Morning:
14°c
Amid the fuss over actress Dame Eileen Atkins's candid interview in this week's Radio Times, what gripped me was her recipe for a successful relationship: I haven't been unfaithful, but only because we married when I was 43.
Thank God: finally someone speaks out in praise of older marriage. Someone who doesn't see it as tragic and taboo, as a lukewarm union between two sad sacks who can't get anyone else.
Older relationships are hot. The sex is better. Ditto the restaurants and hotels. You know yourself better. You have more supportive friends. And you won't put up with nonsense. If a potential lover can't choose you straightforwardly, best move on.
Personally I've found the dating market far more generous this time around, in my forties. People don't have the same agenda for the perfect face, the perfect figure. They want someone for pleasure for fun and films and travel.
If you meet comparatively late, you're also more grateful. Not in a pathetic way you're just not about to screw things up by sleeping with someone else. You've waited too long to be happy. In your twenties, when a relationship encounters a bumpy patch, it's all too easy to stray. I don't know how people stay faithful if they marry young, says Atkins fervently. Women are even more successful at infidelity than men they are better liars.
But at 76, she understands the power of loyalty. Her relationship with her second husband, producer Bill Shepherd, has survived her flirtation with a legendary Hollywood lothario. Famously, on her 70th birthday, actor Colin Farrell propositioned her. Atkins regretfully turned him down.
Let's face it, no one needs to get married at 43. It's an unexpected bonus. Friends are thrilled if you pull it off, but no one's judging any more because more and more of us are single.
All around me, long marriages are unravelling unions held together by children and shared goals (the holiday home in Wales, ageing parents), but not a great deal of love. And now they've got the second child safely through A-levels, the house of cards is coming apart.
People don't have to stay in bad relationships these days particularly women. As the wife of a very famous, very unfaithful playwright told me recently, No one will put up with this sort of behaviour for 50 years any more. And quite right, too. It's ridiculous. She was laughing, but you could hear the pain.
The trick is not to panic at 43. Choose carefully and hold your nerve. And then hold it a bit more.
