How to Stay Married (8 page)

There is also the sex problem. Before you were married, holidays were always treated as safaris. The moment you boarded the train at Victoria, the sap started rising, the eye started roving on the lookout for a holiday playmate. After you’re married, the hunting instinct dies very hard. As a friend of mine said: ‘Taking a married man to the South of France is rather like taking a foxhound to a meet on a lead, and not letting him join in the chase.’

I’m not a believer in retaliation but if your husband does get a crush on another girl on holiday – carrying her beachbag, always ready with a large towel when she comes up from the sea – your best answer rather than sulking is to take to the nearest gigolo. And if there isn’t a gigolo to take, comfort yourself with the thought that holiday romances seldom last beyond the holiday.

Going on holiday with friends, of course, is one of the quickest ways of losing them. The most amiable people turn into absolute monsters when they’ve got too much spare time on their hands.

Everyone will either want to do different things (lying in the sun, sightseeing, diving, pony trekking, or
merely
getting drunk) or else no one will admit what they want to do, and go round looking martyred:

‘What would you like to do today, my darling?’

‘Anything
you
like, darling.’

‘Oh don’t be awkward.’

Particularly avoid going with people who are much richer than you (you’ll worry the whole time about spending too much) or poorer than you (or you’ll spend your time grumbling about their meanness).

We went to France once in a party of twelve, all great friends. It was a catastrophe. Meals were exactly like being back at school: ‘Hands up for salade niçoise.’ All the people who could speak French pulled rank on the people who couldn’t or didn’t dare. All the wives sulked because all the husbands had got crushes on the one single girl, who was sulking because she couldn’t hook the one single man. Bad will was absolutely rampant.

I am painting a gloomy picture of holidays, because I think people often feel that if they’ve had a disastrous holiday their marriage must be on the rocks. ‘If we can’t get on when we’re on holiday,’ they say, ‘there must be something radically wrong.’ Forget it. Cheerful pessimism is the best approach to a holiday, and console yourself that the most disastrous holidays are always the funniest in retrospect.

HOW TO BEHAVE

On holiday there is invariably one who does the planning – booking rooms, tickets, etc. – and one who resists being planned. If you’re the resister, cut down on the beefing, whether it’s about the lack of soap, coat-hangers, hot water, drawer space, bed space, or amount of garlic in the food. Remember when in Rome … and shut up about it.

Don’t overdo the sun – holidays are meant for lots of sex, and you won’t feel like it if you wince every time you touch each other. And it’s depressing to start peeling like a ticker-tape welcome as soon as you turn brown.

Travel is inclined to broaden the hips as well as the mind. Take a few shifts and larger sized trousers.

Take lots of books and sleeping pills. One often can’t sleep in hot countries, and nothing is more depressing than to feel that all of the good of your holiday is being wasted because of insomnia. Take something to settle your stomach, so you won’t spend all night thundering to the lavatory like the Gadarene Swine.

Remember you won’t be able to buy the Pill, or whatever you use, in a Catholic country. One couple were staying in a villa in Spain, and a particularly greedy guest came down one morning, found their contraceptive paste in the fridge, thought it was some exotic pâté and spread it on his toast for breakfast.

Go somewhere where there’s something to do: a casino, the odd night club, boats to sail, etc.

Money should be shared and kept an eye on: nothing wrecks a holiday more than the constant fear that you may run out.

Husbands and wives should do their own packing to avoid endless recriminations about spongebags, razors and cameras left behind.

It’s horrible coming home to a dirty untidy house. If you haven’t got a daily, pay a chum a couple of quid to come in the day before you get home to give the house a going over.

Don’t show slides. Don’t bore everyone when you get back with stories of your holiday. My husband refuses to talk about it, and hangs a notice on his office door saying ‘yes’.

BED

BED/SEX/INTERCOURSE/MAKING LOVE – CALL
it what you like – is the cornerstone of marriage. If the sex side of a marriage is really good, you seldom hear of it breaking up. If you keep your partner happy in bed, he’s unlikely to stray, and if he does he nearly always comes back.

Few people are born geniuses in bed – it is something you learn step by step, like a child learns to talk. The first essential is to be honest with one another. Don’t pretend to be going into ecstasies of excitement if you are not, or your partner will automatically assume he is doing the right things to please you, and keep on doing them.

