How to Have an Almost Perfect Marriage

Statistically, 100 per cent of divorces start with marriage.

Please note, this chapter is aimed at unmarried readers – I’m afraid it’s too late for the rest of you, dears.

Statistically, 100 per cent of divorces start with marriage.

And my cheery demeanour, as you so delightfully put it, is the result of years of practice in front of the bathroom mirror. And the occasional gin.

In the end, we arrived at a compromise – I ignored him and he went to the pub.

WHY GET MARRIED?

Statistically, 100 per cent of divorces start with marriage. And yet there are still hundreds of thousands of weddings each year – why?

Well, people get married for all sorts of reasons – security, social convention, pregnancy, boredom, fear of being alone, even love. Personally, I fancied a new hat and Stephen was nearby. Of course, we all hope to have a string of marriages to increasingly attractive and wealthy partners, but the reality for many couples is that their marriage will endure for the rest of their lives – a chilling thought and one worth considering before entering into what is, after all, a legally-binding contract (see section on how to get out of legally-binding contracts). While this can seem daunting, it’s equally important to remember that compared with being systematically abused in a nursing home or dying alone in a skip, spending your twilight years with your spouse can be relatively acceptable. Personally, I think it’s always good to see an elderly couple walking down the street hand in hand – it stops them falling over.

There is also the question of money. The tabloids are full of warring celebrity couples for whom the rather unseemly battle for financial remuneration has muddied the marital waters and allowed them to lose sight of the reason they were getting divorced in the first place.

And it can be easy to get carried away with the romance of a wedding – the church, the dress, the horse-drawn carriage, the free bar. People even use the phrase ‘fairy tale wedding’ although very few use the phrase ‘fairy tale marriage’ – unless they’re referring to the original, traditional fairy tale which was generally a pretty gruesome adventure without a happy ending.

This book is intended as a guide not only for those couples about to enter into a state of holy matrimony but also those couples already in a state. If you and your spouse are sitting there, cosily imagining that you have nothing to learn from the following pages, I recommend you attempt the following short quiz and I’m quite confident that you will feel differently by the time you’ve finished.

in so many other areas of married life, the secret of successful sandwiches is variety. Never let your partner know what’s coming – that way they can never get bored. Over the years, Stephen’s been treated to everything from my prize-winning Egg and Banana to my Walnut, Tuna and Falafel – or, as Stephen calls it, WTF.

course, I wouldn’t expect you to be able to even approach the lowest level of my culinary mountain but I am contractually obliged to include a number of my legendary recipes in this book so here are a few of the less ambitious ones.

Statistically, 100 per cent of divorces start with marriage.

But above all, marriage is about wanting to share your life with someone you really, truly love but staying with your spouse instead, no matter how much they irritate and ignore you.