Howard Jacobson: You wouldn't think that love, marriage and psychoanalysis would make a fun night out

It was Irving Berlin's 'Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better' that brought the house down

Published: 03 March 2007

So the Tories are going to "recognise marriage in the tax system". Fiscally speaking I have no attitude to this. Poetically speaking, however, I do. (The attentive reader will notice the echo of the wedding vow and rightly judge it to be deliberate.) It's the linguistic come-down I can't bear. You can't put "marriage" and "tax system" in the same sentence and avoid bathos, which is the sin of descending from the sublime to the ridiculous without noticing you have.

In fact it's hard to think of any sentence the phrase "tax system" won't ruin - unless it appears in a letter from your accountant, and then it's likely to be the ruination of your life that concerns you rather than the ruination of a sentence. But if any two concepts should be kept apart at all costs they are love and tax. And if that makes an assumption that love and marriage are the same thing I don't apologise for it. No point in marriage where there isn't love, and no point in love if it doesn't issue in a solemn declaration of its undyingness followed by a big party at which one or both of you can make a speech declaring it again, this time not before God.

But then I am a sentimentalist of marriage. I have done it three times and you can't get much more sentimental than that. The only time I wasn't married (not counting my infancy) was when I was at university, and I hated being at university. There is, I think, only one inference to be drawn from that. To those who believe living together is the same as getting married only without the hypocrisy, I say try it before you comment. Marry whoever it is you're living with and if you don't notice the difference it makes to affirm your sempiternal devotion in a form beyond the merely accidental and sublunary, go back to living with each other without poetry. But don't blame me if they tax you for it.

It was in this devotional frame of mind, whatever you think of it, that I allowed myself to be taken to a couply concert at the Royal Opera House last week. Couples in Counterpoint it was called, and was organised by Couples Centre Stage which is the public arm of the felicitously named Society of Couple Psychoanalytical Psychotherapists, or SCPP to those in the know. The idea was to have professional singers singing songs of love and discord from the repertoire of the musical theatre and a panel of couple psychotherapists on stage to discuss their problems with them as though they were clients seeking help. Not your idea of a good night out? Big mistake. It was a terrific night out.

It helped that the weather was clement enough for an early evening stroll through Covent Garden, and that the latest work of the public artist Martin Firrell - It's Passion That Binds Us - was being projected on to the new elevation of the Royal Opera House. I like words on public buildings and Firrell is a master of gauging their power. Now they're there, now they're not - their fleetingness a trouble to our minds. It's passion that divides us as well, of course, hence the need for a Society of Couple Psychoanalytical Psychotherapists, many of whose members were gathering excitedly to collect their tickets when we arrived. It interested me that they were early. In this business, clearly, you must never be late. Keep a couple divided by passion waiting and you might find blood on your carpet.

All members of the psychoanalytic profession are touching when assembled for a knees-up, even a knees-up as sedate as this, because it is clearly such a relief to them to get out of other people's heads for a night. But couple psychotherapists, who also inhabit the vexed environs of other people's hearts, look especially liberated away from their practices. It's their Highgate distraction I find appealing, their unaccustomedness to noise and crowds, their air of having being surprised to discover that they actually have going-out clothes in their wardrobes. That they wear their sense of responsibility so heavily when the couples they've been helping all week are probably out cavorting lasciviously, without an apparent care in the world, is but another example of the universal unfairness of things. But that's what Highgate's for - to absorb life's inequities.

Though there are those who believe entertainment must not be diluted by any hint of pedagogy, the truth is we are never happier than when pleasure turns out to be educative. Hence the success of events like those organised by Intelligence Squared, where people come out well-dressed and in their thousands to be at one and the same time amused and informed. And hence, too, the huge audiences for television talent shows where we get to hear what the judges think. We like textual analysis far more than we know. Indeed in many instances we prefer the analysis to the text. So it wasn't in the slightest bit off-putting, once the panel overcame its self-consciousness, to have songs such as "I Won't Send You Roses" and "The Girl that I Marry" first performed and then subjected to clinical interpretation. No theatrical glory was dimmed; no musical magic was vitiated. If anything the practice of couple psychotherapy illuminated anew songs which had grown stale with familiarity.

Myself, speaking as someone whose discipline is literary criticism and what we used to call at Cambridge "being intelligent about life", I'd have been a sterner critic of the delusive self-indulgence of "There's a Place for Us" to say nothing of "My Boy Bill" which promises one hell of a disturbed future for Bill; but it was explained to me that couple psychotherapy doesn't go in for ticking people off. Shame, since some musical ticking off would also have been in order. Why that vile song about loving someone who doesn't love you from Les Misérables? Good shrink material, I don't doubt, but no one should give stage space to that most common-spirited of all musicals, particularly when the divinely inspired Irving Berlin - another marrying man - is on the bill.

It was Irving Berlin's "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do better" that brought the house down, anyway. A song of such sweetly absurdist relational competitiveness that the psychotherapists didn't have the heart to fault it. As long as you can make each other laugh you'll be fine. Exchange jokes, sing songs, compete, get married, and go to the next event organised by the Society of Couple Psychoanalytical Psychotherapists - if you can say it - that's my recipe for a happy life.