London - A study of 40,000 British households has established that couples are happiest during the first five years of marriage, after which it s downhill all the way, apparently, with women becoming unhappier faster than men, and more likely to precipitate a divorce.
I suspect that many of these women come to believe that their husbands simply don’t put enough effort into their relationships, which is the theme of a novel published recently.
Called the pile Of stuff at the Bottom Of the stairs, it s about a mother-of-two who works part-time and deeply resents being left with most of the housework and childcare.
She begins keeping a star chart listing her husband’s pluses and faults, a main fault being the pile left at the bottom of the stairs and decides that if, after six months, the minuses outweigh the pluses, she’ll divorce him.
In the end, of course, real life proves more complicated than a star chart, just as the secrets of a successful marriage are far more complex than who does the housework.
Bringing up fulfilled children within a happy marriage is the greatest and most worthwhile challenge most of us will ever face. (another finding of the study is that marital breakdown is more damaging to children than poverty.)
The hard truth for most women, though, is that looking after young children while also doing the housework is frequently unremitting, exhausting drudgery of which he, inevitably, doesn’t do his fair share.
But to imagine that this frustration is all one-sided is to make a mistake. Many men also lead lives of deeply debilitating frustration.
Driven by their DNA to protect and provide, men define themselves through work. When it doesn’t go well, or they get fired, it’s catastrophic, psychologically and is why, as the recession bites, more men are suffering from depression than ever before.
Yet too many wives can’t empathise with this. The divorce rate among couples in their 50s is spiralling prompted, I would argue, not by the pile of stuff at the bottom of the stairs but by a failure of communication and sympathy on both sides, coupled with the fact that the children have left home. The sadness is that for many, the consequence of divorce is not a late flowering of new love and happiness, but loneliness and a sense of failure.
I’m not saying that no one should ever divorce: There s no place colder than a dead marriage. But it seems to me desperately tragic to give up on a marriage just when the children are leaving, and the hardest part has come to an end.
Yes, your husband may have morphed from a vigorous young man with dreams and ambitions to a 50-something with a paunch, a sense of disillusionment and an unhealthy attachment to the TV remote. Sexual passion may, indeed, have waned, and the way he eats may well drive you to distraction. and yet isn’t it precisely now that we should find the will not to walk out but to talk it out? To celebrate the sheer achievement of having stuck together this long; of having created a family, a home and a history?
Of course you can seek a new home and a new life. But for many middle-aged women, the immaculately tidy (but tiny) post-divorce flat soon begins to seem an empty, lonely place. One where you miss not just the pile of stuff at the bottom of the stairs, but also the man who leaves it there. Daily Mail