Modern marriage - Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
Career hitches, children and illness all put relationships under strain. Shona Sibury speaks to five couples about making marriage go the distance
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Designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, 43, and his wife Jackie, 42, have been married for 18 years. They have two daughters, Cecile, 12, and Hermione, nine, and live in Cirencester.
Jackie: I first met Laurence on a snowy January night at my best friend's house. She'd been campaigning for some time to get the two of us together and there he finally was wearing baggy grey trousers tucked into a pair of biker boots, a white polo-neck and a rubber coat.
He showed off dreadfully but I was fascinated by him. Right from the start, we were like a Terry and June cliché with our affectionate bickering, and that has defined our relationship ever since.
When you have children there's no way you can anticipate the impact they're going to make on your life. I was doing the hands-on stuff and feeling like I'd lost my identity, while Laurence (as I saw it) still had his freedom. So those early years of parenting were our biggest challenge.
However, Laurence is the world's most tolerant, patient and compassionate person. His father died when he was nine and his mother suffered from MS so he truly values what he's got.
We manage to see the humour in everything we do and that's got to be the most important thing, hasn't it?
Laurence: When I married Jackie I didn't have any idea what lay ahead, thank goodness! One of the first things I learnt was to obey. The other was that when things are going wrong outside of marriage, like work or money issues, it can manifest as friction inside the marriage.
It took me years to understand that it wasn't us but stuff going on around us that was causing fights, and what was needed was to diffuse the situation. What happens in a good, strong relationship is that one or both partners luckily it's usually both of us will refuse to get sucked into a war of attrition and say, 'This is silly.' And that has been a crucial learning curve for me.
Things have got better and better with Jackie as the years have gone on. Without her beside me I'd be unthinkably lonely.
Laurence and Jackie are Ambassadors for CARE International, which helps 55 million people each year to find lasting ways out of poverty around the world visit www.careinternational.org.uk.
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