by Tim Dowling
Our priority in Naples is a visit to the British vice-consul, the only man in the area with the authority to approve my reentry into the UK, excepting, I suppose, the consul. We turn up with our marriage certificate, some required paperwork, and a selection of specially taken Polaroid wedding photos, and we are prepared to hold hands if it will help. The vice-consul waves away our photos, signs our papers, and gives us tea. He regards our case as a welcome distraction, he says, from his regular duties, which seem to revolve largely around repatriating penniless students. The business is completed in under an hour. The remaining nine days of our honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast stretch uncertainly before us.
In the days when couples had tightly restricted access to each other before the wedding, a honeymoon made sense. If you’ve already spent two years living in a tiny flat together, the honeymoon does not coincide with the honeymoon period. Nine days seems like an awful lot of enforced togetherness, especially when you’ve just embarked upon a project that quietly terrifies you both.
As a young married couple in a foreign country, you feel not just alone but positively quarantined, strolling through the unfamiliar streets of Positano together like two people who share a rare disease. It might well prove an instructive and reinvigorating break from the day-to-day drift of an established relationship, but ten days into a marriage is not a good time to discover you’ve run out of conversation. Under the circumstances, we do the only sensible thing: we run out of money instead.
In hindsight we could have blamed a lack of preparation, but what really happened amounted to a failure of leadership. Whenever we’d been together in America I’d invariably made the arrangements. In London my wife had organized everything while I watched, agog, as if my life were happening in a museum.
On neutral territory, however, neither of us takes charge. Nobody keeps proper count of the cash, tots up the receipts, or attempts to square our spending with the number of days left. The exchange rate is often discussed, but never quite mastered. Perhaps we both feel that the hard-nosed financial pragmatism a marriage requires shouldn’t start until after the honeymoon ends. As a team we prove to be both indecisive and extravagant, switching hotels on a whim, hiring boats without checking the price, and ordering expensive drinks on the beach. We had been gifted a tidy pile of cash as a reward for getting married, but it runs through our fingers without us even feeling it. This is before—right before—it was possible to put your bank card into a cash machine anywhere in the world and receive handfuls of the local money. In 1992 that sort of preposterous convenience is still a far-off dream. Even a bank wire transfer takes three days.
Somehow, with two days to go, we wake up in a hotel on Capri with the equivalent of £30 in lira between us. It is not enough to pay the bill we’ve run up already. In fact it is only enough for one of us to take the boat back to Naples to beg some money from the only person we know there.
“You have to go,” I say to my wife, bravely. “He’s your vice-consul.”
“I’ll be back,” she says. “Don’t eat anything.”
So I sit in a room I cannot check out of because I cannot settle the bill, wondering if I’ll ever see my wife again. It occurs to me that Naples is not the sort of city to which one sends a woman alone on an errand. If anything happens to my wife I will have to live with the guilt. I have an urge to go after her, but then I remember I don’t have the money to cross the bay. I am paralyzed by worry, although my mind somehow finds the wherewithal to ask itself whether a dip in the pool might help.
Finally, at sunset, my wife returns.
“He was very nice about it,” she says. “He gave me some money from the distressed seamen’s fund.”
We pay our bill and return to the mainland in search of a room close to the bus station, so we can get to the airport first thing and put this whole honeymoon business behind us. The hotel we select is so cheap that it doesn’t even start until the second floor of the run-down building it occupies, and you need to put money in the lift to make it go up. It’s just the sort of place two distressed seamen might spend their last night in Naples.
The front desk is a man in a hat sitting at a folding table on the landing. He also sells beer, fags, and soap. But the room has huge windows and a fresco covering the whole ceiling, apart from a bit in the corner where they cut into the plaster to install a shower cubicle. We sit in the window and take a picture of ourselves with a timer, looking out onto the street at dusk. When I want to remember that I had a romantic honeymoon in Naples with the woman I love, that’s the one I look at.
In a lot of ways it does not feel as if we’re genuinely married until we turn up at passport control with our paperwork. There are a few more questions, a bit of a wait, some instructions I am too nervous to take in, and finally, a stamp in my passport that grants me a full year to sort out my new status. At last, I’m an immigrant.
“Now you just have to see the doctor,” says the official.
“The what?” I say.
I am led to a little examination room in a weird backstage area, where I remove my shirt for Dr. Gatwick, a weary-looking man with a mildly sinister bearing.
“Any diseases worth mentioning?” he asks. If I had any, I think, I wouldn’t mention them to you.
“No,” I say.
He listens to my chest, takes my blood pressure, and asks me a few more questions. Then I am allowed to put my shirt back on and rejoin my wife on British soil. Dr. Gatwick’s seal of approval is the final hurdle to married life, or at least that’s how it seems until we are safely on the train to London, and I realize that virtually all the hurdles are still ahead of us.
4.
How to Be Wrong
Take a moment to cast your eyes around my domain: this blasted promontory, wracked by foul winds, devoid of life, of cheer, of comfort. This is my special place—my fortress of solitude. I’ve been coming here on and off for the last twenty years. Welcome, my friend, to the moral high ground.
