The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  I have always had a soft spot for narcissistic charmers. I think this probably started because I used to be so shy. Subtle signals of interest would be lost. I needed men with placards, men who were practically cartoons. I needed men who told me I was gorgeous – and asked me out.

  My most significant relationship started sixteen years ago, at the Elephant and Castle. I was on my way home from a very bad blind date. When a tall, dark (black, in fact), handsome stranger asked me for a drink, I thought it couldn’t be worse than the date I’d just left. We went to a pub under the arches. We went to the Old Gin Palace in the Old Kent Road. We walked back, hand in hand, in the early hours, to my flat. We only went out with each other for a few months, but we have both played a very big part in each other’s lives. Winston is probably one of the reasons I have found it so hard to ‘settle down’.

  Here’s how not to have a relationship. Hold out for perfection. Panic at the first flaw. Assume that a moment of awkwardness means it’s time to bolt. Or, alternatively, make sure you only ever fall for men who aren’t (emotionally or actually) available. That should keep your weekends, birthdays and holidays partner-free for life.

  Attachment theory has a lot to teach us about how to have successful relationships. People who have a history of ‘secure attachment’ are much, much better at relationships than people who don’t. People who are ‘insecurely attached’ or ‘avoidant’ had better find someone who’s ‘securely attached’ if they want to have a hope in hell of making anything work. Two ‘avoidants’ together? That’s me and Winston. Fun, but probably best to run a mile.

  *

  Most of my friends are, thank goodness, much better at all this than me. With my friends Emma and Tony, for example, you can still see the spark after twenty-three years. When they come round for dinner, they sometimes bicker, but you can see that they are still interested in everything the other one says. They argue, they laugh, they tease each other and they sometimes even shout at each other, but every word and gesture make it clear that they are still each other’s number one.

  ‘I think we’ve got a lot of interests in common,’ Emma told me, ‘in terms of politics, writing, our backgrounds as well, so we’re comfortable with each other, but the other thing is I think we like each other. We’re great friends, so we can have a laugh.’ She was stretched out on the sofa in their snug sitting room. I was curled up on the armchair by the fire. ‘But we also know,’ she said, ‘that we need our space, so we didn’t actually buy a place together until we’d been going out for eight years. We’ve each got our own room as well. The rules are that you can’t tell the other person what to do in their room. Tony wants to bring his bike to his room, and I’m really annoyed about it, but I don’t have the right to tell him. You,’ she said, shaking a fist at Tony, ‘had better make it discreet!’

  They met when she was twenty-seven and he was twenty-nine. ‘I’d joined this creative writing class,’ she said, ‘and this wonderful guy walked in. He had a black beret on. I thought: what a poser! Thinks he’s on the Left Bank, does he? And I looked at his face and thought: ooh!’ For the next nine months, she ‘just kind of checked him out’. And then one day she asked him out. ‘He said yeah and that’s how it took off. There was no drama. I just really liked him. I thought he was gorgeous to look at, he had a really nice manner and he was working class, like me. We’ve been together such a long time. People are quite gobsmacked, I think partly because he’s white and I’m black, but we never thought of it like that. I still fancy the socks off him! I think he’s the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen!’

  It’s a cliché to talk about someone’s face ‘lighting up’, but Emma’s face really does light up when she talks about the man she loves. But, I said carefully, you do have rows, don’t you? ‘Oh my God,’ said Emma. ‘Yes!’ So what, I asked, do they row about? For a moment, Emma looked as though she was struggling to remember. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he’s very typically male, so he doesn’t really say a lot, which winds me up a lot. I have been known to throw things, so there was a quiche that was thrown in here.’ She laughed. ‘Which I was pissed off about, because I was hungry and I’d just thrown my quiche! What else? I don’t know. I think it’s the living. For me, things need to be in the right place, so in my space there needs to be a sense of order. So when I’m sitting down and somebody’s socks pop up from the settee, that is not a sense of order, is it?’

