I’ll be there for you — just not now

Is shunning your friends for a few years the recipe for a successful marriage, wonders Sue Leonard

AS more and more relationships break down, how do you keep a marriage going? According to Yasmin Le Bon, the secret is to shun your friends. She said that to keep her 26-year marriage to Duran Duran star Simon alive, she focused firmly on her family.

“I’ve had to accept that if you work, travel, and have a family, you can’t keep friendships up,” she told Easy Living magazine recently. “One day friends will realise why you couldn’t always be there.”

Lisa O’Hara, a counsellor with www.relationshipsireland.com, can understand the difficulties Le Bon would have had, trying to keep all the balls in the air, but she feels there may, ultimately, be a loss.

“Her life with three children, a musician husband and a career is very difficult to manage, but it’s important that a relationship regulates the amount of time of intimacy, and being together versus how much separateness one needs. Some people need more of one and less of another. It’s a very individual thing.

“You can’t maintain the same life as you had before. You have to look at your relationship needs and find a way through it. Yasmin le Bon decided what her priorities were, but by deferring to her relationship and her career, she may have lost out.”

Vanessa O’Loughlin, founder of the Inkwell Group and www.writing.ie, has been married to Shane for 19 years. Mother of an 11-year-old girl and seven-year-old boy, she is very aware that her friends don’t get enough of her time.

“My children are my first priority,” she says. “Then my marriage. Then work. I don’t really fit in friends. I owe lots of them phone calls. I have a friend in Wales who I desperately owe. I do meet up with my friends sometimes. It’s always good fun when I do, but coordinating is always a problem.”

In fact, if it wasn’t for the social networking tool Twitter, O’Loughlin says she might never chat to them at all.

“Twitter is great when you don’t have time to pick up the phone. You feel like you’re having a conversation with a group of people and a bit of fun.

“When you work for yourself, you tend to work every hour God sends. You’re never away from it. Every hour gets taken up with something. If it’s not work, it’s taking the children to school, or to various courses. If friends aren’t on Twitter, or something electronic, it is a struggle to keep up with them.”

Cork-based author Mary Malone feels huge sympathy for Yasmin le Bon. The mother of two boys — now 22 and 20 — has always had a busy life. She works full time for the CSO, but still makes time to write her novels. Yet she says she would never neglect her friends.

“I value my friendships to death,” she says. “They are everything to me. I’ve always made time for them. But it’s like writing or marriage. If you don’t work at it, it will slip away.

“When you become a mother everything is new to you. You don’t want to let anything go. I was lucky. When the eldest, David, was born, we were living in Dublin, and my friends worked with me. When Mark came along I worked part-time for a while.

“I’ve never regretted that, as my family come first. And by working part-time I still had time for my friends.

“I’d have my girls’ nights out, and I’d have coffee with the girls. A lot of us who job-shared were off on Monday mornings. Those were sacrosanct. We’d have coffee in each other’s houses, or we’d take all the children to an adventure playground. We’d sit around having coffee. Everyone was happy.

“As the kids got older, we made more friends through them. There was a stretch of ten years when our weekends were taken over by football matches. But we’d be watching with like-minded parents. We always had a good chat and a laugh.”

Married for 24 years, Mary has always prioritised her relationship with her husband Pat, too.

“Even at the start, when there wasn’t much money, we’d make time for each other. If nothing else, we’d have a ‘date night’ at home. We’d order in a Chinese when the children were asleep. Then you become individuals again.”

The boys still live at home, but they’re busy with their lives, and the house can be quiet.

“I’d hate to be a woman with no friends. I don’t think I’d survive. I think, if your partner knows and understand you, he will know that you’ll be happier after a few hours out with them.”

Mary still sees some of her Dublin friends.

“We meet up every six weeks or so. We used to have an airport day; now it’s a train station day. A few weeks ago I got a train to Dublin and another friend drove there from Wexford. We spent the day talking in a hotel. We drank lots of coffee and had drinks in the afternoon. And I went home the same day.

“I meet two cousins every two weeks. We go for a walk on a Sunday, then we spend a few hours drinking coffee. We have such a laugh, and we save each other a fortune in therapy.”