Caroline O'Donoghue: 7 things about long relationships
I once read a quote by Marian Keyes where she talked about her marriage. She’s been married for 25 years, and in the quote she said that she didn’t view her relationship as one long relationship, but many little ones. She explained the constantly changing energies that push and pull between two people, the way dependencies shift, the way personalities subtly change over years together. It is, I think, one of the few pieces of relationship writing that has ever made real sense to me.
My boyfriend and I have been together for six years. Seven in April. We got together when I was 24 and now, at 30, I feel like we’re two strange plants that have been potted together down the back of the garden and forgotten, and in that time have become gnarled and knobbly and twisted together to the point where I don’t know which parts of my personality are organically mine and which we have invented as a result of spending so much time together. And, like Marian Keyes, in this great gnarling and knotting, I have identified many small phases. I think other people might have these phases too, so I have detailed them here.
Nothing new to be said here, as it’s the most well-documented romantic phase in all of art history. We got together at work, so our all-over each other phase had many witnesses. It was a whirlwind of pulling each other into empty meeting rooms for a midday shift, old man pubs at lunch where the glass girl would cough loudly to stop us and collect our empty pints, wild declarations of one another’s beauty. There was no old movie star too handsome or too dead to be compared to my new boyfriend. As far as I was concerned, he was a young Gregory Peck, a young Oliver Reed, a young Malcolm McDowell. We were watching a lot of movies at the time, which is another part of this phase: being extremely well-versed in the first 20 minutes of a film, and then it’s a blur of talking heads and lines of mad dialogue that make you burst out laughing in the middle of a kiss.
At some point in the first six to eight months, you become very into convincing your friends that this thing is, like, For Real. For some reason you want everyone to take you very seriously as a couple, as if everyone in the world were a bank manager and the two of you were looking for a loan. You keep overestimating how long you’ve been together. “You know it will be a year in December?” you tell your friend. “No it won’t,” they respond, both infuriatingly and accurately. “You were still seeing whatshisname in December.” You are incensed. “A year since we met,” you screech. “God.”
You are obsessed with imbuing your relationship with a sense of legacy, desperate to prove your own substance. You start giving relationship advice to people who have not asked for it. You have also started fighting, but they are baby fights, and there’s still too much to risk for either of you to be the petty jealous monsters you truly desire to be. So you have training wheels fights, fights you later brag about to your friends for being resolved quickly and full of openness and communication. “I simply explained to him that it wasn’t the (insert minor infraction here) that bothered me,” you say, primly. “But the about it.”
You cocoon for a while, lost in boxset-dom, and both of you gain a stone. Farting begins. (This phase is also known as: the year of our lord 2020)
Freaked out by your winter as middle-aged people, you start going out together. Not just on dinner dates either: you start going out on the town, talking to strangers, in search of stories. You become obsessed with the notion that you are still young and that a night can still go anywhere, and while sometimes this ends in amazing parties, sometimes it ends in ‘parties’. Parties that are not parties at all, but seven strangers in a flat, drinking cans and arguing about whether they should call their dealer.
You realise that you have been invited to this ‘party’, not for your sparkling personality, but because these people are broke and want to con two yuppies into buying them drugs.
Could have possibly fitted anywhere in the last three outlined phases, but is generally characterised by giddy upswings (hey look! We have the same edition of the same book!) and dismal lows (Is this it, then? Is it just his wet towels on doors for the rest of my life?). A friend recently said to me “everyone thinks moving in together is all listening to Motown and painting things in dungarees,” and she’s right. The comedown comes when Stevie Wonder stops and you just have to sit in your house alone and wait for the plumber to come, plus the ensuing interrogation when the plumber has inexplicably left without doing anything, and it’s up to you to explain why.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to be one of those dog-owners who refers to their pet as a ‘fur baby’ and I’m not going to imply that my terrier matters as much as your toddler. But something happens when it’s no longer the two of you, when your resources have to be pooled to make a safe world for a more vulnerable thing. This is not without its squabbles: there’s who’s doing more, there’s who’s being too fussy, there’s the strange squelch of jealousy when your partner tells the dog she is beautiful but has neglected to tell you.
Right now, we’re in a phase of playing video games, haggling on Facebook Marketplace for used furniture, and getting through. In a year’s time, we’ll be somewhere new, and then hopefully somewhere new again. The great knotting will spread out and out and out, as the people we know are knotting too, and soon we will be firmly in our mid-30s with ever-tightening knots of old friends and new babies. Here’s to the next phase, and the next, and the next.
- Novelist & award-winning host of Sentimental Garbage. My novel, Scenes of a Graphic Nature is out now
