Anyone who has been married for almost 30 years, as I have, is likely to have one or two annoyances about their spouse. And I realise that some people have much heavier crosses to bear than mine – which is simply that my husband has started to behave as if he is an old man, when he is nothing of the sort.
He is 61. I’m 58. But to watch and hear him carry on you would think that he was approaching his century.
The slightest physical effort – getting out of bed, out of the car, out of a chair – is accompanied by blood-curdling groans and exclamations of pain, completely disproportionate to any actual discomfort.
Meanwhile, getting into bed, car, chair is the cue for a heartfelt sigh as if at the end of an extreme effort or agonising process nobly borne. When he bends down to put some food in the dog’s bowl, the exclamations might have come from a Carry On film. I swear the other morning he cried out with the effort of lifting a mug of tea. It’s pathetic. And I find it increasingly annoying.
When asked, politely, to undertake some trifling task about the house – to take the rubbish out, for example, or to unload the dishwasher – he responds with horror and despondency, as if the effort will try him to the limits of his endurance and perhaps beyond.
I repeat, my husband is 61.
Please don’t think that I am making light of his suffering, or being cruel about his afflictions. He doesn’t have any. He makes constant use of our health insurance to have every area of himself checked over with the utmost rigour, announcing with disappointment at the conclusion of each process that “there’s nothing seriously wrong with me”.
He still works full-time, but arrives home with pantomime-level symptoms of fatigue every evening, claiming to be too exhausted to take the dog out. He makes frequent reference to the fact that if we lived in France he would be eligible for retirement on a generous pension.
“Malheureusement,” I point out, we don’t live in France, so he will have to soldier on for another five or six years at least. I might add that I don’t look forward with relish to having him moaning and groaning around the house once he has retired, while I nurse his imaginary ailments.
The point – on which our grown-up children agree with me, I might add – is that once genuine medical conditions have been ruled out, ageing is largely in the mind. If my husband could get it into his head that he is not on the fringe of the grave but, in all likelihood, simply halfway through his adult life, he might spend less time lamenting his decrepitude and more embracing the opportunities that lie ahead.
“You’re as old as you feel” is a cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. I’ve suggested that he should join me in exercise classes, or Zumba, or swimming, and that we should take walking holidays rather than spending a fortune to flop by the pool in a hot country twice a year.
But he doesn’t seem keen on any of this. The other night, as he was dozing in front of the football, I found an announcement in our local online noticeboard about a couples’ fun run in the park in a month’s time, and woke him up to ask if we should enter together.
“Are you trying to kill me?”
“No!” I laughed. Not yet.
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