Growing apart has now officially overtaken infidelity as the main cause of family breakdown and the tragedy is that it is often utterly avoidable.
When my wife Kate touches the side of her jaw, it’s because it aches. If she stands in a certain way, her sciatica is playing up. These days I notice these tiny inferences that she’s feeling under par.
I listen when she talks, making eye contact, whereas once I would have hidden behind my newspaper grunting intermittently, feigning interest.
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Today, I can say that our marriage is robust and joyful: full of laughter, occasional healthy bouts of contention, and above all, love. And the reason is that I’m in tune with Kate. I’ve learned to put her first; to think about her and what she needs. That’s hard to do all the time, but I’m getting better at it.
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I’ve learned from my own bitter experience that a marriage can unravel when a husband ceases to care enough about his wife. In fact, most marriages don’t end with rows, adultery or even incompatibility, but with an aimless drift into separation.
And my formula for fixing things is a simple one: ‘Happy wife, happy life’ is a maxim that is backed by research and has saved my own marriage.
What’s more, when Mum is happy, the rest of the family tend to be happy. This is much less true for dads. It is a simple truth that I have now acknowledged.
When I take responsibility for our marriage, and put Kate first in my pecking order of priorities, the rest will follow.
I learned this through first-hand experience when our relationship reached a crisis point. It happened eight years into our marriage when Kate told me she was profoundly unhappy.
‘You know I love you, Harry,’ she said. ‘But since we’ve had the children, I’ve found it harder and harder to talk to you. We have a comfortable life and you’re wonderful with the children when it suits you. But you don’t seem at all interested in me. We don’t seem to be friends any more. I feel lonely and unimportant. I’m not sure how long I can go on like this.’
The white flash that shot through my head like a thunderbolt temporarily blinded me with a mixture of panic and terror. Was my marriage over? I never saw it coming.
Everyone accepts that good marriages can go bad. But it was never going to happen to us, was it? Yet insidiously we’d grown apart and, without knowing it, were drifting toward a break-up.
Fortunately for us both, Kate didn’t leave me. As a result of the decision I made to put her first, to be her friend and take notice of her.
I now know that my prime role is to take responsibility for my marriage, to love Kate, to be her friend, to be kind. When I do that, our marriage stays strong, we parent well as a team, and family life works well.
I learned to stop taking Kate for granted. I started to show her affection, to say, ‘I love you’; to notice the new dress she was wearing and to ask how she was feeling. I learnt to be kind to her and this meant sometimes not doing the things I wanted to do.
Like Kate, most women want friendship more than anything from their husbands. That’s it. It’s not about being a doormat. I learned to really love Kate and she loved me back.
That’s what mums want. And that’s what dads need to know. It’s a disarmingly simple formula, but it is the key to a happy and enduring marriage.