We asked two top writers and their husbands to record their feelings towards each other in a diary at regular intervals over a week. What emerged was a fascinating insight into married life.
We all feel it sometimes. That clench of the jaw or roll of the eyes when our spouse loads the dishwasher badly or fails to take out the bins.
Indeed, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty so amply demonstrated last week in a joint interview for Grazia magazine, nothing provokes disagreement in a relationship quite so much as the domestic load — though, in their case, the flashes of real irritation came from him, not her.
We asked two top writers and their husbands to record their feelings towards each other in a diary at regular intervals over a week. I don’t think it’s him I’ve fallen out of love with. My constant frustration is with how much life admin I have to do, says Julie of her husband Cornel Feeding, sorting laundry, going to the pharmacy for baby products. I took them on because I felt I knew best, but it was a slippery slope.When I get in from the school run, I reheat the Alfredo I’ve made and serve it up. Cornel swans in and sits at the table, meal placed before him.
When he leaves and I close the door I breathe a sigh of relief. The house is mine again. Which I rather like. I grab my diary and write ‘feeling: Joy’. I help make the volcano with paper and paint and am pretty pleased with the result, only to find him in the living room playing pool on his phone. I also tended to write the word ‘love’ more when he was not around, something the study also found: absence makes the heart grow fonder.
One entry in my diary reads ‘annoyed’. This was when she was moaning about having to make dinner, but when I offered to chop something, she said I was in the way. You can’t win.We used to be a lot more affectionate before children and when we had no chores and just rented a tiny flat, but with a family comes more responsibility which, I admit, Julie mainly handles.
In fact, in many things we are polar opposites. Justin loves people, company, activity, constant chatter, and self-indulgence, and I am quiet, rather antisocial, and a bit of a control freak, fond of exercise and looking after my health. I give the go-ahead to this investment, but feel instantly resentful that he has disturbed my mental peace.
They don’t settle into the contempt I see in other couples, perhaps because neither of us feels the other isn’t pulling their weight in shouldering parental responsibilities. Having said that, this exercise in ‘checking in with your feelings’ has been quite confronting. It shows me that our being ‘complementary’ too often means Justin just puts up with my crap.
He also says I haven’t hung the washing up in a suitably orderly manner for his taste, but this just makes me laugh. We decide we couldn’t live without each other. Which is the truth. If I could only relax, our life would be like a permanent holiday.Inge is generally in a mild state of panic 24 hours a day, only broken by a run, cat videos, hot chocolates and Prince played at maximum volume.
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