Some years ago Kate Figes wrote a wonderful book called Life After Birth in which she debunked the soft-focus myths of motherhood. Powered by interviews, research and her own passion, it managed to show just how relentless and demanding new parenthood is; it was by turns alarming, inspiring and comforting. Now, in Couples, Figes sets out to do the same for marriage, a term she sensibly uses as a shorthand for all long-term (including same-sex) partnerships. Drawing on interviews with 120 people as well as academic research and occasional insights from fiction, she sets out to convey "the truth", as the book's subtitle puts it.
Figes is a dedicated researcher and a compelling writer, and this is a very good book – the most comprehensive summary we currently have of the changing nature of relationships. All the same, it suffers from a basic problem: as Figes would be the first to admit, there is no single "truth" when it comes to relationships. She herself quotes Anna Karenina's observation that "there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts". No two couples are alike and, what's more, all relationships are shadowed by others, unachieved: a series of potential parallel universes in every household.
It is a truism that we cannot know what other people's relationships are really like, and that's because marriage is like chaos theory. A minor event on holiday can have repercussions at home months later. A tone of voice, a misunderstanding, may have lasting, unforeseen consequences. It is very difficult, as a result, to generalise about the intimate yet often boring detail that is the fine fabric of marriage.
For this reason, many of this book's most telling observations arise out of specifics. A woman called Juliet says her husband complains he is the bottom of the pile in the family and, recalling that she makes squeezed orange juice for her three children but not for him, she reflects that he probably is. Another woman, Iris, snaps at her husband and belittles him throughout their shared interview, then claims that if she were to be nice to him it would seem to condone his betrayal of her in an affair he had more than 20 years ago.
But there's a problem with these anecdotes. Figes says of her 120 interviewees: "I have changed their names and disguised their circumstances as much as possible, so I hope that even you will not recognise yourselves." If you are going to ask people to talk about the most intimate aspects of their lives, it is hard to see how you could do otherwise. But when "Florence" confesses to a flirtation she hasn't admitted to her girlfriend, "Grace", you can't help wondering about the integrity of what you're being told. How many lesbians did Figes interview? Even if Grace wasn't interviewed herself (not entirely clear), might she and their two children not recognise themselves?
Might Figes, then, have changed their sexuality? If she had, would that matter? Perhaps not, in terms of her general argument, but in the sense that such queries are raised in the reader's mind, then yes. And there are quite a few examples of individuals confessing to Figes, presumably on grounds of strict anonymity, things they haven't told their partners – that they are 80% happy, for instance, or that they hated their wedding day. What exactly has she had to change to make publishing such revelations acceptable?
Figes's approach is clear-eyed, liberal, tolerant, sympathetic and wise. Yet marriage is a matter of faith, and her own prejudices show through from time to time. She rejects the idea that she is writing a handbook but she inevitably draws conclusions, and now and then she slips gear from reportage to advice. "When you don't feel like it for weeks on end," she writes in the chapter on sex, "when you look at your partner and wonder where all the lust has gone, question what you might be holding back and why, rather than assuming that eroticism between you is dead." Sound advice, I am sure, but a bit nannying all the same.
She also displays quite a lot of prejudice against romance, quoting approvingly Mary Crawford's "sage" comment in Mansfield Park: "There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry… it is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others and are least honest about themselves." This is not only to disregard Austen's ambivalence about Mary Crawford but, more importantly, to overlook the enormous importance that some fantasy about another person that is not seen or shared by anyone else can have for a long-term relationship. Many of Figes's happy couples, in fact, deliberately suspend some of their critical faculties; they choose to be less than perfectly clear-sighted. This is what romance really means, and she doesn't give it enough credit for being entirely sustainable.
Marriage, of course, is endlessly interesting. It is, as Figes says, one of the biggest gambles of our lives. As she also says, it can be the closest we can get to heaven. But it can also be a living hell, and it's not easy to see what constitutes the difference. This is an admirable attempt to find out, and comes about as close as we currently can to answering the question. But it may be one that can only be answered piecemeal, because, in the face of all the potential for drama, distress, passion and exhilaration of two people trying to fit their lives together, generalisations inevitably seem a bit anodyne.