  ‘They’re probably yours!’ said Tony. Emma used to be a teacher and she gave him one of her head teacher looks. ‘Or I trip over someone’s shoes,’ she went on. ‘That,’ said Tony, ‘is your stuff lying around everywhere!’ ‘No,’ said Emma. ‘You’re butting in. That’s another thing. He talks when he wants to talk. But I think that’s the main thing. His stuff. And sometimes, his organization. Tony will say he’s going to do something, like in the house. We’ve got a broken window at the moment and every day he’s been saying “I’m going to do it”, but it will fall on me to sort it out.’

  They have, she told me, a cleaner, to cut out rows about domestic work. They mostly get their own food, because Emma has to eat a restricted diet for health reasons and Tony doesn’t ‘want a lot of this gluten-free stuff, you know’. They even go on separate holidays. ‘I’m not sure we travel together very well,’ said Emma. ‘His smoking gets on my nerves when we travel, and Tony just seems to do his own thing. When we were on our first holiday, in Morocco, a friend said to me years later, “I was watching you both.” And she was going to her friend, “They’re so in love! Look at him, he looks so devoted to her!” And that was a terrible holiday for us, it was our first trip away and oh my God, I thought I was going to have to kill him!’

  You can see why Emma always cheers me up. I love her, and Tony, because they are both warm and funny and intelligent and kind. And because they’re honest.

  So what, I asked Tony, did he think had kept their relationship alive? He cleared his throat. He has a quiet voice and today it was even quieter. ‘I think there are some basics you have to have,’ he said. ‘If you’re a drunk, or a drug user, or a gambler, or you’re violent or abusive, or you’re just not very nice to live with, that’s probably going to end badly. But I do think there’s quite a lot of luck involved. I don’t think most people will accept that.’

  Well, OK, I said, but it’s not nothing to carry on being attracted to someone for twenty-three years, is it? ‘Again,’ said Tony, ‘you don’t necessarily know what someone’s going to look like.’ Emma looked as if she was about to explode. ‘It’s personal,’ she practically shrieked, ‘what do you personally think about our relationship? I’m not hearing that! I hear a lot of generalizing.’

  Right, I said, let me spell it out. What attracted you to Emma? ‘Well,’ Tony said, ‘I do think it’s partly that she does have quite a lot of the qualities that I don’t have, which always makes somebody interesting. I’m not a very driven person. She is. I’m not a hard worker. She is. I’m not a risk taker. She is. If I’d met someone who was like me, I’d have found that quite boring. There’s nothing humdrum about Emma.’

  Now Emma was starting to look more cheerful. And what, I asked, irritated him about Emma? Tony looked down at his feet and then back at me. ‘I do think,’ he said, ‘a lot of women, not just Emma, regard you as a work in progress.’ Well, of course, I said. A man, surely, is just raw material? ‘They want you to be slightly different to what you are,’ he continued. ‘Why can’t you be a bit more this? Why can’t you be a bit more that? If you say you’re going to do something, for me that’s kind of like you’ve done it. I am a very annoying person to live with, but I do think there’s a certain amount you should just accept.’

  Or, I was tempted to say, he could just make a phone call and get someone to fix that window, but you can see why I’m not the one talking about twenty-three happy years. So had they, I asked, ever got near to splitting up?

  Now Emma’s smile was like the light in the sky after a storm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I might hav
e said “I’ve had enough of you”, but not really. Am I right, Tone?’ Tony smiled, too, and my heart gave a little jump. ‘I don’t think so, no.’ Emma looked over at Tony and her eyes shone. ‘We just think,’ she said, ‘nobody else will have us.’

  For Emma and Tony, it all started with physical attraction. For some couples it doesn’t. ‘I was thirty-eight when I met Ian,’ said my friend Lisa. ‘At the time I was pursuing someone else. We got on well and had a good laugh, but I don’t think there was much thought about anything else.’ A year later, they bumped into each other at a party. ‘At the end of the evening, he took my email address and I thought: this will be quite nice, because he seems like a nice person.’ Not exactly Romeo and Juliet, but look what happened to them.

  ‘About ten days or so went by and I thought “why hasn’t he contacted me?” Then he emailed and we went to a comedy club. I was late. Very late.’ She laughed and so did I. I remember her telling me at the time about how she had arrived in a long coat and scarf and woolly hat, breathless and apologetic, and he had told her that she reminded him of Joyce Grenfell. ‘We seemed to have a nice time,’ she said, ‘but I bent over to pick up my handbag and hit my head on the back of the chair and nearly knocked myself out! And then I didn’t hear from him for months and months.’