Sit down. Do you want some tea? I’m afraid they only do oat milk up here. It’s the moral high ground—what did you expect? There are some salt-free rice cakes on the shelf there. They’re a bit joyless, but help yourself—just make sure you put tenpence in the honesty box.
What were we talking about? Oh yeah: so, earlier today my wife was giving me a hard time about not putting the ladder back in the shed. I told her it was pointless keeping the ladder in the shed because I use it all the time, almost exclusively in the house, and that it was much more convenient and sensible to store it at the back of the cupboard under the stairs, like we used to before we got the shed. And by the way: Why wasn’t I consulted about the switch in the first place?
My wife responded by saying that, at any rate, the ladder didn’t live in the middle of the sitting room, where it had been all weekend, and went on to imply that I was just being lazy and also, quite possibly, a twat. Then I said: Okay, this is not about the ladder anymore. This is about the proper way to conduct discourse between adults. I refuse on principle—on principle!—to engage with a person who would resort to such a personal attack. Someone has to make a stand against this sort of thing, I said, and for that reason no ladders will be moved today. And that’s how I ended up here, on the moral high ground. It’s like a VIP room for idiots.
I don’t remember the subject of the first big argument I had with my wife, only its aftermath. I’m sure it began, as in the example above, with some trivial domestic dispute—a failure to do something on my part, let’s assume—which quickly escalated into a frank exploration of my inadequacies.
It is perhaps a year before we are married. At some point during the argument I decide my character is being assailed in a manner incompatible with my dignity. I say as much, and storm out of her flat, slamming the door as hard as I can behind me, heading straight for the moral high ground. I stomp downstairs and slam the front door, not quite as hard, because its maint
enance is covered by a costly leasehold agreement.
I stand on the front step for a moment, breathing hard and basking in the hot glow of my righteous anger, until it dawns on me that I have no money and don’t know anyone in London who would automatically take my side in this or any other matter. I toy with the idea of going back upstairs to pick up the fight where I left off—as if I’d just thought of another point worth making—but I don’t have any keys. The hot glow wears off. It’s cold and windy, and my dramatic exit did not afford an opportunity to grab a coat on the way out. I look up and down the darkening street. Wherever the moral high ground is, I think, it ain’t out here. I quickly realize that the only decision left to make is whether I count to thirty or sixty before swallowing my pride. I settle on sixty, give up at forty-five, congratulate myself on my willingness to compromise, and push the bell.
“Hello?” she says.
“Can I come back in?” I say.
“Sorry, who is this?”
Since that day I’ve gradually learned to be more cautious about sticking my flag on any summit of self-righteousness. Claiming the moral high ground is, in the end, just a tactic, one that trial and error has demonstrated doesn’t work very well on my wife. If, for example, I were to leap out of a vehicle my wife was driving during a heated argument—ostensibly because I, a man of quiet sense, could no longer share such a confined space with someone so unreasonable—I know she would not creep along the pavement with the passenger window down, begging me to get back in while conceding that she may have spoken rashly. I’ve tested this, and experience has taught me that she will actually speed off before I’ve had a chance to shut the door. She will not come back, even if it’s raining, nor will she subsequently ring me to find out how I’m coping with my choices.
A relationship expert I once interviewed over the phone about argument techniques (I was looking for shortcuts and cheats, to be honest) asked me, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to have sex tonight?” At the time the whole idea of ceding one’s claim to the moral high ground in order not to jeopardize the prospect of future intercourse struck me as highly unethical, although I had to admit it also sounded like the sort of thing I would do. Still, it wasn’t fair. Why can’t I have sex and be right? In a perfect world, my wife would want to sleep with me because I’m right.
The relationship expert, much as it pains me to say it, had a point. In the context of marriage, a moral victory is something you’ll invariably end up celebrating on your own. If you’re going to get on in married life—if you’re going to have sex ever—you’ve got to learn to lose an argument. And to do that, you’ve got to learn how to be wrong. I honestly don’t know where the work of being a good husband finishes, but I have an idea where it starts. It starts with counting to sixty, giving up at forty-five, and pushing the bell.
Unfortunately being wrong does not come easy to men, even when they are very, very wrong. A man will go to great lengths just to avoid being put in a position where he might be obliged to express uncertainty.
“Why don’t you just say ‘I don’t know’?” my wife will sometimes shout after I’ve just spent ten minutes trying create the opposite impression. What does she expect? If you don’t want my impersonation of expertise, don’t ask me questions I can’t answer.
In the company of other men, being wrong is almost impossible to live down; that’s why we spend so much time debating points that can’t be settled one way or another—the hypothetical and the unknowable: the outcome of future sporting events, alternative tactics that might have affected the outcome of past sporting events, the true motivations of politicians, economic forecasts, etc. That’s why fishing is such a perfect communal activity for men: you can spend an entire day speculating about what might be happening underwater. Once upon a time we could also argue over areas of shared historical and scientific ignorance, but the smartphone put paid to all that: Circumference of the sun? 4,366,813 kilometers. Plantagenet kings? Got it right here, mate.
