It’s time, if you can stand it, for part two of Blog 43 and the Loves of Julian. A correspondent has told me that she thinks I fall in love far too readily. She might be right, but thankfully those days are behind me. I now have my one true love and there will never be another. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Although I think it’s worth posing the question, is it more important for a successful and long-lasting marriage to be great friends or great lovers? I actually think real, intimate, trusting friendship is the most important thing in a relationship, but that’s just me.
My first marriage ground to a slow end in a depressingly familiar fashion. We’d been married for 7 years, I was approaching fifty and I was away so much at work (which involved huge amounts of international travel) that it was almost inevitable that we should grow apart. It was sad because we really were the best of friends, but to my shame, I had a fling with a US Olympic skier, which my wife eventually found out about. We went for counselling and for a year tried to make it work, but the damage was done. We parted without wrangle on amazingly good terms and with much heartache and sadness, but no bitterness. She returned to Canada with our two labradors and I remained in the house in Wiltshire, which felt very empty for many months afterwards. Thinking about it, my correspondent might have a point, because I then met a beautiful blonde (they always are!) who was the most bubbly, extrovert, party-loving woman I have ever met. She was divorced with two youngish boys and had handfuls of potential suitors. She had been involved in a very nasty speedboat accident which had left her in quite a bad way internally, but you would never have known it. She was probably the gutsiest, most determined and stubborn woman I know. Sadly, she had been the victim of a strict Victorian upbringing which rendered her almost frigid. My love was largely unrequited until it was too late. By the time she felt the way I did, other issues got in the way and we started to drift apart. At that point I met the future Mrs Tutt. (Future at that point, now the present Mrs Tutt!). It was at our local golf club. As I walked into the Pro Shop a vision of Amazonian loveliness was walking out of the other door, with blonde locks flowing over a very skimpy halter top, and legs up to her armpits, encased only in the tightest and briefest of shorts. It was unusual attire for a lady at a fancy golf club, but she was a scratch golfer and the men, including the Committee, spent most of their time trying to get her into bed. Luckily for me, despite my relative senility, I succeeded where others had failed. We had our honeymoon in Mauritius sometime before getting married and the resulting son attended our wedding fifteen months or so later.
As old friends celebrate forty years together and more, it makes our twelve years of marriage seem rather pitiful, but nothing about my life has been conventional and regrets I have none. I’m writing this sitting in the garden with love in my heart and the recipient not far away, on the most stunning early Spring day, that could easily be mid-summer were it not for the lack of foliage. Long may it last.
2DtC
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