The office
OFFICE PARTIES
IF HUSBANDS AND wives aren’t invited, be extremely careful. This is the moment when Mr Chalcott in Accounts, who has been eyeing Mrs Pointer in Personnel all the year, suddenly gets too much drink in him, makes a pass at her and the whole thing erupts into an affaire. Try not to get home too late, be careful to wipe lipstick off your cheek if you’re a man, and replace your make-up carefully if you’re a woman. The fact that Mr Prideau in Packaging saw fit to pounce on you may be just Christmas high spirits, but it will worry your husband, who’ll think it is normal procedure for the rest of the year.
If you go to your wife’s or husband’s office party, be as nice as possible to everyone. These people may seem draggy to you, but your partner’s got to put up with them all the year round, and will get tremendous kudos if you’re a success.
Be prepared for anything — my mother went to my father’s office party once when he was in a very senior position. She was hotly pursued by a man from the boiler division in a Mickey Mouse mask, who kept tracking her down in the Paul Jones, tossing her up in the air, and crying, ‘I am your demon lover.’
Hotly pursued
Be careful what you wear, look pretty but not out-rageous. When I was newly married, I went to the Author’s Ball at the Hilton in a party of my husband’s grandest business colleagues. Very brown from the South of France, I wore a white strapless dress which was so tight, I didn’t need a bra. The five-course dinner was too much for it. As I stood up to dance with one of the directors, it split, leaving me naked to the waist.
OFFICE RELATIONSHIPS
A husband spends far more of his waking life with his secretary, and the people he works with, than with his wife. It is the same for his wife if she goes out to work. It is very easy to get crushes on people you work with. There’s natural proximity, there’s the charm of the clandestine (we mustn’t let anyone in the office know), of working together for a common purpose, and finally, because men basically like to boss, and women to be bossed, there is the fatal charm of the boss/female employee relationship. For if you are used to obeying a man when he says ‘take a letter’, or ‘make me a cup of coffee’, you may find it difficult to say no when he says ‘come to bed with me’.
Bear in mind before you either pounce, or accept the pounce across the desk, that people aren’t nearly so easy to live with as to work with, and you’d probably be bored to death with your boss or secretary if you had to spend twenty-four hours a day with them. It will also make things very awkward later if you go off them, while they still fancy you, or vice versa. You may be forced to leave a job you like.
Be very careful, too, not to let your husband or wife think that you are keen on someone in the office, or they will go through agonies of jealousy during the day, and raise hell every time you are kept late — even if you are working.
HAVING YOUR HUSBAND’S BOSS TO DINNER
The wife should pull out all the culinary stops and look as beautiful as possible.
But don’t flirt with your husband’s boss too much or you’ll have him sending your husband abroad and coming round on his own!
Invite another amusing but socially reliable couple to meet him. Then when you and your husband have to leave the room to dish up or pour drinks, he won’t be left alone to examine the damp patches or the peeling wallpaper.
Give him plenty to drink but not too much, or he may become indiscreet about company politics, regret it the next day and take against your husband.
General marital problems
COMMUNICATION
ONE OF THE beauties of marriage is that you always have someone to look after, and to look after you, to share your problems, and to tell — without boasting — when something good happens to you.
It is vital that couples should get into the habit of talking to each other and be interested in each other’s activities, be it a game of cricket, an afternoon at the WI, or a day at the office. If you are able to communicate on a daily level, you will find it much easier to discuss things when a major crisis blows up — like a husband losing his job, a sudden sexual impasse, or the television breaking down.
Nothing is more depressing than seeing married couples on holiday or dining together gazing drearily into space with nothing to say to one another — at best it’s a shocking example to unmarried people.
I feel strongly that married women should try to set a good example to newlyweds or people about to get married. Nothing is more morale-lowering for the engaged girl than to be taken aside by a couple of bored and cynical married women and told how dreary marriage is, the only solution being infidelity or burying oneself in one’s children. Rather in the same way that women who have children often terrorise women who are pregnant for the first time with hair-raising stories of childbirth.
SEPARATION
In long separations from your husband or wife, there are all the problems of loneliness and fidelity. Even short separations — a week or a weekend — have their own difficulties.
When her husband goes away, a wife steels herself not to mind, and although she misses him, unconsciously she builds up other resources. She finds it is rather fun to read a novel until three o’clock in the morning, have time to get the house straight, watch what programmes she wants on television, not have to cook and wash, and be able to see all the people she is not allowed to see when her husband is at home.
Gradually, as the time for her husband’s return approaches, she gets more and more excited. She plans a special homecoming dinner, she buys a new dress and goes on a twenty-four hour diet so she will look beautiful. In her mind she has a marvellously idealised picture of his homecoming.
And then he arrives — hungover, grubby, exhausted, and if he’s been to America or anywhere else where the time is different from ours, he’ll be absolutely knackered. He won’t want to do anything else but fall into bed and then only to sleep.
The wife is inevitably disappointed — this is no god returning, merely a husband, grumbling about the rings round the bath, bringing not passion and tenderness but a suitcase of dirty shirts.
Similarly, a husband returning to his wife after some time away will find that an ecstatic welcome is often followed by a good deal of sniping and bad temper. The wife will have stored up so much unconscious resentment at being deprived of his presence, that she will take it out on him for a few days.
The only way to cope with après-separation situations is not to get panicky if your wife or husband acts strangely. It doesn’t mean they’ve met someone else, they are just taking a bit of time to adjust to your presence again. In a small way, it’s like starting one’s marriage over again.
JEALOUSY
Once your life is centred round one person, it is very easy to become obsessively jealous. Try and keep your jealousy in check: it will only cause you suffering, and make things very difficult for your partner.
If you marry a very pretty girl, or a very attractive man, the fact has to be faced that people will still go on finding them attractive.
Give your wife a certain amount of rope, let her go out to lunch with other men, but start kicking up if it becomes a weekly occurrence with the same man. Never let her have drinks in the evening unless it’s business or an old friend, and draw the line at breakfast. If you are married to the sort of man who’s always humiliating you by running after women at parties, you’ll have to grin and bear it. He’s probably just testing his sex appeal, like gorillas beat their chests. Before I was married, a girlfriend and I used to divide men into open gazers, or secret doers. You’ve probably got an open gazer, so thank your lucky stars you’re not married to a secret doer.