Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits

The banquet of my life is not a bad night out at all, but the main course hasn’t appeared, so it’s all £4 carby sides. My blood sugar’s low and the kitchen keeps sending out the same dauphinoise that’s somehow both too boring to unconsciously ingest and too rich to stomach. You and your partner sit across from each other, very much at the same table but often eating from different menus, electricity crackling between you. You are in a mood for three days after you use Google to win an argument and find you’re wrong (the meaning of architrave, for example). He tells you you look fine and you silently seethe for the entirety of July. He sends you a Spotify playlist but he knows you’re Apple Music. How could he not know that? Does he not know you at all? Is this burning an eternal flame or building up resentment?

This bit in the middle is meant to be the hog-roast years. I thought I’d be on autopilot as I dolloped apple sauce on my baps and asked for more crackling. But this era is majority graft with short breaks when I get drunk enough to briefly forget the exertion. Five or ten years ago everything I wanted only took half a day to achieve. I quit smoking in two hours. I stopped wearing skinny jeans and buying the Sun. Now my life is conversely both hyper-slow and hyper-convenient. I can have a meal delivered to the door in thirty minutes, but we can’t find a womb to incubate heirs for love nor money (don’t get me started on how much that costs). I can get a chin-up new outfit to my door in four hours, but I can’t legally move an inconvenient wall in my house that’s definitely hollow when I knock on it. All I really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in him too. But we also need to save for new floors. And the womb rental. Life gets in the way.

Everything is protracted and repetitive and doesn’t move you forward, like Gareth Gates introducing himself on Pop Idol. It’s like someone is constantly playing the first note of a concerto for two years. Or not even that. It’s like when the entire orchestra is playing the same hum note in the warm-up. I just want to hear a few bars of the concerto. When we moved into our château I never thought I’d wake up every day in a cold bedroom because no matter how many times I bleed the upstairs radiators the one next to the bed is only ever half full. It courageously gasps out little wheezes of lukewarm air, but they’re immediately absorbed into our unvarnished splinter-ridden floor (we have to wear shoes right up to the bed, which is not sexy, let me tell you). The room isn’t draughty per se, but there are fissures between the window pane and the frame, so sometimes you’re hit by a laser-precision dart of cold air, like somebody’s blowing on you through a plastic straw. These fissures also let in sound. I hate the foxes on my street keeping me awake all night with their screeching. I’m certain Fantastic Mrs Fox is being penetrated in an orifice she’s not accustomed to using that way, which makes a noise like a thousand wet balloons griping at once. And the binmen are just pure noise. Worse than jazz. There’s also the Uber driver who regularly stops outside my house to piss in a bottle and throw it into the gutter. I don’t have the balls to knock on the window to scare him off like a pigeon. I’d love to shut the world out, but the innards of my house are no sanctuary. There’s a matrix of major and minor jobs that need doing before we get to the windows. Here’s a verbatim forward from my husband: Fwd: Our quotation is £695.00 + VAT for the 1 x Party Wall Awards, 1 x Notices and 1 x Condition Schedules. It’s impossible to sprint through an email as dry as this. It’s like trying to rollerblade through treacle.

Marathon love is an Eton mess of experiences and emotions – all your meringues get smashed, but they’re still edible. Life is random paint-strokes of grievances and appreciations that build the masterpiece of any union. You have to stand back to see the full picture, but close scrutiny shows the work. At the frontline it’s a committed slog, the kind of graft you don’t write about because it’s much easier to mention sprinting off the night bus into each other’s arms, or Pancake Day, or anything but the quiet dramalessness of a good marriage. Marathon love is a fractured metatarsal you can still walk on and nobody offers you a splint so you hunker down and try not to kick up an unnecessary fuss. Over the course of a marathon there are good bits, great bits, transcendent moments of fully dilated pleasure, but they’re glimpses of grout between slabs of hard graft and patience and trying to be your best self. Relationships are a perpetual Monday night: the pub is uneventful and complaintive and nobody ever calls time. One part of you loves the quiet, the other part of you wants taking to the end of the week already, to the merriment and noise and overstimulation.

Inevitably, a unique knowledge of your partner builds like couture, perfectly tailored to the other person. Partners can be stubborn to the point of self-destruction, like an animal refusing to board Noah’s ark. Partners can be disagreeable, like a budget flight. Partners are both the North Star guiding you through all the bullshit, and the bullshit itself growing like damp. Partners are the only people who really know how to push your buttons. Partners are the only people who should really know how not to. Partners know the little in-jokes, and can divert the oncoming storm of an argument. Between the sunny spells, resentment can build up like thin layers in a good wok. It doesn’t matter what he’s cooked tonight, because you can always taste that one forgotten anniversary. Every innocuous comment has micro-subtext. Every fart is Pompeii. Every other gift is the Joni Mitchell CD from Love Actually. Somehow marathon love is both super-intense HIIT workouts with no recovery periods, and the quiet, exhausting seasonal nothingness between Christmas and, erm, wow, it’s Christmas again. Where did the time go? Why don’t we have proper floors yet? Somewhere in the middle of this you ideally smash like the avocados you prepared for lunch, and keep tabs on world events and culture. Keeping your eye on the ball is exhausting. The biggest decision used to be where to have dinner on Friday or when to take a shit without the other person knowing how long you’ve been gone. (Honestly, nail the shit schedule as early as possible.) Suddenly you have to decide whether your kids’ names are too classic or too pretentious, and whether they’re going to be organically reared or privately educated.

A long-term relationship is a bit like a Netflix binge: you keep watching each scene, but sometimes you’re not fully following the plot. You’re committed to seeing out the series, but the drama in front of you maybe doesn’t have your full attention. I get the nagging suspicion I’m going to Gone Girl my husband because he doesn’t appreciate me. My ego needs stroking like a tabby. I want to be noticed the way hardcore Americans stare at you if you don’t stand up while their national anthem is playing. Oh, bae can you see by the dawn’s early light. Longing to be objectified like the early days. Salad days are manageable, but decades of dauphinoise are tougher. You try and shake a depressing thought: I would happily go to bed on an argument, but I wouldn’t miss my skin regime for anything or anyone. Does that mean I care more about my pores than about my husband?

Ten years in and nothing ever goes horribly wrong. And nothing goes stupidly right. Nothing’s changed, I still love you. Marathon love is nothing like Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. It’s not Bonnie and Clyde. It’s not even Kylie and Jason. It’s Saturday at kids’ parties as forty toddlers come up on party rings. It’s Sundays at Sainsbury’s. It’s enjoying being apart. It’s being together in silence. It’s singing at the top of your lungs in the car. It’s biting your tongue. It’s picking at your feet in broad daylight. Marathon love needs different sustenance from a sprint. It needs the nutrient-rich compost you only get from being agreeable and listening, which sounds easy but isn’t. The sprint is always short-lived. Live fast, die young. A marathon takes time. Look how far we’ve come, my baby.

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