Marriage

Another sunny Sunday morning and the phone rings. I pick up the receiver. It’s Frank. I groan inwardly. Frank is a doctor and an old family friend and a great talker. What he has to say is always intelligent and interesting and often funny. He will explain scientific laws or philosophical arguments or biological functions with elaborate care and in the simplest possible terms, so that even a child might understand them. My immune system, for example, is run by soldiers with powers of arrest and internment, constantly on high alert for terrorists. His talk is invariably sprinkled with his favourite Jewish jokes, and bawdy songs, which he breaks into with little or no provocation, his cherubic face aglow with pleasure.

My gay best friend is cheating on me with another woman. I saw him with her the other day and now I’m prostrate with grief and shock. I don’t think I will ever be able to bring myself to forgive him. Even if he begged me to come back to him, we can never be the way we were. I don’t even know how to tell him I know about the affair. He is carrying on as if he doesn’t know that I have found out. All I keep thinking is: ‘How could he do this to me? How? After everything we have been through? The long discussions about Botox, the episodes of Kath & Kim, the endless gossiping...I wouldn’t mind so much, but the gay marriage law was already making it harder than ever for sad, forty-something single women like me to hang on to their gay best friends.

A friend of mine, quite a distinguished lawyer, takes the view that marriage ceased to make sense after no-fault divorces came in. What, he says sternly, is the point of a contract when there’s no sanction if you break it? Well, quite. But if no-fault divorce pretty well invalidates marriage after the event, prenups do quite a good job of undermining it beforehand. The point of marriage is that it’s meant to be a lifetime affair – the hint being in the ‘til death do us part’ bit – and the point of prenups is that they make provision for the thing ending before it even gets underway.

Is there a more tragic tale being played out in the British press than that of heroic Andy Murray and his doting, wispy girlfriend Kim Sears. He caused a stir earlier this week by suggesting that he would marry the poor darling after this year’s Wimbledon, only to reveal that it was in fact a joke. Ha. This comes after a long string of will he/won't he headlines, and lots of breathy concern for poor, sweet Kim. There is a solution to Kim’s pain. It’s a bit zesty. It would certainly slog it to those media pundits who see her as a limp fish: She could ask him to marry her. A radical thought. But women shouldn’t be scared of popping the question. And neither should men be scared of accepting a proposal.

Of all the interesting revelations by the French magazine Closer about François Hollande, the most interesting for me is its claim that he owns only one pair of shoes. I don’t think I know anybody with only one pair of shoes. Even my brother John, who at the age of 86 has rather let himself go sartorially-speaking, possesses two pairs. Yet if Closer is to be believed, the President of France has only one pair. The president’s shoes are important because when he arrived from the Elysée Palace on the back of a moped for a visit to his alleged mistress in a nearby apartment, his face was hidden by a safety helmet. So Closer, which secretly photographed his arrival, had to rely on his shoes to confirm his identity.

George Bernard Shaw made no bones about the merits of schooling: it was, he felt, a way for parents to offload the care of their children onto other people, and he was right. The rich do this systematically, of course, in delegating their children to boarding schools, but for the rest of us, Ed Miliband’s plan to extend childcare provision by obliging primary schools to take in our children from eight in the morning to six in the evening will have a good deal of appeal. At least for parents it will; if I were a teacher, I’d take a dim view of having babysitting added to my other duties. But as Ed says, ‘…the cost of a nursery place is now the highest in history, at more than £100 a week to cover part-time hours.

For a minute I just stood there with my back against the wall, staring at the credit card receipt. Then I slid down into a crouching position on the kitchen floor. ‘So this is it,’ I thought to myself. ‘This is really going to be how I find out.’ I’d found the receipt in the front pocket of one of my husband’s suitcases on Tuesday morning. It was for dinner for two at the Four Seasons Hotel in Santa Barbara — a place he’d told me he’d never been. He’d had the Merlot and the rib-eye; she’d had the cucumber martini and a Caesar salad. I’m guessing that she waived the dressing. I’m already working out the logistics by the time my husband gets home from work.

The Telegraph reports that the Relationships Alliance, which is to launch in the House of Commons, warns that the ‘disintegration of romantic, social and family relationships costs the average taxpayer around £1,500 a year’. Apparently this amounts to £50 billion a year. The story is of course familiar, even if the figures involved are new. Broken relationships can cause immense social and economic damage to the wider community. The Relationships Alliance, which is a union of charities, actions groups, politicians and individuals, has come into being to convince the government to adopt a national strategy to counter these costly ills. Relationships do break down, and some relationships should be dissolved.

Labour has decided that David Cameron's slip-up on marriage tax breaks at PMQs is worth digging into for a little longer.

What with the flap about Ed Miliband’s dad, the legion of the outraged have forgotten what they were planning to get angry about this week – the marriage tax break, which is social engineering and a blatant Tory attempt to punish single mothers in favour of the patriarchy. As a paid-up member of the patriarchy it always sounds more fun coming from people complaining about it than it actually is. Marriage, for men, is a form of domestication and many would rather spend their 30s and 40s playing computer games, if possible with a live-in girlfriend to whom they have made no commitments. Many end up getting married partly because their peers do, and the social pressure to conform. Why do we do it?

Our world has been rocked by revelations that Bridget Jones — described as 'the world's most famous literary singleton' — is now a widow. Her ex-husband Mark Darcy has left her with two children and a life lived through social media. Bridget is now obsessed with a toyboy called Roxter, a 29-year-old she met on Twitter. Pull yourself together, Bridget! The solution is obvious to Mr Steerpike (oh all right! Lady Steerpike was my inspiration). You must get hitched to your long-time, on-again-off-again love interest, the devilishly endearing Daniel Cleaver. Here's why: 1). If Hugh Grant reprises the movie character, at least it will keep him occupied. #hackedoff 2). Getting married again might qualify you for David Cameron's new tax break.

Apparently I’ve proposed to my civil partner. He claims that on BBC Radio 2, on the Jeremy Vine show (he thinks it was the JV show) I expressed myself in terms which presumed his prior acceptance. I can’t remember a thing about it — on live radio one does tend to throw these thoughts out heedlessly — but my partner swears I said, ‘Oh yes, well I suppose we’ll have to get an upgrade.’ He found this a graceless way of popping the question, and has forbidden me from using the term ‘upgrade’ again. Ah well. But in that case, if not ‘upgrade’, what shall we call it?