“The blossoms fell like confetti in hard rain”

I’VE never really gone in for all this ‘I am my beloved, and my beloved is me’ stuff.

This week, I’ll have been married to the same man for 25 years and I’m not my beloved and my beloved is not me; He’s one tree. I’m another. But this is just a quibble because as far as art, fortunate accidents, blossoms and roots go, I think this Captain Corelli quote is bang on.

The first bunch of pretty blossoms fell from our tree in a sudden gale, when a stark blue line appeared in the plastic window of a Clear Blue home pregnancy kit, a few weeks after we met first. The blossoms fell like confetti in hard rain. Straight down. No drifting. Though we had an inkling about what might be left after the emotional bush fire of having a baby, looking back it was nothing more than an inkling, based on flowery things like thumping hearts in train stations and having top fun eating chips in arctic winds on Whitley Bay beach. So it was surprising to find that though the blossoms tumbled fast, something weird started happening to our roots; instead of inching away, they started inching towards each other, and here they are, 25 years later, tied up in a big knotty bundle. God knows how we’d ever untangle them.

Writer AP Herbert wrote, ‘The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep’; 25 years later, we haven’t cracked the code of perfect synchronous living. In my experience, marriage is like a piece of music: great overall but sometimes oddly syncopated, arrhythmic and surprisingly difficult to dance to, even after 25 years. But dance we do.

When my husband reminded me recently that our wedding anniversary was coming up, I told him he’d triggered an idea for this column. “What’s the idea?” he said. “Enduring love,” I said. He said “if you write about the time I gave you a Crunchie for your 20th birthday [blossom fell off the tree that day I can tell you] make sure you write about how you forget our wedding anniversary every year.”

I think in writing about enduring love, it might be prudent to widen the net, so I’ve asked three long-married friends about blossoms and roots and here is what they said.

Friend 1: “The blossom fell from the tree when my husband sat down quite naturally to have a number 2 naked while I was in the shower in the same room, at a stage in the marriage where I still left the room to fart. Our roots are still wrapped around each other because our personalities have been fused together through years of firsts: first house, dog, car, mortgage, debts, grown up crisis, baby… years of shared experiences, good and bad. The result is a profound friendship and trust.”

Friend 2: “I’m not a romantic but all I can record is the fact. The first time I saw my husband walking up a path wearing his trademark t-shirt and jeans, something in me shifted. I felt like I was meeting a stranger I already knew. I felt that this person was going to be part of my life. Unfortunately he didn’t feel any of this at all. He only noticed me, he said, because he could see my boobs when I leaned forward (I wasn’t wearing a bra.) The simple stuff sustains us — waking up together, coffee with the newspapers and the profound stuff too, like the joy and worry of children. And, of course, the times when something in me still shifts.”

Friend 3: “The blossoms came off the tree when I watched my wife give birth to our first son 28 years ago. The baby came out blue, then it went pink, then I fainted. When I came round, my wife was haemorrhaging. When she stopped, I thought you don’t really know about love until it’s about to be taken away from you. Right then, roots went down.”

And as for me, after 25 years blossoms have fallen but the branches aren’t completely bare. He still thinks I look just as nice without make-up. I still think his smile is the business. Not bad for two people who hitched up on the back of eight encounters and a clear blue line.