As the 4th Estate website rounds off its ‘Family Reunion’ theme, we turn to much-loved Guardian columnist Tim Dowling’s wonderful How to Be a Husband, and consider the benefits of matrimony. Tim is a husband of some twenty years, and his marriage is resounding proof that even the most impossible partnership can work out for the best. Some of the time.
So while his book is called How to Be a Husband, it’s not really a how-to guide at all. Nor is it a compendium of petty remarks and brinkmanship – although it contains plenty of both. You may pick up a few DIY hints. You might learn that while marriage is founded on love, it endures through bloody hard work. Most likely it will make you whimper with the laughter of painful recognition.
How to Be a Husband is a cautionary tale about throwing caution to the wind. It’s a new manifesto for marriage and an answer to why, even when we suck at it, we stick at it. Read on to discover the first few of Tim’s ‘forty precepts of gross marital happiness’…
‘Successful cohabitation requires a couple to address many disparate and competing aims, but it may help to think of your overall strategy as being analogous to Bhutan’s mandated objective of Gross National Happiness. First proposed by the fourth Dragon King of Bhutan in 1972, the concept of Gross National Happiness alloyed living standards, physical and spiritual well-being, environmental impact and stability to develop an index to measure the nation’s progress. And it works pretty well in Bhutan (the Land of Gross National Happiness), as long as you’re not a member of the 20 per cent of the population – mainly Hindus of Nepali origin – who were expelled from the country in the 1990s.
In marriage you and your partner must work together to construct a domestic operation that will make both of you as happy as possible without sacrificing the collective health, security or long-term stability of the partnership. I realize that put that way it sounds boring, which is precisely why I coined the catchy term Gross Marital Happiness.
When I said this wasn’t a self-help book, that was because everything I know about staying married can be boiled down to forty pretty basic insights. Actually, only thirty-seven – three of these are bollocks – but I wanted a round number.
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© Tim Dowling 2014
To be enlightened by the other thirty-five precepts, How to Be a Husband is out in paperback on 9 April 2015
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