Official: Marriage is good for your health

Uxorious: Christopher Wyld first met Kate Figes in Minsk, Belarus, in 1979
10 April 2012

Christopher Wyld often gets called Mr Figes, after his wife, the best-selling author Kate Figes, whose books on family life include Life After Birth and The Terrible Teens.

Married for 21 years, Christopher and Kate each kept their own surname - except hers keeps threatening to take over. And this week he is as well to feel a little nervous about the label because his wife is attracting huge publicity for her latest role as a love and marriage guru.

Kate Figes's new book, Couples: The Truth, offers "a window onto the domestic lives of others". Which always makes others want to look right back into your window, doesn't it?

Couples - dedicated to her husband ("of course") - has been widely publicised, with Figes proclaiming that "blazing rows are good for you", "sex is occasionally messy, painful, unwanted or boring" (oh dear), and "there are still huge taboos about discussing what really happens between couples". Figes has even been called the woman with "the secret of a happy marriage". No pressure there, then.

So isn't Wyld terrified of the curse of Hello! - the idea that once you put it out in public that you're happy together, you immediately split up?

"No, I don't have anything to hide. If Kate had said, 'I'm going to write a book on what makes great sex ' I might have felt a bit of pressure," he laughs. "We're not smug. I think it's surprising and wonderful when people get together and stay together. I think it's very sad if people think, 'Well, this might be good for 10 years.'"

Wyld is himself a stylish, charismatic character with state-of-the-art glasses, close-cropped grey hair and BlackBerry in hand. He is engaging and funny, plus he possesses a trait which is always attractive in men: he is as good a listener as he is a talker. You can't imagine women don't throw themselves at him and apparently they have. "I have met and known lots of deeply attractive women," he says seriously when I ask about fidelity. "But it's never an issue. We would both be thunderstruck with misery if the other went off." It helps that he and Kate married in their early thirties, he adds: "We had both been around. Since then there might have been opportunity - but there was never temptation."

A long-time foreign editor for BBC News in the Eighties and Nineties, Wyld is now director of the Foreign Press Association, facilitating contacts and political access for international correspondents in London. When we met at his office near Trafalgar Square he had just come from an event thrown by Peter Mandelson. ("The mood was fin-de-siècle," he says with a raised eyebrow.) He first met his wife - "and this is true," he grins - in the canteen of the Communist Party headquarters in Minsk, Belarus, in 1979. Wyld's cousin was studying Russian with Kate and they were both on their year abroad: he went to visit.

But nothing happened between them for eight years. "She didn't hate me but I wasn't looking for her and she wasn't looking for me. She was deeply entwined with someone else. And she thought I was a bit of a plonker. Because I was - in her view - something of a smoothie-boots, a posh-sounding public school Oxford graduate." In turn, 30 years on he cannot believe that he married the woman he did, he jokes. "Sometimes I think, 'Good Lord, I'm married to Kate. I thought I liked leggy blondes. And here I am with a short, dark, Jewish Leftie from north London'."

After Minsk, they kept in touch and by the mid-1980s were an item back in London. They married in 1988 and moved in together for the first time. He was 34, she was 31. They still live in the same house in Stoke Newington. "Kate wasn't bothered whether we got married. But I had lived with someone and I knew we would endlessly be asked, 'Are you getting married?' When Kate told me she had told her mum it was happening, though, I thought, 'Well, we'd better do it then '"

Figes's reluctance - which she has written about - was down to her own parents' divorce when she was five. Wyld's parents were happily married for 52 years until his father's death so he had no such reservations. "Kate had an unhappy childhood in many ways because of that. When we got married, for many years she would say, 'You're not going to leave me, are you?'" Wyld says one of the reasons their marriage has thrived is because he and his wife both see themselves as feminists. They believe men and women should have equal roles. That view strengthened when they had their two daughters, Eleanor, now 20 and a drama student, and Grace now 16.

"Kate was always her own person, she made her own living, she had her own job. And we share a lot of fundamental values - in kindness and in sharing the burden, for instance. We have always had an absolute commitment to the children and to putting them first."

Apart from those aspects, though, he adds amiably, "We didn't and don't agree on anything, really. In fact we disagree a lot. Which I like. I remember saying to my mother about another girlfriend before I met Kate, 'It has all got a bit predictable'. And my mother said, 'Well, I've been married to your father for 40 years and I still have no idea what he's going to think about anything'. And I thought, 'That's what I want'." It helps to have different interests, too. "I have a season ticket at Arsenal. She has been maybe twice. She loves opera. I'm beginning to grow up and be able to cope with it."

Wyld wholeheartedly agrees with the message in Couples: The Truth: that it's a modern myth that people don't work hard at their relationships, that they just give up and get divorced. "Most of our friends have been together a long time, have children and they're doing their best. People try to have what Bill Clinton called 'the quiet miracle of an ordinary life'. It sounds so boring and bourgeois but it's one hell of a challenge to be happy together and to have well-balanced children. People work hard for that and go through a lot of pain."

He is not sanctimonious, however. "One's own marriage is enough of a mystery without judging other people's." And they have had their tough times: Kate was "miserable and depressed" after the birth of their first child - which led to her ground-breaking book Life After Birth, describing mothers' ambivalent feelings. "Meanwhile, I was having a great time working really hard. I remember one time we planned to go away for the weekend, leaving Eleanor with an aunt, and I rang from a taxi on my way to Heathrow to say, 'I'm going to South Africa for work'. That sort of thing did happen. I didn't realise the impact."

Later, when he was out of work - he took redundancy from the BBC in 1995 - it was a great strain. "When one of you isn't busy and not sure what they're going to do, it is tough. I've never earned good money, though," he adds. "But so what? We've both had to work - and I can't imagine it any other way. What fulfils you in life is relationships, not money. We all need money, of course, and it's horrible to be broke. But the quality of your relationship is what makes you happy."

In the book Figes says that she has "no magic formula" to offer her readers - it reveals plenty about the secrets of others' marriages, while giving away frustratingly little about her own.

Her husband, however, disagrees. He does have a formula. "Humour and commitment," he says. "People can take themselves far too seriously." Marriage improves as you get older, he adds. "It really does get better. And if you can make it through to when your children are 20, then you're on your own together at weekends. And that is wonderful. It seems amazing to me. That you can look at each other and say, 'God, how did we do that?'"

Come on. Someone give the man a book deal.

Couples: The Truth by Kate Figes (Virago, £14.99) is out tomorrow.

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