Finding five positives not always easy
There we were to talk about our feelings, fill in workbooks in red ink, drink orange juice through a straw and listen as we were told the five early indicators of a relationship break up (going in from the side at the breakdown or spear tackling are not two. I asked). Welcome to the pre-marriage course.
After what was a low-key version of the Mr and Mrs game you’re familiar with from the TV, our respective answers were fed into a computer and the machine then coughed up various graphs and charts. We sat in another room a couple of nights later to discuss the results. The conversation centred on me for some reason, as the counsellor pressed various leaflets into my fiancée’s hand.
Nevertheless, we left with the cert required to get married in the church. As well as that piece of paper, I’ll genuinely take with it lots of valuable advice.
I now know that I’m ‘an adaptive child’ who stonewalls during arguments and is more a feeler than a thinker. And, importantly, I now realise that the key — the real key — to a happy marriage is ... 5:1.
This is the ratio you need to remember. There’ll be bad in every shared life. Conflict will often crease a relationship but the trick is to make sure there’s five bits of positivity for every one that’s less so, we were told.
One of the instructors explained that it’s like a bank account — each good thing (flowers, dinner, shutting the hell up) is a deposit, and a negative moment a withdrawal. If you dip into the overdraft, your marriage flirts with foreclosure pretty quickly. Many of us start married life in negative equity in more ways than one, it seems. If we applied the same rules to sport, I thought after 45 minutes of dross at the Aviva Stadium on Wednesday night, the stadium around me would be empty.
I picked up a ticket on Wednesday evening on Grafton St and found I was sitting with my back to the Sky Sports presentation position. You know those guys who stand outside the studio window and glare through the glass and into our living rooms, as presenters and pundits try to do their job? That was me this week! I nodded at Jason McAteer casually as he went about his work and I slugged down some of the €2.80 Aviva Stadium tea and a bar of Fruit and Nut I brought from outside. For a brief moment the footballing stars aligned — the man who scored against Holland on this same pitch in 2001 looked into the eyes of the man who stood on the same turf to watch the Kings of Leon a few short years later.
But who’d want to be a football great? For 90 minutes I got a brief glimpse into Trigger’s life. He sat quietly above my head after his pre-game duties were done and tried to watch the game. Three ladies with tricolours etched onto their cheeks, lorrying the ‘minerals’ into themselves, turned a full 180 degrees for the entire game to tell the former Liverpool midfielder in a variety of imaginative ways how handsome he was and what they were going to do to him.
I say 90 minutes. Closer to the 85-mark they clip-clopped up to the Sky box to get their moment with Trigger. As the Irish equaliser squeezed in, he was wrapped up in their happy embrace with his back to the action. He ran back to his seat bashfully to catch Cox’s finish on the big screen.
At half-time we watched as one Ireland fan was surprised by his partner on the pitch in front of us. She led him out in front of the West Stand and dropped to one knee to offer a February 29 marriage proposal. They might well find themselves taking time out for a, helpful, marriage course down the line.
After a low-key performance, however, it remains to be seen if this Ireland team will give us enough good moments this summer to keep the relationship fresh.
* adrianjrussell@gmail.com Twitter: @adrianrussell
