Keeping relationships happy in the twilight years still requires some patience, writes Padraig O'Morain.
IF TWO people have been together for 30 or 40 years, how are they supposed to be?
The "soft focus" version of life would have it that they are kind, gentle and loving, living in sort of autumnal glow as they prepare to go hand in hand into the sunset.
How many couples do you know who are like that? Not many, I'll bet.
They're more likely to emulate Jack and Vera from Coronation Streetor George and Mildred, who bickered through a television series in the late 1970s.
The basic premise of these series is that the longer people live the more they remain the same. The more they remain the same, the more they irritate each other.
And given that most of the issues that annoy people about each other in a marriage never get resolved, there's plenty of scope for irritation.
Perhaps that's a little over-pessimistic, but some American research hit the headlines earlier this year when it pointed out that the longer people are together, the more they irritate each other.
You don't have to get old to get irritating, of course, and for some grumpy old couples, annoying each other is an art they've been cultivating for a very long time.
During much of an ill-tempered marriage, people can get by through working out an accommodation - usually unspoken - whereby they stay out of each other's way.
Work helps with that. The office can be friendlier than the marital home. So do separate social lives - I go to the pub, you go to choir practice.
But staying out of each other's way can come to an abrupt end.
If one partner is already full-time in the home and the other retires, then suddenly they have to put up with each other all day and not just in the evenings or at weekends.
This is why people are often better off working, even if they don't need the money.
But it's not just retirement that pushes people closer together than they want to be. If one develops a chronic illness which requires having an eye kept on him or her, then the other partner's freedom comes to a sudden conclusion.
And when people are being looked after they are not always on their best behaviour. They can order the other person around. They can sulk. They can be confused by medication and need help figuring out what tablets to take and when.
The effect on the partner who feels trapped by all of this can be a simmering anger. The other partner isn't having much fun either, though, and this comes out in grumpiness.
Matters get even worse if the couple try, in the words of comedian Jenny Éclair, to "out-martyr" one another.
This is a game people learn to play early in the marriage, usually in relation to work, child-rearing and housework. The issue of who is the greater martyr is not generally resolved to anybody's satisfaction.
You can continue this into old age if you want: I'm sicker than you, I have more pains than you, I've been more disappointed in life than you, I have more to put up with than you, and so on.
Despite all this, couples tend to stick together. People are most likely to divorce in their thirties, not their sixties.
Jenny Éclair, mentioned above, has, along with Judith Holder, written a book called Grumpy Old Couples.
On Woman's Houron Radio 4 last week she staked her claim as a half of a grumpy old couple. Her partner of 30 years has never asked her to marry him and describes their relationship as "a one-night stand that went horribly wrong".
She warns ageing couples to avoid the temptation to install an en suite bathroom. The dawn chorus (men are terribly regular, she said) is too off-putting. She also suggested to men that bringing your wife the paracetamol when she has a headache is more touching than surprising her with flowers.
Kindness, she suggested, is one of the most important qualities in a long-term relationship.
Oh well, it's not terribly passionate or stormy or romantic is it? Perhaps Romeo and Juliet were lucky not to live long enough to become Jack and Vera.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. That's Men, the best of the That's Men columns from The Irish Timesis published by Veritas