GOING THE DISTANCE

Mother-of-two and documentary filmmaker, Alanna Clear talks love, marriage, divorce and going the distance with her husband Mike.

I'm a mother of two boys. One portly, chatty three-year-old and one patient and oft-ignored ten-month-old. I'm a cardholding member of the usual it's-the-hardest-thing-I've-ever-done cliché club, and that's saying something.

Because I've also made a documentary. An independent one, by which I mean it was just me and my brand new husband with a negligible budget to match that tiny crew. And now, 6 long years after our honeymoon folly, it’s finished. It turns out that it takes substantially longer to bring a fully-formed documentary into the world than a child, and puts a marriage under almost as much strain.

In the face of that other stinking cliché that half of all marriages end in divorce, we decided to use our honeymoon to find out what makes the other half of them last.

The plan was to drive a motorbike and sidecar from Alaska to Argentina (the longest road in the world – marriage metaphors abound) and ask couples from every walk of life along the way what they believe to be the secret of a lasting relationship.

By the end of it, we’d interviewed around 150 couples in 17 countries. From polygamous fundamentalist Mormons to porn stars; burns victims to FARC kidnap victims; a Nobel Peace Prize winner to a Mexican lucha libre wrestler. Sage couples with 65 years of marriage under their belt, gooey newlyweds, and some of the most prominent relationship experts in the world. Every single couple sharing love and wisdom as they talked.

I spent up to 15 hours at a time for days on end in a bathtub of a sidecar in Central American rainstorms. My new husband and I became colleagues, any notion of romance scuttled out the door when our (self-imposed) regulation boiler suits went on. A saccharine threshold to marriage this was not.

And yet, we’ve now finished it. Our third child is born. Cause of many more squabbles, many more cold shoulders and co-irritation. Perhaps pride too, though similar bias, and fear for how it will fare in this cruel world.

Going the Distance: A Honeymoon Adventure is now available to watch online at www.goingthedistance.org.uk. It has been officially selected by various international film festivals and, despite Alanna’s maternal concerns, is curiously watchable. See the trailer here.