Why 'Progress' is Bad for Women - Mary Harrington

 

Anatomy of a break-up

It happens every day, yet the bitterness of love turning sour always takes those involved by surprise. Mark Steel was in his forties a respectable father of two when his relationship fell apart. This is histragicomic account of its sad unravelling

Wednesday, 24 September 2008


It must be a trial to live with a comic and their disconcerting habits. Only comics, for example, feel such inconsolable anguish in a curry house, because they're halfway through telling a hilarious joke and it's trodden on by the waiter interrupting with "Your starters, please" and delivering your onion bhajis. Only comics come away from a funeral feeling numb and hollow because another comic's story about the dead person got a bigger laugh than their own. So my partner would probably have been able to make a case that if you're going through a period of manic volatile anxiety, it may not be advisable to be living with a comic.


For around 10 years, our awkward moments remained an unwelcome nuisance that we could learn to live with, like diabetes.

But then they grew, like the engine noise you know you shouldn't ignore, but do anyway until it suddenly clatters with doom. In some ways the more dramatic episodes were the most manageable. But when there was a low level of rumbling discontent, it was tempting to deal with it as a genuine argument, for example by exhaling a puff of exasperation and saying, "But you asked for custard." And that way we could descend into the world of the classic bickering couple, boiling with a sense of injustice while enunciating one word at a time with tensely bent fingers and a galloping heart, "You said turn left so I turned left."

There'd be the gruelling moments following a chilling exchange when neither of us would speak as we brushed past each other, each of us leaving a trail of unsettling frostiness.

Then a neighbour would call out "Hi, yoo-hoo, anyone there?" and my partner would suddenly abandon her scowl and cheerily discuss the latest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Which makes you even more livid, unable to de-clench a single muscle while wanting to shout, "OY. We're supposed to be GRUMPY here. You might have been faking it for effect so you can switch it off as soon as an outsider arrives but I really fucking MEANT it er, sorry, Barbara."

Or we'd play out that dreadful scene in which you've snapped at each other with particularly malicious venom but you're not really in a position to leave the room to allow the acrimony to cool down. For example, having just been described as "a selfish shitty lump of shit", you've still got to sit next to each other for the foreseeable future because you've just turned on to the M6 at Lancaster.

From time to time we'd hold a series of informal summits, after the children went to bed, involving discussions that went on until about one in the morning, so that each session was probably longer than the United Nations take to discuss the crisis in Kashmir. And because I fidget, I'd make things worse by getting up to change the CD, which must be exasperating if you're midway through a heartfelt soliloquy about feeling unappreciated.

At one point my partner and I were referred to a doctor who might be able to help us out, but he couldn't find the key to his office so we conducted our discussion sitting in the corridor as hobbling men and kids with broken arms walked past us. Without looking at either of us he muttered, "Hmm, it may be depression" in a way that suggested that if you'd complained about chest pains he'd say, "Ahh, the problem is you've got an illness." After 10 minutes of questions like "What makes you angry?", he took me to one side and said, "Do you have sex?"

"Now and then," I told him hesitantly. "Try to give her more sex," he said, then walked off. And I got the impression he'd prescribe a similar remedy for food poisoning or bee stings.

One problem when a relationship is fraying is that the words that come out are difficult to decipher, as both parties find it hard to articulate the underlying cause of their anxiety. I'd hear, "The PROBLEM, as you well know, is what you KNOW it is and if you can't even KNOW what you've done, well then DON'T you think I don't KNOW." This is a delicate situation for anyone, but a comic has the overpowering instinct to say something like "That's the question for your philosophy exam you may turn over your papers and begin NOW." Which, I can testify, doesn't help.

Trying to answer the points raised, with however much sympathy, is just as useless because such anguish has its own language.

Reassuring someone that you haven't done what they're crying you've done is worthless, because that's not what they're really crying about. It even makes them more frustrated, like when you present a yelling toddler with a bottle of milk when they really want their teddy but can't say the word.

If there was an immediate solution, I couldn't find it, so I entered one of the most negative phases of life in which, despite having a house, a partner, children and middle-aged respectability, you find yourself sleeping every night on the settee. The question for any couple reduced to long-term settee status is how much bitterness must there be to make the settee preferable to the bed?

Settees are uncomfortable. You sleep at best fitfully and every morning a different bit of you is crunched and twisted. You wouldn't choose to sleep there when there's a specially designed piece of sleeping apparatus a few feet away, just because you'd had a row or were in a sulk. You'd have to feel as if you were two North Poles on a magnet, so that even if you were pushed into the bed, you'd ping backwards, twizzle round and land on the settee.

And somehow you get used to it, the journey from overwhelming love and passion to repulsion happening in such gradual increments that you accept it as normal.

I realised my life was in trouble when I started envying couples who had normal ferocious rows. They would be sitting opposite each other on a train, he fuming ahead, lips tight together, breathing heavily through his nose, while she turned each page of a magazine with a violent flick as if swatting away a strange green insect, when without looking up she would snarl, "I can't believe you're going to Dublin on my mum's sixtieth, Sean, you bastard." He'd give it two more snorts and a fume and splutter, "He's my mate, right." And I'd think, "Aah, how sweet." Because my rows had no logic and no plot. If anyone had overheard them, they'd have complained "I didn't enjoy that, there was no beginning, middle or end." They'd get going with an abstract complaint, such as "Oh yes, that's TYPICAL" and move rapidly on to random complaints such as "How DARE you? You couldn't even stand my CAT."

