How marriage counselling and fertitlity helped save Roopa Farooki's marriage
After 10 years together, my husband and I left our safe jobs and our house in London, and bought a wrecked 18th-century farmhouse without electricity or running water in south-west France. And while we were pursuing our rose-coloured vision of the good life, we made two disturbing discoveries: the fact that we couldn't conceive naturally, and the fact that without the distraction of our busy careers, we weren't that happy with each other.
We had previously been unbearably smug about the future and optimistic about our new life away from the rat race. We had both become jaded in our work - I sometimes found it hard to keep a straight face with clients when debating the minutiae of toilet roll messaging in international ad campaigns, and my husband had had his fill of designing other peoples' houses and wanted to do something for himself. It felt that over the years, in growing up, building careers, buying properties and getting married that we had lost something along the way; we had become conventional. Whereas when we first met we had been romantic dreamers and had fallen head over heels in Love with a capital L - giddy, foolish and starry-eyed, holding-hands-in-the-rain kind of love - my husband impetuously proposed on our fifth date in a bustling pub in Oxford.
A decade on, we wanted to be romantic dreamers again. We thought that with our move to France we would once more have the time, space and freedom to indulge in the things we loved - writing for me and renovating for him - and finally start a longed-for family. We cheerfully dismissed as sour grapes the caustic comments from one friend who said: "Who retires to France at 30? It'll be a disaster." But he was right. It was.
It wasn't the fact that we were living in a tent that depressed us - we'd camped in worse places before. What got us down was each other.
We had bitter, protracted arguments in the glorious, sun-filled garden of our picturesque ruin while we picked cherries, plums and grapes, cleared weeds and shifted building materials in wheelbarrows. After all our daytime hostilities, we then couldn't escape each other in our flimsy tent at night. For years we had got used to just seeing one another during hectic London weekends, complaining about the lack of time we had together, but now we had each other for 24 aching hours a day, isolated from all our friends and family in the idyllic French countryside.
It wasn't clear whether we knew each other too little, after all our years together, or too much. We no longer held hands in the rain; instead we shuddered under the dripping canvas with cups of gritty coffee, looking out at the soggy maize fields, and had nothing to talk about except how suddenly miserable our relationship was, and the depressing fact of our infertility as each month passed without a glimmer of a pregnancy. Our romantic dream was falling apart, and we were too.
It felt unfair that we had survived so much together - going through his mother's painful decline and passing, through depression and redundancy, through punishing hours in our respective jobs - to end up like this, when we were so close to getting everything we had always wanted. "Be careful what you wish for," was a phrase that came up a lot; "trouble in paradise," was another. Our long silences were even more accusatory and painful than our arguments. We no longer seemed ready for our new life, but neither were we ready to give up on what we had planned for, and so we stubbornly carried on, grudging and resentful.
"We hate each other. We shouldn't have got married," my husband finally snapped during an argument back in the UK - ironically in the restaurant that catered for our wedding. I was furious with him for saying out loud what we'd both been thinking. I'd never thought it was possible to feel so much gut-wrenching enmity for someone as I did for the person I thought I loved. "We'd better try counselling," I said, before we started throwing around the dangerous "D" word and fighting over who didn't get the wrecked farmhouse. I called Relate in the UK and we began sessions with them the next week. The same week we found out that we were finally top of the list at the local hospital for fertility treatment. We just couldn't bring ourselves to pass up the opportunity, however lousy the timing. So with inspired irresponsibility we started two completely contradictory courses of action. Marriage counselling and fertility treatment.
It never occurred to us to conceal what we were doing, even though my in-laws were visibly shocked one weekend visit when we blithely announced that we had to pop into town for our guidance session. "Are you quite sure you're all right?" they asked me seriously, with that searching look that seemed to imply that our sanity was in doubt. My husband and I shrugged off any odd reactions and found ourselves uniting against criticism of what we were doing. The one thing we had in common was that we were still optimists when it came to our relationship. After all, we couldn't loathe each other so much if we hadn't loved each other in the first place. And although we sometimes found the counselling a bit embarrassing or boring or fuel for yet another argument, it really helped.
We didn't need a divorce - what we needed was a referee. A neutral arena where we could express ourselves without anger, frustration or judgment. We did still love each other but with everything that had happened, and all the horrible things we'd said, we needed to remember why. We began enthusing about marriage guidance to our friends. One couple with famously fiery tempers said they could never do it themselves: "We've got children. What if they told us to break up?" Other couples were interested enough to ask us for Relate's details.
The fertility treatment helped bring us closer, too. We had both dreamed of being parents for years, but we hadn't realised how much our infertility had bothered us until we were able to do something about it. Going to the hospital for all those awkward, embarrassing procedures finally helped to remind us why we had got together and got married in the first place. We held hands while I was poked and prodded, we supported each other, and we realised we still had the potential for romance. Except that now we were also learning the importance of respect. By the time we managed to conceive our first child, we felt ready to stop our counselling sessions. It was the same time that planning permission came through for our rustic wreck, so we could finally create the home we'd always dreamed of, for ourselves and our family.
So now, four years and two beautiful children later, I'm writing this at our never-quite-completed farmhouse - my husband's dream project, which proved a money pit just as we suspected, but which we love. And I pursued my dream, too, and succeeded in becoming a writer against all reasonable expectation. Although I am still an optimist when it comes to marriage, I know that we can't tie up our loose ends in life as easily as we can in books. Despite all our good fortune, my husband and I still have our difficulties, we argue over the children, over work, over hundreds of petty things. But we make up, too, because in the end, after all the nit-picking, carping and complaining, there is still Love, with a capital L. It has always been there, although it has sometimes been buried or ignored. It might be foolish and starry-eyed, but it might also redeem us both.
Corner Shop by Roopa Farooki is published by Pan Paperback on October 3 priced £7.99. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875