be a success.

On that Monday morning, when he is dressing for work, tell him to dress more casually, but don't tell him why. He might protest a little at first-but if you plan properly, all will be well.

Romance is adventure. It's the things that go wrong, that are unexpected. It's not the bland lovely face of a girl; it's the face of a girl with mystery, with a sense of adventure, with a sense that contact with her could make everything go very wrong indeed, or very right. Dangerous men are romantic too, as many women have found to their cost. A beaming, good-natured, respectable man might make a good husband in some ways, but unless you bring out the danger in him, he'll make a boring lover, and really good husbands should be lovers too. If you oppress him with your strength, you'll turn him into merely a good-natured companion. Show him your femininity as well as your strength, so that he will show you his masculinity as well as his kindness.

Who wants to make love to someone night after night who is just a good chum? Your imagination can turn him into whomever you like, of course, but imagination can go only so far alone. It needs to be rooted in some reality.

Make sure you frequently arrange holidays or weekends away, or even evenings, in which you can play those old roles of lover and his lass.

When you're having romantic trysts, don't discuss the mortgage or the problem of the leaking roof: listen to each other, flatter each other with your interest in each other, pretend you've known each other a week instead of years. There is no doubt that there is nothing quite like young love. Make sure you keep some freshness, some sense of discovery. As your love grows older, keep it young.

Marriage is a beginning, not an end. I read recently of a couple who revived their earlier feelings off romance by making love in their car parked in their drive. That seems a little excessive. But certainly love should never be respectably formal; it should always be a little dangerous, a little wicked, and all to often marriage can take that wickedness away.

Don't be too respectably married. Keep an element of mystery, of unpredictability, of danger between you both.

One very romantic woman treats her marriage like one long romance. On her husband's last birthday she organized a complete secret day for him, starting with breakfast at the London hotel, Brown's, then a test drive around Hyde Park Corner in the Mercedes he'd always wanted to drive, then a video in bed of John Lennon's "Imagine," then the afternoon in bed, then a surprise party for him with all his closest friends. Everything was unexpected, surprising. Take the trouble to give pleasure to your lover. Take trouble over his life, over your life. Share new adventures, new places. Don't allow love to grow dim and overfamiliar. You are a new person every day. Don't forget that. Grow together-don't grow apart.

When I was young I used to envy the rich talking and laughing in lighted restaurants while I was walking by outside, looking in. But now that I'm one of the people in the lighted restaurants, sometimes I envy those outside, the people still struggling, because struggle is romantic.

Of course, people do inevitably change within a marriage, but respect marriage. Try to change together. Do all you can to keep your marriage safe and strong. It can bring you more happiness than anything else in the world. And divorce is a very, very painful experience.