What I've learned about men, by Shirley Conran

Looking back over 80 years of life, if I were young again and fate dealt the same cards, there's only one thing I would change: me. 

I would be more self-reliant, I would be proactive, I would look after my own finances, I would be myself. Many girls alter themselves to play the part of the woman they think their beloved wants. 

In my case, living in Portsmouth when I was 17, to a fairly large portion of the Navy, I played the part of the 1950s Grown-Up-Little-Girl, obedient, docile and ‘feminine’. ‘God, it makes you want to reach for your sword,’ said one young Royal Marine officer, protectively. But 
you are not a chameleon, so such 
behaviour can be destructive.

When a woman marries, she often thinks her groom is perfect, except for
 a couple of things she plans to change. But the man never changes and the woman always does, and when the bride gradually turns back into her real self, the groom is stunned, because he thought he was marrying someone else. Not a recipe for eternal happiness.

Of course, a woman doesn’t always realise what she’s doing because she has been subtly indoctrinated to do so in order to entrap a man by her mother, family, society, since the dawn of time.

Shirley Conran with ex- husband Terence Conran in 1955

What prompted
 a proposal from
 husband number two
 (I’ve had three in all)
 was that I was able to
 cheerfully endure 10 stormy days in a tent on a midge-infested Scottish mountain. He was led to believe I enjoyed such rough, manly stuff; that I was, at heart, a cross between an obedient boy scout and an army officer’s batman, always supportive and cheery as I secretly prayed for the rain to stop long enough for me to boil a kettle on our collapsible stove.

Many years later I was courted, with marriage clearly in mind, by a much younger widower. After six flattering months I realised I was once again acting the 1950s Grown-Up-Little-Girl – meek, docile, obedient. I was horrified. The relationship ended by mutual consent. 
I was no longer in danger of losing my hard-won ‘real self’, my down-to-earth, practical, sometimes vulgar self: mother, competent moneymaker, hard worker
 who doesn’t want to iron, unlike the unbidden Stepford wife who’d been taking over my brain.

For me, the ideal relationship is an interdependent one, like a pair of trapeze artists performing without a safety net. At any time, one of you is always there to support the other. A good relationship also depends on good communication. So does good sex. It’s unwise to expect your partner to know what you want by osmosis; you need to tell him. Humans can talk, but they’re not yet very good at communicating.

In bed, some men are not very good at listening, while some are still, shall we say, geographically uninformed – astonishing though this is, when sex is thrust in your face every time you turn on the TV. How to tell him what you want? Try asking him what he likes best. Then it’s your turn. Speak clearly, in English rather than Latin...

Shirley in 1982

I speak from experience when I say it may take a long time for him to accept you know more about your body than he thinks he does. Once you have told him, even if he seems to accept it, back up your astounding information with something in print. When I stabbed a finger at an explicit paragraph in Cosmo, my lover finally accepted I was not a crazy fantasist. Angrily he said, ‘Why don’t they teach that to boys in school?’ Our relationship then became much more cosy and genuinely intimate.

Oddly enough – and it may be because it can be easier to talk in the dark – once you have sexual communication, it’s easier to communicate in other areas. In a long-term relationship, good communication is the glue. Forever is not always forever and being married doesn’t stop you falling in love with someone else. My friend Dee once said middle age is when the problem of how to get the man you want changes into how to want the man you’ve got.

After three divorces I’m not qualified to give advice on how to have a happy marriage. But I’ve thought a lot about what went wrong and why, and I’ve observed a lot of long, happy marriages. And, in a nutshell, this is what I’ve noticed: l. Be polite. This only works if you have good communication, otherwise you might get what novelist Angela Lambert called ‘a rather English marriage’, with politeness papering over the cracks – or damn great gulfs.

2. Remember what you first saw in him. Maybe he isn’t a combination of Superman and Einstein, but neither are you. 3. Sharing and caring only works if both of you do it equally. Otherwise, resentment can creep in.
 4. Legendary Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown explained the success of her long marriage to movie producer David Brown: ‘I treated him like a king, so 
he treated me like a queen.’ It’s worth trying.