Relationships - Hardcover

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Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships – yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might therefore be intuitive and easy. This book starts from a different premise: that love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. It calmly and charmingly takes us around the key issues of relationships, from arguments to sex, forgiveness to communication, making sure that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck.

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Chapter 8 - The Dignity of Ironing

When intelligent and sensitive people – guided by Romanticism – come together in relationships, they tend to be agreed on an implicit hierarchy of what is and isn’t important for the success and endurance of their love. They tend to be highly aware of the importance of spending time together (perhaps in museums or by the sea), of having fulfilling sex, of assembling a circle of interesting friends and of reading stimulating books. They are unlikely to give much thought, however, to the question of who will do the ironing.

Part of the reason is that when Romantic writers explored the troubles of relationships in their works, they never talked about laundry. They tended to draw attention to an important, but notably limited, range of issues. The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin depicted unrequited love in Eugene Onegin. Gustave Flaubert examined boredom and infidelity in Madame Bovary. Jane Austen was acutely attentive to how differences in social status could pose obstacles to a couple’s chances of contentment. In Italy, the most widely read novel of the 19th century – The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni – discussed how political corruption and large historical events could overwhelm a relationship. All the great Romantic writers were – in their different ways – deeply interested in what might make it hard for a relationship to go well.

Unfortunately, there is a crucial omission in this catalogue. Little attention or enthusiasm has been directed at ‘domestic’ things – a word that sums up the key, practical, recurrent questions of a shared life, ranging from responsibility for doing the shopping or cleaning the fridge to whether a cousin needs to be invited to dinner or whether to go on holiday to the same place we went last year.

According to Romanticism, these aren’t significant issues. A relationship should be about elevated factors: intense passions, heroic loyalty, and integrity in the face of conventional prejudice. The daily tasks and squabbles of domestic existence feel, by contrast, unworthy of attention. Prompted by this background attitude, we don’t weigh up domestic factors carefully when forming a relationship. We don’t readily acknowledge that contrasting attitudes to such things as cleaning the bath or spontaneously inviting friends round for a drink will need to be handled with immense care and could otherwise wreck a joint life.

If a dispute feels high-status, we don’t mind lavishing time and intelligence on it. We are more patient because we understand it’s going to be difficult. (We don’t throw our hands up in the air when we haven’t found a new job or a better place to live after five minutes.) A Romantic attitude to love makes certain conflicts look minor – what level to set the thermostat to, or whether all the cutlery needs to match – so we flare up when they start to dominate our lives, as things like these inevitably will.

One strategy we might deploy to calm ourselves down is tell ourselves that it’s not worth getting worked up over a tiny detail. We should try to stop caring about whether ‘soon’ means ‘in the next five minutes’ or ‘in the next week’ or whether it is disgusting (or lovely) to read the newspaper while sitting on the loo. But this doesn’t really work because – as we readily admit around the arts – details are crucial: they are the tiny points at which grand themes come into focus. We accept that a poet will agonise over the choice of a single word; equally, a whole attitude to life may seem to be summarised in the way a person squeezes a toothpaste tube or how loudly or quietly they close a door.

Characteristically, we don’t ‘budget’ adequately for such disputes. What is infuriating is not the difficulty in itself, but the difficulty being there when we don’t think it should be. We haven’t anticipated it, and haven’t been educated to deal with it. Rather than ignoring contentious details, we should try to budget better for them.

The starting place is a frank avowal that living with another person is both tricky and important. Of course, there will be many small sticking points where the overarching nature of our two characters is inconsistent. But we would treat these almost as diplomatic incidents, requiring prolonged and painstaking negotiation. 

We would be willing to talk through with our partners the intricacies of how to share a duvet or organise a weekend with the same patient seriousness that diplomats devote to the sub-clauses of a bilateral trade agreement. For we would be sure, as they are, that a detail is rarely just a detail but is wholly worthy of extended discussion, eloquent exposition and much careful listening to the points of the other side. Unfortunately, our society has made this sound like the death of love rather than what it really is: a major help in making love work.