Women tend be more forgiving about wrongness. Some women, in my experience, will even defer to a man’s pronouncements on a subject when he’s clearly wrong—when everyone else in the room is thinking: You’re wrong—if only to avoid denting his fragile ego in public.
My wife is not one of those women. She does not draw a big distinction between denting my fragile ego in public and denting it at home. It’s one of the reasons I love her, and it’s also one of the reasons I won’t play tennis with her. It can’t be a bad thing for a man to learn to admit his mistakes with grace, or even, initially, without grace.
* * *
While arguing is inevitable in a marriage, protracted disputes can be damaging to a relationship, and are often avoidable. There usually comes a time in the middle of a heated argument when you realize you would rather be doing something else: watching TV perhaps, or eating. But if you have any sense at all you will not attempt to suspend hostilities by saying, “Ooh, that thing is about to start on BBC2,” or “You know what? I could really go for some M&M’s right now.”
Conversely it is rare to be struck, midargument, by the sudden realization that you are wrong. That tends to happen much later, when you’re sitting by yourself trying to figure out why you didn’t win. It’s too late to be wrong then.
Over many years I have learned the trick of amalgamating these two different types of epiphany. When you begin to lose interest in an argument either because you’re hungry or bored or you’ve simply run out of steam, scan your brain for ways in which you could be wrong. This can be difficult for men—at first it may even feel as if your brain won’t allow it—but this handy checklist should give you some clue as to the error of your ways:
SEVEN WAYS IN WHICH YOU MIGHT BE WRONG
1. The Wrongness of Omission. Have you deliberately withheld some evidence that supports the counter position? Introduce it as if you think it will help you, and then sit back and allow yourself to be taken apart.
2. The Wrongness of Not Listening. This has the advantage of almost always being true—you probably haven’t been listening properly. You need to apologize, and then start listening, but that’s all you have to do. Your contribution to the debate has finished. From now on, just nod.
3. The Wrongness of Forgetting Your Original Purpose. Arguments often lead you down little strategic alleyways in search of short-term advantage, and it’s easy to lose your way, especially if feelings are running high. But it’s perfectly feasible to close your rant with the words, “and I’ve now forgotten why I even started this sentence!” If you allow your partner to reassemble the broken pieces of your argument for you, you will almost always end up with a more charitable interpretation of your logic than you deserve.
4. The Wrongness of Underestimating Your Partner’s Emotional Investment in the Issue. This is the point at which you say, “I had no idea you felt so strongly about this,” although what you probably mean is, “I’ve just realized I don’t feel strongly about this at all.” It’s not your fault. Righteous anger is an opportunistic emotion—it can desert you at weird times.
5. The Wrongness of Making It All About You. It is rare for my wife and me to have a serious argument in which she does not at some stage say, “It has to be all about you, doesn’t it?” In my extensive experience it’s almost impossible to respond to such a challenge without making your answer All About You.
6. The Wrongness of Offering an Ultimatum. Whoops! Did you just draw a line in the sand? I think we both know you didn’t mean to do that. When has brinkmanship ever worked for you in the past? My wife never blinks in these matters: she knows I’m going all in with the argumentative equivalent of a pair of fours.
7. The Wrongness of Being a Bit of a Cock. All you have to say in this case is, “Perhaps I’m being a bit of a cock about this, but . . .” You might get a denial in return, although you shouldn’t hold your breath.
Now all you have to do is find a way
to acknowledge your error and give up. This is not a simple matter of saying, “Hang on a minute—I think I’m wrong!” and flicking on the TV. If you’re going to be wrong, you’ve got to look wrong, even if that means mimicking a last-ditch attempt to save face.
Use whatever technique works best for you. Say “huh” dismissively and then let an awkward silence bloom. Or fold your arms, sit down, and stare at your shoes for a full minute—a classic. Try conceding in a way that doesn’t sound at all conciliatory, by saying something such as “I’m wrestling with the unattractive possibility that you may have a point.”
Here’s one I use a lot, even now: I just say, “Whatever.”
“Whatever” has a reputation as a meaningless piece of conversational shorthand, but it’s actually terribly useful when conceding an argument. It acknowledges someone’s right to an opinion without necessarily giving it credence, and, depending on your inflection, it can also imply that while life is too important to waste time fighting, your willingness to make peace—to be the bigger person—comes at some emotional cost. Best of all, it does all this gracelessly. The other person will assume that having lost your case on points, you are seeking to abandon the discussion before a humiliating climbdown becomes necessary. With “whatever,” everybody walks away with something.
One of the great tactical advantages of admitting you’re wrong is that in marriage nobody wants to be a bad winner. If you love someone it’s impossible to draw much pleasure from forcing them to admit a mistake. The very few times I’ve actually won an argument I’ve noticed a strange hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach which somehow robs the moment of all satisfaction. And that is not how I want to feel at the end of an argument. That’s how I want my wife to feel.
