I'd say we've a happy marriage - but maybe I've misread Mrs Utley and she's set to spring a Huhnesque surprise

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Too late for my old schoolmate Chris Huhne comes a tip from the Northwest University of Illinois which might have saved him an awful lot of bother.

If only it had emerged a couple of years ago, he might still be presiding over the Department of Energy and Climate Change, plotting to seize the leadership of the Lib Dems from Nick Clegg and merrily imposing green taxes and wind turbines on the rest of us.

At one of his seven houses, he might still be enjoying his multi-million-pound fortune, snuggling up on the sofa with his adoring wife Vicky and wondering what to buy her for their 29th wedding anniversary this year.

Anguish: With jail awaiting him and his career in public life destroyed beyond hope of recovery, Huhne has become an object of national ridicule and contempt, loathed even by his own son, for all the world to see

At his feet might still be sitting his beloved son Peter, gazing up at him reverently, with all the affection and respect due to a distinguished father. Instead, the clever, self-confident boy I knew at Westminster School as Christopher Paul-Huhne faces utter ruin, professional and personal.

With jail awaiting him and his career in public life destroyed beyond hope of recovery, he has become an object of national ridicule and contempt, loathed even by his own son, for all the world to see. 

Never since they were written more than three centuries ago have the words of William Congreve been so widely quoted (and misquoted): ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’

Which brings me to that tip that might just have saved him, if only it had come a little earlier. No, I don’t mean the advice that he should have taken those three penalty points ten years ago. He’s probably worked that out for himself by now.

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What I mean is the finding from Illinois that the way to keep a marriage happy is to write three seven-minute essays every year, analysing our marital disputes from the dispassionate point of view of an outsider.

Could this little exercise, costing only 21 minutes’ work a year, have rescued Chris from the alluring charms of Carina Trimingham and kept him true to Vicky — thereby dissuading her from spilling the beans about his guilty secret?

Certainly, Northwest University’s Professor Eli Finkel seems to suggest it might have done the trick.

‘I don’t want it to sound like magic,’ he says, ‘but you can get pretty impressive results with a minimal intervention.’

Professor Eli Finkel (pictured) suggests the essays written between couples could save marriages

As the experiment was explained yesterday, the team tracked the marriages of 120 couples for two years. Some had been together for only a few weeks when the study began, others for more than 50 years. The findings were the same for them all.

In the first year, the couples were left to their own devices, reporting at the end of it that their marital satisfaction had fallen. But in the second, half of them were told to commit their rows to paper once every four months, while the other half were left alone.

At the end of the 24 months, those who had been spared any homework reported that their satisfaction had dipped further — apparently confirming previous studies’ findings that marital happiness tends to decline with every passing year.

Is this really the general experience? With a week to go before our own 33rd wedding anniversary, I’d say our early-to-middle years together were full of wild highs and lows, in no particular order, while the later ones have been more consistently contented. But perhaps Americans are different. Or maybe I’ve completely misread Mrs U and she’s about to spring a Huhnesque surprise on me.

Anyway, at the end of the professor’s experiment, his 60 essay-writing couples reported that their marital satisfaction had stabilised. Although they didn’t argue any less, their rows upset them less.

Might this have been the answer for Chris and Vicky? Oh, dear, somehow I doubt it. But what we can all be pretty sure of, after the public airing of their gruesome woes, is that it’s far too late to patch things up between them now.

Indeed, the spectacular wreckage of the Huhnes’ relationship highlights one aspect of marriage that was almost entirely missing from this week’s Commons debate on the pros and cons of allowing couples of the same sex to have access to it.

Listening to the advocates of gay marriage, you might have thought the institution was all about love, and nothing else. They made it sound as if gays were being cruelly excluded from a pleasure-garden, full of scented flowers and twittering birds, mysteriously offering a more intense and magical form of commitment than a civil partnership.

Venting: The finding from Illinois says that the way to keep a marriage happy is to write three seven-minute essays every year, analysing our marital disputes from the dispassionate point of view of an outsider

Take the contribution made by the gay Tory MP Mike Freer — hailed by some as the best and most moving speech of the debate. I don’t want to be unkind, but it sounded to me as if he’d gone soft in the head.

Vibrating with intensity, as one admiring commentator put it, he said: ‘I am a member of this Parliament. I sit alongside you in committees, in the bars and in the tea rooms. I queue alongside you in the division lobbies. But when it comes to marriage, why are you asking me to stand apart and to join a separate queue? I ask you: if I am equal in this House, give me every opportunity to be equal.’Look, Mr Freer. You know perfectly well why traditionalists are asking you to join a separate queue.

They’re not saying that your love for your civil partner is inferior to a husband’s for his wife (although I grant you that some of the more brutal among them may be thinking it).

They’re just saying it’s different, in the way men and women are different, and that marriage should continue to be defined, as it has been since the year dot, as a relationship between a man and a woman — one of whose principal purposes remains the procreation and rearing of children.

Yes, of course everyone should have an equal right to get married — but with the same condition attached to Mr Freer as to everyone else: that it must be to someone of the opposite sex. That’s what marriage is.

The contribution made by the gay Tory MP Mike Freer was hailed by some as the best and most moving speech of the debate on gay marriages

Although this is not something I get worked up about any more (and I came round to civil partnerships long ago), I simply can’t see why it should be thought unfair to ask Mr Freer to join a separate queue at the register office, any more than it’s unjust to expect men and women MPs to join separate queues for the loos.

But I’m straying from my point, which is that marriage isn’t the bed of roses that so many same-sex couples seem to feel they’re being denied.

True, there’s nothing to compare with a happy married life — apart from a happy civil partnership, that is — for the blessings it can bestow upon a couple. Indeed, one striking study finds that heart bypass patients who are happily married are three times more likely to be alive 15 years after surgery than those who are dissatisfied with their marriages.

But making a success of a marriage can also be jolly hard work (especially for the wife, in my experience) — and anyone setting out for the altar or the registrar’s desk should be prepared for some pretty grim times, amid the joys. If it goes seriously wrong, of course, there’s no misery like it.

Just ask the Huhnes.

I’ve long thought the main cause of the great tragedy of marital breakdown is that young couples have such ludicrously high expectations of an institution that is quite as much about duty and forgiveness as about love.

All these romantic advocates of same-sex marriage, with their visions of  Shangri-la, may be making this problem worse — and they could be in for a rude shock, when they’re given the right to call themselves married and notice that nothing has changed.

As for Professor Finkel’s tip, I don’t feel much tempted to commit my own marital rows to paper. In fact, I put much more faith in a study from Norway this week, which found that couples who keep pace with each other’s drinking are far more likely to stick together than those who don’t.

God love and bless Mrs U, she likes a drop as much as I do. Indeed, this may be the secret of the ever-growing contentment I feel in her company.

Yes, we have our rows — but with every sip of the Cotes du Rhone, it becomes that much easier to forget them.