A wife – if she can possibly help it – shouldn’t pretend to be having an orgasm if she is not. Although her husband will flop down satisfied beside her afterwards, she will unconsciously build up a resentment both against him for not seeing through the cheat, and against herself for cheating.

Of course it’s not vital to have an orgasm every time you go to bed with a man, but the fact remains that it’s much nicer if you do. It draws you together, it gives you a marvellous feeling, and it’s the best sleeping pill in the world.

Another myth that must be shattered is that men are lustful beasts whose appetites must be slaked, and women have to endure it.

‘Your father was very good to me and never bothered me much,’ Victorian mothers used to tell daughters who were about to get married. ‘Just shut your eyes and think of England.’

Recent research, however, has discovered that
women
can be just as highly sexed as men, need intercourse just as often, but in most instances are too inhibited to ask for it.

A wife should therefore not be ashamed to take a wholehearted enjoyment in sex, ask for it often, and if her husband isn’t forthcoming, to seduce him, by making herself pretty, wearing sexy underwear, or simply by wandering round in the nude.

Don’t be too fastidious. Nothing that two people who love each other do for their mutual enjoyment in the privacy of their own home can be wrong. If he’s on a Lolita kick, pander to his whims and dress up in a gym tunic. If she’s got a slave girl complex, tie her up before you make love to her.

Sex books are quite helpful but they always made us howl with laughter. They kept talking about the ‘upright male member’, which made us think of an incorruptible MP.

Read as much erotic literature as you can get your hands on, not only to excite you, but to give you ideas. Marriage needs every novelty to keep it going. A man I know said his wife was absolutely sensational in bed for at least a month after she’d read
Fanny Hill
.

For beginners (
see the chapter on the honeymoon
) the thing to remember is to take things slowly. It may be six months or a year before you manage to establish a sexual rapport. It’s only in books that the man goes on drilling all night, and suddenly the rock splits and the oil comes gushing out. Enthusiasm is nine-tenths of the battle, and perseverance. Kindness and gratitude are also essential. Tell your husband what doesn’t work for you, but make pretty sure you tell him when it is good. If having the inside of your thighs stroked excites you, say so. Don’t let him wait thirty years to find out.

HOW OFTEN

This is entirely up to you. Everyone lies about it if you ask them. I read in one book that the average man of thirty has sexual intercourse 2.8 times a week. When I told my husband, a rather smug gleam came into his eye, but he was curious to know what they did on the .8 occasion.

On the other hand, one Indian sex manual says that during the first year of marriage couples should have intercourse three times a night for the first three months, twice a night for the next three months, and every night for the rest of the year. After which I suppose you die of exhaustion.

There’s no rule. Sometimes you may get a jag and have each other a dozen times in a weekend, sometimes if you’re both tired you may not feel like touching each other for a week or so.

HOW NOT TO LOOK IN BED

Curlers and great blobs of face cream are grounds for divorce – no woman need wear them. If you want curly hair, get a set of heated rollers. If you want a soft skin, put on face cream in the bath.

People should wash and clean their teeth before they go to bed, and have at least one bath a day. This may sound elementary, but it’s amazing how many people don’t, and, sweat fetishists apart, most people would rather make love to someone who smells and tastes good.

Have separate beds if you must, but not separate rooms. Once you get on to the separate rooms kick, it’s so easy to shut yourself in every night and grow further and further away from your partner. If one of you snores, or is a bad sleeper and wants to read, have a bed made up in the spare room, so you can slip into it if you get really desperate about three o’clock in the morning.

Don’t, however, get out of the habit of making love. Quite often if you’ve been snapping at each other you will find that once you sleep together everything will be all right again.

I met a girl the other day who boasted she only gives herself to her husband once a year on his birthday. A woman should be grateful that her husband wants her, and any woman who keeps on saying ‘I don’t feel like it tonight’, unless she’s ill, pregnant or recovering from a baby, deserves to have an unfaithful husband.

Equally no man should deny his wife, if she obviously wants it. There’s no excuse for the sort of career man – an American, as it happens – who will only sleep with his wife on Friday and Saturday, so he’ll be fresh for work on the weekdays.

Another of the great myths about sex is that for the
first
year you glut yourselves like someone working in a sweet shop, and after that the glamour wears off and you settle down to pastimes like bringing up children and gardening. In any good marriage, sex should get better and better as the years go by, even if you indulge in it marginally less often.