Actor Sir Michael Caine has revealed the secret of his successful 43 year marriage. It’s having separate bathrooms.
“Not many people know that,” he might have added. Some of us do. Many a seasoned matrimonial campaigner would append separate televisions, separate bedrooms and, if possible, separate houses. Love’s young dream of 24 hour togetherness soon morphs into the irritating reality of somebody ‘in yer face’ night and day and the complete surrender of your personal space.
Unless you come to small accommodations about places of privacy and periods of solitude, you’re liable to end up murdering each other.
The bathroom is a case in point. He may love you from head to foot, but does he need to see you in a mud mask or cutting your toenails, nor you witness him squeeze that stubborn spot or shamble about scratching?
When did all this togetherness in the smallest room become fashionable? I see fond young couples cooing over bathroom suites with ‘double vanity unit feature’, (twin basins side by side) and a room-for-two shower cubicles. “You’ll regret that,” I think. Body maintenance is frequently an unglamorous business. Do yourself a favour. Put a great big bolt on the door and preserve the mystery in your marriage.
The Loving Spouse and I were, as the poet puts it, “two minds as one,” but it took many years and a hard-fought campaign of avoiding each other to arrive at this idyllic state of affairs.
I often wonder if men and women are really designed to live together in the degree of prolonged proximity society decrees they must. Perhaps we ought to emulate the pattern of more primitive primates – females and children living communally, with just occasional visits from the males? That might reduce the number of bones of contention wrangled over by couples. Women might not be so perpetually exercised by the clumsy ineptitude and emotional inadequacy of men, nor men so permanently baffled by the reason, logic and wit of women.
Generally speaking, domestic waters are ruffled, not by the major cataclysms of drunkenness, gambling, infidelity or violence, but the endless repetition of insignificant offences – like always leaving the top off the toothpaste or shower gel, the dirty socks beside the linen-basket, the damp towels on the floor and that endemic fault in men, the lavatory-seat up. Not that women are exonerated from guilt – their tendency not to listen, to interrupt, to answer one question with another, to leave doors open, lights on and clothes draped over the back of chairs, would try the patience of a saint – but their bathroom habits are, for the most part, irreproachable. Eight years of sharing a bathroom in our first home ensured we had a second one in our second.
For women, the bathroom ought to be a sybaritic sanctuary – a place for long, scented soaks, preferably with a glass of wine and a novel; a place where she can step on the scales and despair of herself without a grinning face peering over her shoulder saying “Hello Chubbs”; a place where she can re-invent herself by putting on a face to face the day. Few of us are naturally blessed with the symmetry of feature or glowing complexion that says “I woke up like this.”
Men of my generation are functional creatures. Apart from a brief teen phase of dabbing Clearasil on their acne in the hope of attracting a girl and a squirt of one of those memorably muscular fragrances Old Spice or Brut for dances, their’s was a policy of ‘wash and go’.
‘New man’ is a different class of bathroom beast with a collection of grooming products and cosmetic enhancers that rivals his female partner’s – masculine wares with macho names, offering ‘protective intensely hydrating comfort for the special needs of heavily stressed skin’ – implying Scott might have taken it with him to Antarctica. It’s moisturiser, boys – and this is Ulster, not the Urals.
What great-uncle James, who washed in an enamel basin outside the back door winter and summer, would’ve made of it all doesn’t bear thinking about.
