How we stay together: 'It doesn't feel like we're two really different people'

Names: Yvonne Edgren and Nick Mansfield
Years together: 34
Occupations: Writer and academic

If there’s one thing that’s kept Yvonne Edgren and Nick Mansfield together, it’s their constant conversation. “[It’s] unfolded over years and years,” says Nick. “Sometimes there are things we’ve been talking about for 20 years.”

The Sydney couple have been together for almost 34 years. Last year, they spent three months driving around Europe together and never ran out of things to say. Whether it was what they were seeing, visiting or eating, their two children, their wider family, their relationships with other people, their common interests such as politics and the arts or just debating ideas, they talked constantly.

That’s not to say they always agree. Says Yvonne: “There’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and sometimes we change each other’s minds and sometimes we don’t.”

Theirs was an intellectual connection right from the start. They met at the University of Sydney, where she was a mature aged student and he was working on his PhD. Both in their 20s, he was her tutor in romantic literature, studying poetry by Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley. They laugh when they recall their heady beginnings. The articulate Finnish-born Yvonne stood out from Nick’s other students: “She was the one student who was really engaged and dynamic and talked a lot and had interesting opinions.” Yvonne felt it too: “He was handsome [but] I thought he was way out of my league. I was kind of fangirling.” So, while there was a “frisson” of interest, it was kept very much above board. “I had a really high grade point average and I wasn’t about to cast a shadow on that by having a relationship with my tutor,” says Yvonne.

Nothing happened until they bumped into each other a few months later at a cafe. “I remembered that I’d liked her as a student and then suddenly it struck me that it was more than that.”

Yvonne Edgren and Nick Mansfield. Photograph: Yvonne Edgren and Nick Mansfield

Things evolved after that and eventually they moved in together. “We never thought oh, we’re at this stage of our relationship, we’re going to change into this stage of our relationship, we need to talk about it, we need to plan, we need to decide,” says Nick. “It just all deepened and extended. We spent all our time together.”

They were married not long after that, another seemingly logical step. “Getting married was just the icing on the cake really, it was just confirming what was already the situation,” says Nick.

“I was better than I was without Nick, a better person, I was more reflective, I was smarter, I worked harder, I was kinder. He inspired that in me,” says Yvonne. “I felt like I was my best self when I was with [him].”

Nick was awarded the Harkness fellowship in 1988 and they lived in the US for two years. They were living back in Sydney and both academics when their first child was born. “That was really hard,” says Yvonne, “I lost my shit for a while there. We were living in this tiny flat on the top floor of an old 30s block and Nick was down in the garden hanging out the nappies to dry and I just remember screaming out the window, ‘You’re hanging them out wrong!’ And Nick, bless him, he just looked up at the window and he unpegged them all and hung them out again. He was very, very patient.”

The family moved to the Blue Mountains, with Nick commuting to the university each day. Trying to maintain a work-life balance was almost impossible. He remembers feeling as if his colleagues were judging him for not pulling his weight at work, while he felt he wasn’t doing enough at home. “[I remember] thinking, I’m doing my best and I can’t actually do everything that I want to do in either of those environments, but that’s it, I’m just going to have to live with that.”

Some of their most challenging times together came when close family members died. Grief can bring out the worst in people but Yvonne and Nick learned to navigate this. “We give each other space to grieve. When we have difficulties – luckily it hasn’t been both of us at once – the other one takes up the slack. We can read each other’s moods fairly well, and we look after each other.” They focus on trying to make the other happy and comfortable as much as possible. “I think we each get a feeling of security out of supporting the other person’s needs in a way,” says Nick.

This is something they’ve passed on to their two children, Tilda and Oscar. Says Yvonne: “It has been a fairly intellectual and academic household, but something that we’ve always valued as well is emotional intelligence. So our children are very empathic, we tried to teach them empathy and we try to practice empathy with each other.”

They avoid competition or power plays among the family and neither enjoys drama. “I don’t think we’ve ever really felt that conflict was a way to achieve anything between us,” says Nick. “I’ve seen couples where they have arguments and it’s kind of a battle to the end. I’m always surprised, for some couples, that really works. They really get somewhere by going through that conflict and reconciling. That just doesn’t work for us.”

That’s not to say they repress or avoid conflict, they just prefer to listen and compromise: “It’s not like we’re totally stitched up and avoid any disagreement or comment about anything, but at the same time, it’s not really a way in which we sort things out.”

They have agreed to focus on the big picture and not sweat the small stuff. “It’s not because we’re transcendent or wise or anything, it’s just we don’t have time for that,” says Nick, “it doesn’t work for us to be petty. It doesn’t achieve anything, it’s just painful and you don’t progress.”

While their personalities are different in many ways – she’s more impulsive, he’s more “slow to warm up” – it’s as if they’ve developed a third personality between them. “When we talk, we’re in a kind of shared zone in a way,” says Nick. Each will do their own thing but then they’ll come together. “It doesn’t feel like we’re two really different people doing something autonomously in parallel. It feels like we’re there together, it’s like a third person who’s actually us as one.”

Their commitment to each other has become part of who they are. “I can’t imagine the person I would be without Yvonne,” says Nick. Yvonne agrees: “I can’t imagine writing something without Nick reading it. I can’t imagine getting dressed for a night out without asking Nick how I look. I can’t imagine cooking a meal without Nick there to eat it. Everything I do, I do for us combined.”

They’ve shared so much of their adult lives, their commitment to each other is unspoken. “It is unbelievable to be so well known by somebody,” says Nick. “I think a lot of people that have relationships that end after a short time, they give up on that. If you’ve been together with somebody for 30 years, they know you so well and they accept you, they accept the things about you that other people wouldn’t accept. It’s a wonderful thing to feel that grounded in the world, that somebody knows you that well, that actually knows you better than you do.”

That love and acceptance has kept them together. “We’re together because we’re together, and because we’ve built on that for such a long period of time, it is what we are and it’s quite an incredible thing,” Nick says. “I can understand that excitement when we were first together, the excitement was intense and overwhelming and incredible and passionate, but you don’t have to feel you need to keep going back to that. That’s an important thing that we share as our past, but that has deepened and extended into all the experiences we have.”