Nine Years of Beraphic

Beraphic, in case you are wondering, is a relationship name, composed according to television fans' relatively recent "shipping" conventions. Since Benedict Ambrose and I took refuge in a holiday flat with Netflix, I have become hip to the kids and all their crazy entertainment crazes. Currently it is making portmanteaux of fictional characters' names in homage to their romances, e.g. "Riverdale's" Jughead + Betty= Bughead.

I remember "shipping" Mulder and Scully from "The X-Files" decades ago, but nobody called them Sculder or even Mully, thank heavens. However, I seem to recall the names of canoodling film stars being squished together in this way, like Bennifer and Tomkat. Ick to Tomkat.

Anyway, it is Beraphic's ninth wedding anniversary, so feel free to send us pottery, if you like. We have just returned from a boozy lunch, so B.A. is taking a nice nap and I am sobering up with coffee before delving once more into the latest correspondence from the front-lines of the war against the Culture of Death.

This morning we went together to my weekly Polish tutorial for a fun activity called "translate for B.A." Language tasks are not immediately transferable, so if you expect to speak a foreign language abroad when travelling with a monolingual spouse, you must practise thinking in the foreign language while your spouse is interrupting you monolinguistically.

We told my young Polish tutor that today was our anniversary, and she was quite interested in the longevity of our marriage and wanted to know our recipe for success. B.A. said it is going along to Polish lessons to make sure the Polish tutor really is a woman, and now that he has seen her three times, he is sure she is a woman and he doesn't have to come anymore. Ha ha ha.

I had to translate that all into Polish, by the way.

Then B.A. got  philosophical and said that the recipe for a successful marriage was five parts patience mixed with a sense of humour about oneself and one's spouse. Also, shared first principles. And also love because without love it's nothing, which is easier to say in Polish than "five parts patience."

At a certain point I just free-styled and explained in what seemed to be recognisably Polish that unlike most of our generation in either Canada or Scotland, we are both fervent Catholics, which was our shared first principle. It would have taken a lot more vocabulary to theorise that anyone whose first principle is vegetarianism should marry a vegetarian, or anyone who is a fanatical nationalist ought to marry someone from his or her nation.

Catholicism in itself is more consciously pro-marriage than, say, vegetarianism or nationalism, but I remember being confronted with a classroom of little Catholic girls all deeply anxious to know how one goes about getting an annulment. That said, Catholicism smiles upon those things that help sustain a marriage--like patience, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice--and frowns upon those things that stick pins in it, like resentment, spendthrift, and infidelity. I'm not sure vegetarianism is that conscious of relationship-building, and nationalism could theoretically lead a woman to leave her alpha male husband for an alpha-plus national chieftain, or a man to leave his ageing wife for a fertile young thing, all for the sake of the Fatherland.

But in general I am all for people figuring out their own first principles and choosing their spouses  accordingly.

Less edifying factors that lead to long marriages include financial interdependence, with certain ruin to both, should one spouse desert the other; family pressure, with the likely disapproval of many suddenly scary family members, should one spouse desert the other; and a fair amount of unpleasantness in the world outside the home, so that home is a real refuge, no matter who else is living in it. For example, I might be flakey and crabby and prone to singing the same Polish pop song over and over again, but I am still more soothing to the nerves than, say, a Scottish vs English punch-up in the Historical House car park.