婚姻保鲜的秘密是什么？

Mastering the Art of Marriage

Wedded bliss: Jane and Rob Fearnley-Whittingstall on their wedding day 
Photo: CHRISTOPHER JONES

"I fancied him for all the wrong reasons," says Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall, eyes twinkling at the memory. "Rob was terribly handsome, which wasn't necessarily a sound basis for a permanent relationship."

After 47 years of marriage she is, she says, lucky that the glamorous Oxford undergraduate turned out to be a kind and thoughtful man who still makes her laugh (and who grows some very fine purple sprouting broccoli). "I don't think we ever run out of conversation," she says, although she happily admits they still have arguments, as all couples do. "Rob will have got over it in five minutes, while I'll be brooding away in my lair for hours and hours."

As you would expect from the author of The Good Granny Guide, Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall, a very young-looking 70-year-old, has her feet firmly on the ground. In her new book For Better, For Worse, subtitled "A light-hearted guide to wedded bliss", she celebrates the institution of marriage while wondering how on earth any of us manages to stay the course.

She talks about the domestic front line – housework, the television remote, snoring – and the vexed issue of in-laws. She talks about flashpoints that signal danger, like financial anxiety, and whether infidelity is the ultimate betrayal. With candid comments from those she has interviewed, and extracts from novels, letters and songs – by everyone from Winston Churchill to the Beatles – she presents a down-to-earth picture of marriage that makes it seem both a source of joy and plain hard work.

Jane and Rob Fearnley-Whittingstall still happily hitched after 47 years 
Photo: CHRISTOPHER JONES

Marriage is, of course, very much in the headlines in the run-up to the election, with the Conservatives promising tax breaks and Labour dead set against the whole idea. Fearnley-Whittingstall manages to champion marriage while suggesting tactfully that all long-term relationships are equally valid.

"I don't think that it's the role of government to manipulate people's choices about the way they live their lives. If at the moment the tax system is unfair to married people, it should be evened out, but I don't think it should be made more advantageous to be married." In Britain today, after all, many couples live together without tying the knot: her own children Sophy, 46, and Hugh, 45 (the well-known chef), had long-term relationships with their partners before they married.

At the same time, Fearnley-Whittingstall, who becomes, with the arrival of Hugh's baby this month, a grandmother of six, is clear about the advantages of marriage. "There is something about going through the ritual – making promises in front of all your friends and family – that makes the whole thing more serious and is, for some people anyway, a stronger and greater commitment."

She has always been a keen observer of relationships. She remembers her own father coming back from fighting in Egypt after the Second World War, the Union Jack hung out to welcome him. "I think my mother's generation had a very difficult time in their marriages because of the long periods of absences and separation."

But she says she wouldn't dream of offering advice to her own children without being asked. "It is sometimes agonising to watch when things go wrong, but that's the whole thing about the book. It's to say that arguments and rows don't mean that a marriage is on the rocks."

The Fearnley-Whittingstalls married in July 1962 in Henley-on-Thames, where Jane's parents had settled after returning from what was then Rhodesia. In those days, she says, weddings were usually in the afternoon, and the reception tea consisted of cucumber sandwiches, strawberries and cream, and a choice of tea or champagne.

After staying at home to bring up Sophy and Hugh, she embarked on a new career (encouraged by her husband Rob, an advertising copywriter) and trained to be a landscape architect. The idea for the book came from looking at the relationships of couples who had created gardens together – Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Rosemary and David Verey.

"I just got a flash," she says, "that there was a much broader issue here – marriage in general and how couples manage to live together." And there is, she says smiling, a link between gardening and marriage: in both cases, you have to be patient and nurturing, and be prepared to wait for results.

If Jane is an ambassador for marriage, she's also a realist. She knows, as she says in the book, that the promises we repeat when we stand at the altar are easier to make than to keep. But, as she says, "I would hope that people with strong, long-term relationships can somehow pass on whatever wisdom they have gained. Which, I suppose, in a small way, I'm trying to do – blow the trumpet for marriage a bit."

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