Text 3 to marry someone you are crazy about is the greatest blessing of your life

(condensed)

Rowan Pelling, 34, editor. She has been married for seven years to Angus MacKinnon, 49, now an executive editor of Atlantic Books.

My father passed away with lung cancer when I was 20 and I recognized the fragility of people you love. Seeing my mother’s grief I realized, with a shock, that she loved the five of us because of him.

It was an enchanted childhood and I am a reluctant adult. I was cynical about relationships and didn’t believe in going out with people. I think there is a sexual component to most relationships and I had flings with some of my close male friends. I had my first proper relationship, at 23, with Christopher, a 50-year old architect who invited me to visit Croatia with him while the war was on.

Two years later I went to work at GQ magazine as PA to the editor. When I arrived everyone was watching a tape of an Everyman documentary about celibacy. The deputy editor, Angus MacKinnon, was on it and he was saying: “I think there’s terrific pressure on people to have sex all the time,” and then they filmed him making a lonely omelette. He exuded something that attracted me and aroused a kind of a protective feeling towards him. But I thought I would never get to know him.

I made tea for everyone in the office just so that I could make tea for him. A month later I told my flatmate that I was in love with a man I didn’t know at all. He was interested in military things and, desperate to engage him in conversation, I mentioned the 1946 film A Matter Of Life and Death. He said: “It’s my favourite film and I’ve only ever gone out with women who love it.” When I brought the mail round, he said some coded line from it under his breath. Over the next weeks we both got thinner and ill-looking. Nothing was declared but I would stare across the office to find him looking at me.

I invited him to a party. He arrived with flowers and I walked around with them glued to my hand but I couldn’t talk to him because Christopher was there. As he left, Angus asked me to spend the day with him in Cambridge and I said something portentous like: “Yes! You know I will”. We were never apart after that. He took me to see the house he had grown up in, gave me his signet ring and we had our first kiss.

Love ruins you for casual sex. A sign on my office door says: “You’re just a few minutes away from sex with a stranger.” But if fidelity wasn’t difficult it wouldn’t be worthwhile.

I’m seen in my underwear in The Erotic Review and get offers from men’s mags to pose nude. That’s when my husband rolls his eyes and says: “I think the world has seen quite enough of my wife.” He is the most extraordinary man I’ve met, but you must embrace some hostile territory in a great love affair. I’m gregarious and he won’t go out without a three-line whip. I’m freezing all the time and he wants the window open. The biggest compromise I’ve made is living in Cambridge but I spend a couple of nights a week in London. People think: “Where’s the other half?”

Marriage has made me happier, more grounded and confident. It has made me more flirtatious and given me a freedom in my dealings with people. My father was 27 years older than my mother, and my important relationships have been with older men. People may think I’m seeking out my father but one of my sisters prefers younger men, so there’s no pattern in our family.

When I read Jane Eyre at ten, it gave me a frisson of excitement. She surrendered to Rochester, the older man, who epitomized a dark and forbidding sexuality. In my relationship with my husband, I can be the miscreant and he the slightly stern older partner. What I find attractive is the person who isn’t easy, who plays it so you don’t know if you are getting through that layer of magnificent otherness.

Being in love has an extraordinary hormonal effect on me and I hope we’ll have children. If not, I hope I won’t see it as a crippling tragedy. I’ve been lucky in that my marriage is unrestricting and I haven’t had to behave like a 1950s housewife. It’s unwise to poke and prod a relationship. This can only ruin the intimacy of marriage. I trust Angus and I don’t think he should have to confess his innermost fantasies and secrets.

Marriage is like signing up for a religious faith. There’s no proof and, on the face of it, it’s illogical. These days there is a primacy of self and we are increasingly indulgent about relationships, but if you marry someone you feel crazy about, it’s the greatest blessing of your life.

(by Rowan Pelling)