When you and your partner woke up this morning with a four-day break beckoning, what did you do first? Make love? Offer to make each other breakfast in bed? Or, more likely, did you argue about who was going to get up and deal with the kids? Be honest, one of you was seething with resentment about having to keep all the little details about rugby and ballet and new shoes in your head, while the other remained serenely oblivious.
Or maybe you don't have kids and instead you're in the midst of an argument about your weekend plans: whether to do the garden or go away somewhere. That is, if your spouse has noticed that there is a garden. "Let's go away," your spouse says.
"Everything is booked," you answer.
"So why didn't you make a reservation a month ago?" your spouse asks.
And so it goes. One in four arguments happen over a weekend, according to Relate, the British marriage counselling service. If you have managed to organise a little quality time, will you be able to turn off your mobile phones and your fax machines for four whole days? And if you haven't got the self-control to disconnect from electronic hyper-reality, you just might spend the weekend arguing about it, mightn't you?
Negotiation, negotiation, negotiation. At work and at home, nothing can be taken for granted anymore. You and your spouse are on short-term contracts - both in your careers and in your marriage. We've never had more money and opportunity - or so they tell us. Yet while the economic boom has brought us material success, we are paying a high price in terms of relationships. The downside of the boom is that many of us are in emotional turmoil. The economy may have gone mega, but in the marital bedroom, at least, the Celtic Tiger is about as thrusting and dynamic as a newborn kitten.
At the offices of the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service (MRCS) in Dublin, where you'd think they would have heard everything by now, they are shocked by their own statistics. Their survey of 250 couples seeking counselling, seen exclusively by The Irish Times, shows that the proportion of working women seeking counselling has shot up by 12 per cent in 12 months, from 29 per cent in 1996 to 41 per cent in 1997. Infidelity is booming along with the economy: the proportion of men who admit to having affairs has risen by nine per cent, to 24 per cent, and the proportion of women doing likewise has risen by four per cent, from 11 per cent to 15 per cent. "The true figure is probably closer to 60 per cent. Most people who have affairs probably get away with it without anyone finding out," says Yvonne Jacobson, the marriage counsellor who conducted the research. Physical ill-health among those going for counselling has risen by seven per cent - most likely due to stressful lifestyles that are making many of us sick. And the number of couples talking about separation has increased by eight percentage points to 60 per cent. Behind the statistics lies a story of shattered intimacy, tensions and resentment. It used to be that the family was the haven from a stressful world. In the new economy, work is the haven. "Work is much less complicated and you know what's expected of you," says Ruth Barror, director of the MRCS.
She thinks that at the very heart of life, work and success have replaced intimacy and family relationships as the meaninggivers. She has heard stories which, she says, makes her hair stand on end. Young couples in financial careers whose lives are stress, stress, stress and sell, sell, sell from the moment they leave the house at seven a.m. to drop the baby at the creche, to the time they return for a rushed meal at seven p.m., then go out again to the gym in an attempt to relieve the stress of rushing around all day. Then the couple falls into bed at 11 p.m. too tired to talk, much less make love - if love is even on their minds.
"There are no armchairs in relationships anymore. No soft place to flop down and feel held and safe," says Ruth. "If two people are stressed out and working too hard, it's very hard to find the time to be intimate. You don't have to be workaholics. Two people doing two full-time jobs and grappling with housework and children are in effect doing three jobs."
In those three jobs, everything is up for negotiation. We are constantly competing for fairness and equality, which makes modern relationships like modern chairs - beautifully designed in expensive materials, but when you try to flop down into them you are likely to be impaled.
For those of our parents' generation who clung to traditional roles, life was clear-cut and required little negotiation. The woman was the nurturer and nestmaker, the man was the provider. If anyone lived in the fast-lane, it was the man, almost without exception. It wasn't an ideal situation, but at least everyone knew where they stood. Today with two partners living in the fast-lane, there's no slowcoach nurturer to stoke up the Aga - and the emotional warmth. "Clients tell me that not even their mothers can care for their children. They're too busy," says Yvonne. So we have the mothering role taken over by creches, caterers and cleaners and life is more and more fragmented. Parents and children live parallel lives, returning home in the evening like worker bees to the hive, which means, of course, that one day when they've fulfilled their function in the economy they will drop dead. "What horrifies me," says Yvonne, "is that everyone is into instant gratification. People don't need to plan or think ahead. Everything is done on the hoof and the more money you have, the easier it is do to that. Couples say, `let's go on holiday. Okay, let's see what we can book.' Then they go and it's a disaster because they argue the whole time. We're losing some deeper sense of meaning. We're all trying to achieve a sense of identity through work and we don't have the opportunity to sit and just be, and enjoy being a family."
Relate's survey of 2,000 couples in Britain found that couples are most likely to fight in bed, travelling and on holiday - which means that holidays are likely to be anything but. (Money and sex are the top two subjects which induce arguing, by the way. About sex, men are more likely to complain of lack of foreplay. Women complain most about lack of frequency.)
The best thing you could do this weekend for your marriage and your children could be nothing, Yvonne suggests. Go for a long walk. There's a lot to be said for walking off your frustrations and gradually talking things out as you go. (It has the advantage of leaving little opportunity for one or other of you to "storm out" - after all, you're already "out"). The problem with this is that some people are terrified that they'll be faced with the horrendous truth of how little they have in common with their partner. "You may think: `Who is this person? I have nothing to say to them.' It's a risky business," says Yvonne. It may feel safer to have a hyper-organised weekend of ferrying children about, DIY, gardening, shopping and dining with friends in the same situation, who won't ask awkward questions.
We're not talking about our mothers' generation, for whom we tend to feel condescendingly sorry because they didn't have our opportunities. The average age of people seeking counselling at the MRCS is 38.5. For these couples in their late 30s, who have been married six-14 years, marriage has been a huge disappointment. We grew up thinking we didn't want to be our mothers, but would our mothers want to be us? Waking at six a.m.? Seeing our children for an hour or two daily? Living in homes where - as Ruth Barror puts it - "we no longer feel loved and accepted"?