AND they lived happily ever after – that’s how all great love stories end. There are never any further details of exactly how the couple in question managed to sustain this blissful existence, whether his snoring kept her awake, if she always left the top off the toothpaste.
But that’s the truth of relationships, of course. Real life is no fairytale, and we all find different ways to navigate that.
Now, thanks to I’m A Celebrity, some light has been shed on how one husband and wife manage the business of marriage – Coleen Rooney revealed that Wayne’s job as manager of Plymouth Argyle means he’s only home “once or twice a week”.
She could be on to something here. Perhaps this is actually the perfect set up for a long term relationship? One step on from separate bedrooms, aka The Sleep Divorce, here’s The Over Half The Week Divorce.
“Wayne comes back once a week, sometimes twice, depending on the fixtures,” Coleen told The Mail on Sunday after landing in Australia. “Usually, he has Sunday off so he might come home. What’s good about the championship is that a lot of games are closer to me, closer to home, up in the North.
“So he’ll come home on a Saturday evening and spend Sunday with us, depending on what the boys have got on. Time together is limited, more so than ever now because of the travelling and stuff.”
You can probably tell exactly how long someone has been married from their opinion on a spouse being 260 miles away most of the time, but hear me out. If you only saw your other half a few days a week, you would really miss one another, long to be together, not be in any danger of taking each other for granted.
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PA)The petty annoyances that drive you to distraction would be magically erased – his socks would be on a different floor, in another postcode, that little noise she makes when she chews would be impossible to hear from five hours drive away.
You would have so much to catch up on every time you were back in the same house, you would have – gasp! – proper conversations, maybe even with – steady now! – sustained eye contact, rather than grunting at each other occasionally from behind your phones.
Maybe this kind of separate togetherness isn’t sustainable long term, but for a while in the middle of a long relationship, it sounds pretty ideal. Like a palate cleanser. Time off for good behaviour.
Which leads us neatly on to the reason this arrangement is a particularly good sign not just generally, for everyone, but specifically, for the Rooneys. Wayne’s numerous past transgressions are so well documented we don’t need to go over them yet again here – and Coleen leaving him to his own devices is the clearest sign yet that this is all behind them now.
She obviously trusts him. If she didn’t, him living so far away for so much of the time, on his own, would be torture for her as she wondered what the hell he was up to. They must both have worked very hard to get to this point.
So there we have it – The Rooneys: a great example of modern marriage. And nope, it definitely isn’t April 1, promise.
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