Blaise Tapp: Wife deserves a long service medal for 20 years of marriage
One of the few golden rules that I’ve consistently stuck to throughout my adult life is to refrain from offering any form of meaningful advice.
Apart from what’s the best way to eat black pudding or how to steam a pan of half decent tasting rice, outside of work, there isn’t a great deal else that I feel sufficiently expert at to opine on. I’ve had to double down on this rule in recent days while showing off about how Mrs Tapp and I are celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary this week.
People’s initial reaction has been one of blatant incredulity that any sane human being has the patience to put up with yours truly for two decades, with some even following up with the somewhat clumsy, if not unreasonable question, ‘how have you managed that?’
The simple answer is that I haven’t given it that much thought and that 2005 genuinely seems like five years ago, although I’m not entirely sure whether time has flown by that quickly for my better half. Like the rest of the planet, our relationship has endured a lot over the past few years, including numerous lockdowns, which pushed millions of relationships to the brink and beyond.
Our secret? A huge amount of tolerance on Mrs Tapp’s part and the fact that we have enough room at home if ever the need arises for some personal space, which it does from time to time. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to interview couples who’ve celebrated 60 years of marriage and, in one case, 70 years, with a couple of them claiming that they’ve never had a cross word in all that time, which is something that I struggle to believe. Unless at least one of the couple has a hearing impediment or neither of them has ever had an interesting opinion then I can’t see how an argument-free marriage is possible.
Don’t get me wrong, the idea of Jack and Vera Duckworth-type existence, where barneys are a part of everyday life, leaves me exhausted but where’s the fun in agreeing with someone all of the time? It’s boring, right?
The big difference between now and twenty years ago, apart from me having even less hair than I did back then, is that we now fully understand the advice that we were given back on that glorious Saturday in June, that all marriages take an awful lot of hard work. They really weren’t kidding but it really is worth the effort.
Other than that, I’m still making it up as I go but what I do know is that Mrs Tapp deserves a long service medal as big as a bin lid.