And yet to leave altogether seemed an awful, unimaginable prospect at every level from trying to calm inconsolable kids to having to set up a new broadband account. There's the stench of chaos: legal documents, financial agreements, access arrangements, finding somewhere to live, buying a new settee. And the dreadful finality and acceptance of failure. Despite the high number of families that break apart, each one is categorised as a "failed marriage". Aligned to this sense of failure is the humiliation of giving up. You used to gaze at each other across a table splashed with takeaway curry and communicate with tiny twinkling facial expressions, affectionate puffs and grunts, and it's achingly mournful to accept it's gone. You feel it must still be there somewhere, if only you look hard enough, in the same way that you search through the house over and over again, refusing to accept you've lost your favourite jacket.

To part in your forties with children in tow is so different from doing it in your twenties with nothing more to row about than who gets the blender. All continuity will be lost for ever; in 20 years' time there will still be awkward arrangements about who goes where at Christmas and there will be no time when everyone sits together joyfully recalling the years until now. So after a few months on that settee, it took only a half-decent week without a major cacophony to convince us to give it another go. I left the settee, and everything was marvellous. We held hands on the way to the shop, and some people came for dinner, and we had the floors done up, and we saw Crystal Palace get promoted in the play-off final. But of course it wasn't really marvellous, because nothing had been repaired. We were like an old car that's packed up, but then suddenly one day for some reason when you turn the ignition splutters along again for a while.

One night, after a particularly fraught five hours, I realised the front and back doors were both hidden behind a tower of chairs, planks of wood, buckets and assorted useless objects from under the stairs. "We've barricaded you in," said my son and daughter, "because we were afraid you might leave." These are the issues that are weighed up before anyone takes the decision to finally part from their family. Around this time, the Government and opposition were both suggesting financial incentives should be offered to families who stick together, to curb the blight of broken homes. Even that, they believe, comes down to money. They really haven't got a clue.

The final moments of a failing relationship are usually pathetically ordinary. Unlike in films, where there's a last brave embrace amid the hubbub of an Italian railway station, or a drunk but eloquent liberating speech delivered to a stunned family gathering, the last words are more likely to be "I think this is your mug."

There was a minor grumble, something to do with shopping, one sunny Saturday afternoon, that I think involved cat food, delivered with the intonation Al Pacino would have used if there'd been a cat food issue in Scarface. And immediately I knew that was the end. I had no idea a few minutes earlier that we were one small-to-medium-sized snarl from termination, but when it happened I just knew. I'd run out of tolerance, and it seemed as definite and beyond my control as if I'd gone to make a cake but discovered I'd run out of flour.

"That's it," I said, surprised. Just as there must be a definite point when someone knows, absolutely knows, "I am going to try to swim the Channel" or "I am going to explode myself in a public building" and they become mentally prepared for all that their decision entails. I knew right then that I'd soon be packing records and reassuring children, contacting the gas board and telling people they couldn't get me on that number any more.

One of the weirdest moments after moving out was the first morning I woke up in the new place. Not only was it chillingly still and quiet, this was what the place was always like. Before, there had been moments of quiet when everyone else was out, but it was always a slightly anxious quiet, a brief calm to be inhaled before doors crashed open and the natural beat of childhood urgency ricocheted once more round the building. It was the quiet of a stadium before the starting gun for a sprint final. Now there was a different quiet, a permanent quiet. I could make some artificial noise by putting on the Wu-Tang Clan, but there was no organic thud-thud "Aaagh" "Get OFF" "Dad can I have a Twix" "pewaaa waaa kachakach COOL I've shot a ZOMBIE on level 2."

Another thing that is odd is not having to tell anyone where you're going. You just leave the house, and don't have to call out, "Just nipping out for some Sellotape." To start with I'd wander up the road slightly disconcerted, as if there was some procedure I hadn't been through, perhaps a form to complete when I left the house, to send to the Town Hall. Quite simply, finding yourself on your own for the first time in 13 years is lonely. And the irony with loneliness is it can make you feel that all you want to do is be alone. Then, disaster I couldn't get cable. It wasn't available in the road for some reason. Surely there was a law somewhere that said if someone is lonely cable has to be provided as a basic human right.

Once you're no longer surrounded by the everyday torment of a fractious relationship, it becomes possible to view the squabbles and conflicts from a distance. Even in the midst of wrath and fury, you realise it isn't aimed at you, it's aimed into the air somewhere, at the universe, for being a bastard of a universe. But somehow there seemed to be no way of preventing the frustration from booming and crackling us into court.

As I walked towards the court on the day, I saw her through the window of Starbucks, reading the clinical legal documents of the case. And in that image lay the potential for total despair, the triumph of cynicism. What was the point of hope or love or the tingle of expectation if it could end sitting in Starbucks amending "related" to "pertaining" with a pink marker pen? Can there really be people who stride into court for a case against their ex-partners pumped up with the craving for victory, like American wrestlers? If so you have to wonder whether they ever were in love in the first place. My own overwhelming emotion in the courtroom was bewilderment at how this happened.

How do you end up dreading a visit from the person you used to drive all night to see briefly in the morning? You don't want to spend the rest of your life looking back with disgust at every picnic and curry you shared, regretting the times of ringing in sick to spend the day in bed together, recalling festivals, boat trips, backstage passes, crazy French bars, trips to the all-night beigel shop at five in the morning, the night the Tories were kicked out, the bewildered newspaper man in the snow, as merely part of a marathon mistake.

Of course those moments were as strikingly real and electrifying as you remember them. Which is why the only true victory in this kind of court case would be one in which both of you were sentenced to stay locked in the room until you could remember, for the last time, the thrill of the first glance, the gulp at the first eye contact, the smell of the hopeful decaying function room where you first met.

However vindictive either side may appear, what most shattered couples really want, I suspect, is to smile at each other one last time and mean it, and in that moment salvage all the memories of hope.