  Ignoring ‘The Rules’, a dating trend at the time that encouraged women around the world, including me, to behave like passive-aggressive American teenagers, she screwed her courage to her keyboard and emailed him. ‘I didn’t hear anything for months,’ she said. ‘I went to a poetry reading and he was there and it kind of led from there, really. I always like to say that neither of us was interested in the other, but life got in the way a bit. He said he was interested, but things happened.’

  They ‘jogged along’, she said, for eight months and then she had a shock. ‘When I got home from work I thought: I’ll have my usual fag and a glass of wine, and I suddenly realized I didn’t want either of them and I thought: “Oh God, this is really weird.”’ The next day, she went to the ‘well woman’ clinic in her lunch hour and was told that she was pregnant. ‘I remember bursting into tears,’ she said. ‘I walked back to work. The first person I told was the office cat. When I told Ian, his first response was “oh shit”.’

  Not, you’d have thought, the best start to a happy family setup, but they both soon perked up. ‘We arranged to meet in a pub,’ she said. ‘I had a Coke. He had a pint. We talked for about five minutes about it, and then played a game of pool. And then I said, “What about this? We don’t know each other very well. We don’t live together.” I was looking at the practical side of what might go wrong. He was looking at the practical side of what could be right about it. I spent five months being pregnant on my own, living in a house share. And then we moved into a flat in Stamford Hill.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘I loved that first home.’

  So, I told her, did I. It’s just up the road from me and I remember that first visit, to see Lisa, Ian and their tiny baby, made me feel as if I should have brought some frankincense or myrrh. I will never forget the glow of happiness that seemed to shine out of all three of them – and it seems to have been there ever since. ‘Ian was working nights,’ she said. ‘He would come home from work at nine o’clock in the morning. Ruby would be asleep by then. I would get really excited because the night before I would have taped Father Ted or The Simpsons and we would watch that, with a pot of coffee and Ruby asleep in front of us. We’d know that in our little world, everything was OK.’

  Whenever I see Lisa and Ian, that’s certainly how it looks to me. They have had plenty of challenges – money worries, job losses and horrible bosses – but their family unit always seems strong as a rock. When I first knew Lisa, she shared my weakness for the narcissistic charmer. She had, in fact, just come out of a relationship with a charismatic, handsome guy who had broken her heart. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘sometimes we feel that having somebody who’s perceived as more attractive, more successful, more appealing, will raise our status. But in that relationship I was always anxious. With Ian, I feel safe and confident and I like being with him. I think you should never forget how much you like that person and that’s something you have to work at. You have to keep reminding yourself of whatever it is you do well.’

  What I do well is panic and run away. But I’m quite good at seeing what other people do well. I was asked to do a piece about cross-cultural marriages, inspired by my own Swedish–Scottish mix. I met a fiftysomething English woman in the Cotswolds who had married a Dane. I met a twentysomething English woman who had married a very handsome young Italian and was living in Bari. And down the road from me in Dalston I met Veena Supramaniam, a half-Anglican, half-Hindu Sri Lankan Tamil and her Israeli-Australian husband, Nativ Gill.

  Veena went to live in Botswana when she was twelve. She went to boarding school in South Africa and then went to do a degree and a PhD in Melbourne. Nativ was born in Israel, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and moved to Australia when he was nine. He and Veena met at Melbourne when she spotted him at the gym. ‘He caught my eye straight away,’ she said. ‘I thought,’ he said, handing me a mug of tea, ‘that she was very beautiful and very exotic.’ But they were, they explained, friends for five years before they ‘got together’ and it was only after another nine years that they got married, in a Hindu and Jewish ceremony on a Sri Lankan beach.

