Review: Learn Love in a week

Synopsis

After ten years of marriage, Polly and Arthur are at crisis point:

Polly

'Arthur is the IKEA wardrobe of husbands. He looks good in the pictures, but if you ask him to hold anything, his back pops out.'

Arthur

'I have the libido of the Giant Panda; I know what sex leads to. It leads to a small person who likes to post toast in the DVD player.'

Can they learn to love again? And if they can, will they still choose each other?


Review

Like many relationships, there comes a point where love becomes stale, monotonous, long winded, a never ending surge of dreariness and sexless existences. Love in real life is a disappointment, when the romance and the flowers have stopped, replaced by nappies, Mr Tumble and school runs, that’s when the real challenge begins, this is the point where divorce becomes an option. How do relationships survive past this point?  Why do couple’s divorce and how do so many others make it work past ten years?  As much as I dislike Gwyneth Paltrow she put it perfectly in one of her interviews “I asked my dad once, “How did you and Mum stay married for 33 years?” And he said, “Well, we never wanted to get divorced at the same time”.  

This is where Arthur and Polly are at the beginning; she is tired and fed up with Arthur and his beautiful incompetent body, she longs for what could have been with James, a guy who could have been the one. She is plagued by memories of that one perfect date and wonders how her life would have had she ended up with James. She is tired of being the breadwinner and longs for a house somewhere in the countryside which she cannot afford whilst she’s with Arthur.  Arthur, a stay at home dad loves his wife and children however he is fed up of feeling emasculated and unappreciated by Polly. He loves her and wants to make it work and for this reason they manage to stay together. However getting to that point where they finally find happiness, they go through trials from best friends, nipple licking, pool parties, obnoxious teenagers and hospitals all in a week.

Learn Love in a Week, a simple read, made spectacular by the anecdotal and conversational way in which we are immersed into Author and Polly’s life. This is a story seen from three view pints, Polly, Arthur and Emily (Polly's best friend). Arthur is a lovely characters, self pitying and incompetent at times but all the same just as wonderful. Polly was annoying, constantly nagging and unappreciative, she is unsure of who she is and in her state of confusion, she hurts those around her. Emily was an unnecessary voice, an intruder in a story that should have sorely been about a couple going through trying times. 

In the end this was a great read and as much as I tried I found it impossible to put down.