A married couple won the Nobel prize – we know what they go through

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/07/nobel-prize-married-couple-nicci-french

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Sean French: Couples working together can be hazardous

When I heard on the radio that a married couple had won a Nobel prize, I immediately wondered where I could borrow a dinner jacket and whether I still knew how to tie a bow tie or whether it was safer to buy a clip-on. But then I discovered that this wasn’t the Nobel prize for literature being unexpectedly awarded to a British couple who write psychological thrillers together. Disappointingly, the Nobel prize for medicine has been given to a Norwegian husband-and-wife team, May-Britt and Edvard Moser, as well as John O’Keefe, for their research into the brain.

Being married is hard, and working with your partner is hard, and winning the Nobel prize is not quite as hard as the preceding two, but still pretty hard. So if you multiply those all together, the result is very hard indeed. I suspect that the secret of the survival of many marriages is that the couple spend much of their time apart, with different friends, different experiences. When they have a bad day at work, it’s really only half a bad day, and they can always lie about it at supper.

History suggests that couples working together can be hazardous, even for Nobel prizewinners. Marie and Pierre Curie won the Nobel prize for physics together in 1903, which was good. But three years later Pierre was run over by a cab while crossing a Paris street. I suspect it was because he was wondering whose turn it was to collect their child from school and trying to remember whether he had hung the washing out.

On closer inspection, I’m a little suspicious about this year’s award of the Nobel prize for medicine and physiology. It has been awarded for the discovery of the brain’s “GPS system”, which controls how the brain “knows where we are and is able to navigate from one place to another”. If May-Britt and Edvard Moser had left their Trondheim laboratory and sat in the back of our car for a typical excursion, they would have quickly discovered that there is no such area in the brain. That’s why we need an actual GPS. One that really knows how to get from one place to another. And doesn’t argue about it.

Nicci Gerrard: Rules keep us tethered together

Although all boundaries may have collapsed (work and leisure, the private and the professional, the self and the other, the pronouns “me” and “him” and “us”), it is still important to have rules: a kind of grid laid over chaos, without which either our work or our marriage or both would disintegrate. So Sean works in a shed in the garden (crucially, where he can’t get the internet) and I work as far from that as possible, in an attic room – I realise this sounds rather gendered. We never tell anyone who wrote which bit, because that would be like unravelling a tapestry that we’ve stitched together. We edit each other’s work as we go and when we realise that beloved passages have been cruelly axed we are not allowed to feel aggrieved, still less to reinsert them.

We’re like climbers roped together, saving each other and pulling each other off the cliff face. We must not make the other feel stupid, however ridiculous an idea may be. We have to remember that we are not rivals. There’s no such thing as winning an argument in a marriage. There’s a hoary old saying: “Behind every great man is a great woman.” And a newer one: “Behind every great woman is a man trying to stop her.” But now here are May-Britt and Edvard Moser, side by side. Bravo.