Carol’s Column

It's a perfectly opposite life

"WE'RE a perfect match," confided Gladys Greenbaum to me on the phone this morning.

"Humphry goes for the breast of the chicken, I enjoy the thigh. He likes curry hot enough to melt his upper dental plate while I like it mild.

"He squeezes the toothpaste tube from the bottom and I squeeze it from the middle.

"Together we've been squeezing happily for over 25 years."

Yes, that's a happy marriage, I thought to myself as I replaced the receiver. That's what it's all about.

In fact, the most successful marriages seem to be between opposites.

Take Dudley Moore and Jerry Hall.

OK? OK?, so they're not married yet, but it's just a question of time.

She's tall, magnificent, a blonde and as slender as a giant baseball bat. He's short, plump and hangs somewhere around the region of her kneecaps.

Yet it works.

I was trying to explain this to my nine-year-old daughter the other day when she asked me how come her father and I had remained together for nearly 18 years.

Answer your children's questions, say the experts. Don't fob them off with irrelevant replies. It turns them into inadequate, unstable adults.

"It's simple," I replied, wanting my daughter to grow into an adequate adult.

"The reason why your father and I have remained together for all these years is that we're married."

"It's a miracle," she replied, shaking her pigtails and scratching her left ear. She really does take after my husband in so many ways.

"You and daddy are so different."

True, I thought to myself.

"Daddy's organised, quiet and gentle. He always listens when we talk to him. He never shouts, he never loses his temper. He never smashes the car, burns the eggs or loses us."

There was a silence.

I wasn't going down without fighting.

"Sure, your father always listens because he's the only man I've ever met who has the ability to sleep while sitting with his eyes open and his head nodding.

"He never shouts or loses his temper — he never has to. He knows I'll do it for him.

"And he never smashes the car because he doesn't lift 11 children, four bicycles and a month's groceries and still have to be at the hairdresser, clinic, dog parlour, school and doctor by 10am.

"And of course he never burns the eggs because he never cooks them.

"Anyway, Nicola," I continued (I always call my daughter Nicola when I'm displeased).

"I only lost you once, a year ago, and I realised it immediately I got home. I came back to fetch you," I added.

Later, while I was making the bed and fluffing out the seven blankets on my side — he sleeps with one — I had to agree she was right.

It was a miracle we'd stayed together for so many years.

This attraction of opposites had something. We were different in every way.

I like potato, he likes baked fish, I like lazy holidays on golden beaches at 10-star hotels, classical records, Robert Redford, peppermint toothpaste, fast cars.

He likes jazz, biking or camping holidays where you experience the great outdoors first-hand, strawberry toothpaste, Land-Rovers and Jane Fonda.

So we compromise.

We eat baked fish, listen to jazz, spend our holidays in a leaking ex-army tent, use strawberry toothpaste and drive a Land-Rover.

The strange thing is that even our mothers have opposing views.

Mine thinks I am beautiful, intelligent, charming and that he is quite the luckiest man in the world to have found me.

While my mother-in-law once described my spouse as handsome, intelligent with classical legs and a wonderful nature.

She also thought he was the unluckiest man in the world to have found me when he could have had Jackie Onassis, Raquel Welch or Princess Diana.

Had he been a little nearer to them, of course.

And yet, after all these years, we're still together.

Yes, it is a miracle.

We're a perfect match. Goodness, one of these days we'll even begin to speak to each other and then the cynics can call us Darby and Joan.

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