“Maybe we should renew our marriage vows”

IT’S late at night.

I’ve finished the last 10-minute round of Picking Up and Putting Back downstairs while my husband is in bed reading the newspaper. I climb in beside him. He puts his arm around me and I find his feet with mine.

My thoughts turn to marriage.

The marriage vows are couched in such imprecise terms. For ‘better and for worse’, and ‘to have and to hold’ are quite… woolly. And while the vows encompass the principal issues, they don’t encompass the trifling ones, like Picking up and Putting back for example. It’s as if the trifling ones don’t count.

I know we normally get hitched at our most optimistic and romantic — but what about an unambiguous pre-nup chat? What about a sort of ‘vow powwow’?

That you could record.

I roughly estimate that my pre-nup chat might have lasted a couple of hours. A tendency to gender-politicise housework is difficult to explain. But nevertheless, my husband would have understood, after just two hours back in 1986, that for me, finding the dishwasher emptied is infinitely preferable to finding a bunch of roses in it. Because it’s not.

I ask my husband what he thinks about my pre-nup ‘Vow Powwow’ idea. He’s unsure. He says the chat would have had to be brief and to the point. His would have been short, he says, even if he’d had the benefit of hindsight.

I’m mainly curious about what his to the point points might have been but I’m disconcerted: the nature of his love seems to be admirably less conditional than mine.

“Is this a man thing?” I ask.

He rustles pages. “Yup.”

“Maybe we should renew our marriage vows,” I continue. He’s reached the sports pages now but seems to have picked up an incorrect and wholly imagined subtext… something to do with the words Renew, Marriage and the Fact That We’re in Bed? Anyway, he puts the paper down and I set him straight.

“You know, update our marriage vows,” I explain. “I mean, what would your points be, if you could go back in time. What would you say in the powwow? Five things. You go first.”

“I haven’t got five things,” he says. I rub his foot affectionately with mine to reassure him. He seems wary.

I’d thought five was a conservative number; I’m having trouble confining my bullet points to 10. “Three,” he says. “Each.”

I’m competing with sports pages and in a weak bargaining position.

“Number one,” he says, “I’d definitely have specified that you fill the car up with more than two euro worth of petrol at a time.”

Number one segues seamlessly into number two. “I know this sounds bad,” he says, “but I would have hated it if you’d let yourself go, so I’d have mentioned that, just in case you’d been the sort of person who might have got fat, like…” and he mentions an 18-stoner.

I’m trying to process one and two when he says, “number three: you’re totally scatty with money”, and continues, “you never have a clue what’s in our account, so I’d insist you did all the money stuff right from the start instead of me. I’m bored of doing it…”

“My go,” I interrupt. “If I could go back in time, I’d state clearly that you couldn’t raise your eyebrows at our bank statements or call me ‘Imelda Marcos’ when I bought shoes.”

“Relax…” he says.

This reminds me of a point I hadn’t thought about. “One of my retrospective conditions would have been a veto on being told to relax about things like squalid bathrooms because being told to relax has the opposite effect.” I’m hitting my stride and he knows it.

“Right,” he says. “Stop.”

“Can’t stop now,” I say, “I’ve got two more things” and get the first one in fast.

“Full Volume Sport On Radio Five Live In The Morning…” I begin but at this point he picks up his paper and starts rustling the pages over-enthusiastically. Then he puts it down with a cross flourish.

“I’ll tell you what one of my points would have been,” he says tersely, “and I’d have made absolutely sure I said it loudly, so you couldn’t miss it. I’d have made a point that we never have conversations like this at midnight. Maybe that way I might have been able to read the sports pages in peace.”