Love and Marriage

A conversation I’ve had again and again with my female friends almost since we were old enough to talk is about who’d we’d marry and what our wedding’s going to be like. We’ve all been nuptually fixated before we knew what sex was or even realised that boys weren’t actually made of slugs, snails and puppydog tails. 

FYI: this was the most sexist film I've seen released this side of the millennium

And of course, if you’re a brit you’ll know the hype at the moment is all about the new series of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding being shown on Channel 4; so yesterday when I was schmoozing with the girls it all came up again.

I have somewhat complicated views on marriage, as it seems my family has been cursed to divorce ever since it’s been socially acceptable.

Usually, when someone asks me about getting married I tell them that I don’t plan to, and that two people can lead a perfectly happy and healthy relationship without tying the knot.  Anyway, I couldn’t be fussed with the whole buying a wedding dress too small for me and crash dieting myself into it debacle.

HOT!

But secretly, inside I have a crazy yearning to become a character in a Lawrence novel, the downtrodden wife of a miner, living in a two-up, two-down terraced cottage with our four children, who spends all day cooking and washing the family’s linen with a mangle only for my husband to come home from the mine, snatch the jam jar I kept the money for little Louisa’s new hobnail boots in, and go down the pub and spend it all on drink. Later he’d come home and beat me senseless because there were lumps in the custard at dinner.

I’m not sure whether this is a genuine fantasy of mine or just the product of a deep-rooted wish to lead a more literary life- or perhaps it’s just my masochism coming through.

Why is being beaten such an attractive prospect for me?