  If that sounds like a bit of a slow burn, it certainly seems to generate a lot of heat. The sliding window to their balcony was wide open. ‘He always has it open,’ moaned Veena, but after we’d been talking for a while, I could see why. They were so engaged with each other that the air in the room almost crackled. The day before it had been full of candles for Diwali. ‘The whole house,’ said Nativ, ‘was a fire hazard!’ A few minutes later, he was telling me that he was ‘fiercely proud as an Israeli’, loves to celebrate Passover and Chanukah and marks the start of the Shabbat with the kiddish, the blessing of the bread and wine. But he also said that his Judaism was ‘cultural’ not ‘religious’ and that he was ‘the world’s worst Jew’. ‘I eat so much swine,’ he confessed, ‘I could support a pig farm.’

  Veena, said Nativ, is a ‘phenomenal cook’. But it was, he said, impossible for him to cook if she was in the kitchen ‘because she’s a total Nazi’. Perhaps only the grandson of a Holocaust survivor can say that to his wife.

  When I tore myself away from their kitchen table, I left with the feeling that the Diwali candles and the Shabbat bread and wine really weren’t the point. The point is that what it takes to have a successful cross-cultural relationship is pretty much what it takes to have any successful relationship. You have to like each other enough to put up with each other’s foibles. You have to have shared interests and shared values and you have to be able to laugh. And you need enough tension to keep the spark alive. ‘There is tolerance,’ said Nativ, ‘but there is challenge, too. I like,’ and now his eyes were glittering, ‘to stir things up.’

  *

  I once went to see a couples counsellor. I had met a man I liked and had actually managed to keep the relationship going for three months. I was worried that I would wreck it and wanted some help to make sure I didn’t. The second time I saw the counsellor I had to tell her that I had already bolted. For me, breaking up isn’t at all hard to do. What’s hard to do is stick around.

  That counsellor said she thought I was suffering from what she called a ‘terrorizing idealism’. I think what she meant was that I was expecting someone like Barack Obama to turn up, perhaps with a first edition of Keats, whisk me off for dinner in Paris or Rome and beg me to make his life complete. After a simple wedding, in a white church surrounded by marguerites and wild roses, we would go off to change the world while also making time for glittering conversation and the kind of sex that makes you blush when you wake up.

  She was, of course, spot on. I always thought it was about finding the right person, the right chemical and intellectual ingredients that you co
uld chuck in a giant mixing bowl to create a massive, delicious and miraculously long-lasting cake. I didn’t quite grasp that it was about effort. Not just the effort of seeking, and auditioning, and charming, but the daily effort of accommodating and listening and biting back irritation and learning that a cross word is not the end of a relationship or a world.

  I wouldn’t want to treat my friends as lab rats, but I can see that what they’re doing confirms the evidence. Instant attraction is a very nice start to a relationship. It worked for my parents. It worked for Emma and Tony. How delicious to feel a little quickening of your pulses, a little warmth in your cheeks, a little tingling in what you might even call your loins. And how lovely – how miraculous, even – to have the trigger for that tingling sharing your bed.

  My parents called it ‘love at first sight’, but the scientific term for it is ‘limerence’. Limerence, according to the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who coined the term, is ‘an involuntary interpersonal state that involves an acute longing for emotional reciprocation, obsessive-compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and emotional dependence on another person’. Been there, done that, got the too-tight, embarrassing T-shirt. I have driven past someone’s home at night, in order to get a glimpse of the light in their window. I have stared at a Post-it note a man has scrawled, for hours and hours and hours. I have not converted any of these feelings into a successful relationship, but then there’s no particular reason why anyone would. Limerence is a cocktail of dopamine, phenylethylamine (a natural amphetamine), oestrogen and testosterone. After six to twenty-four months, it generally starts to fade. It fades unless the people who have it turn it into love.

  Love, according to the research, is based on friendship. It’s based on thinking that you have lots of things in common. This doesn’t mean that you actually need to have lots of things in common. A study of 23,000 married couples showed that similarity accounted for less than 0.5 per cent of their satisfaction. What matters, according to the psychologist John Gottman, is your emotional style. You should, apparently, emphasize similarities. You should not, as Lisa discovered, play hard to get. You should make sure you do nice things together. And you should have lots of sex. I haven’t quizzed my friends on how much sex they have, but couples who have sex two or three times a week are, apparently, happier than couples who don’t. But as I’ve said before, sex is not broccoli. If you want to kill your sex life, add it to your ‘five a day’.