THOSE GREAT LOVERS …

(Excerpted from Life is a Frolic by Goolbai Gunasekara)

Great lovers of fame or fiction have never lived together. Ever thought of the odd fact that the great lovers of history (or fiction) never actually had to dwell together? Beatrice and Dante, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, to give a few of the couples united by so great a love they either died of it (silly idiots) or wrote endless letters and poetry to each other which lived on in time (the poetry not the lovers) thus boring generations of unhappy examination students studying Literature.

Great lovers never had to see their romantic partners early in the morning looking anything but romantic with tousled hair and no make-up. They never had to deal with crying babies, dirty nappies or an assortment of childhood illnesses.

One totally harassed young wife made a pact with her husband that the next time the baby cried in the middle of the night HE would have to get up and rock it back to sleep. On cue, at midnight came the little wail. The wife nudged her husband.

“Go ahead,” she hissed. “It’s your turn.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean THIS baby,” he yawned turning round and settling down comfortably. “I meant the NEXT one.”

So, couples need to adopt a few time-tested systems that can act as marriage boosters. My personally tested routine is to spend a few days apart… even a day apart helps. This gives everyone much needed ‘space’ (modern parlance for time alone) and the opportunity to do whatever one wants. Obviously, this advice is not for couples with babies but even here there are always mothers-in-law to act as babysitters!

It so happened that my Offspring had KitKat (my grand offspring) in the USA. It therefore necessitated my going to the USA for a few months. My Dearly Beloved saw me off at the airport with a big, happy smile on his face. My general factotum of thirty years, Sepin, was likewise delighted that I would no longer be anywhere near the kitchen. Clearly, I was not going to be missed.

But when I got back, I was greeted as if I was the sole survivor of the recent Tsunami.

“I couldn’t find ANY shirt and there was no one to cut my hair,” said Dearly Beloved plaintively.

“Aslin,” Sepin yelled down the phone to her friend. Sepin does not trust the phone to amplify her already loud voice adequately. “Nona is back and the Mahattaya has stopped telling me not to eat sugar.” (Sepin is highly diabetic.)

I take it everyone is happy I am back.

“Sort of,” Dearly Beloved said cautiously. He was not going overboard about it, but I got the message. He missed me!

However, one cannot keep going abroad to be missed. There is an easier method. Let us take it a day at a time. At noon each Wednesday, Dearly Beloved prances off to the Rotary Club. Every Wednesday evening, he has a weekly dance session at the DBU. All this activity gives me, and the household, a day off. A blessed peace descends. Husbands are noisy people.

“This water is not iced properly,” he says three times day to Sepin who mutters angrily to me, “What can I do if power cuts are spoiling the chicken, the fish, the vegetables and the Mahattaya’s temper anney.”

The opposite side of the coin must be looked at too. Recently my school friend, Chereen’s parents passed away. They celebrated their 68th anniversary and lived those years together in delightful harmony. They never spent a night apart. They sat together in the evenings holding hands, “Like two lovebirds,” says their admiring daughter. She cannot remember any disagreements or disagreeable moments and truly theirs was a marriage which was the exception that proved the rule.

Such a Utopian situation is not for most of us, but we can still dream, can’t we?