How to test a marriage: Build a barbecue together

If you want to test the strength of your marriage, skip couples therapy and build a five-burner barbecue together on a sweltering summer day.

Bonus points if the sales assistant says it’ll take three hours, but actually takes you four because your hubby lacks attention to detail and assembles two panels upside down and backwards.

I know what you’re thinking: Why didn’t you catch the mistake while reading the instructions?

Oh, I would have. If I’d been allowed to view the sacred instruction manual.

You see, in this DIY nightmare, he was the foreman and, I, his mere minion who simply had to “hold this panel” and “pass that screwdriver”.

The thing is, we didn’t even set out on Boxing Day to buy a barbecue.

We were just looking for outdoor chairs to jazz up our backyard entertainment area.

Then we spotted it – the shiny, seductive black barbecue with a sizzling price tag we couldn’t walk past.

So we didn’t. We snagged it.

Fuelled by the euphoria of purchasing something new to replace the old Weber grill, we dove into the assembly process with optimism and ashes of ambition.

That lasted about 15 minutes.

Turns out, we’re not the only fools to spend that Christmas holiday period wrestling with a toolkit and set of instructions that might as well have been written in ancient hieroglyphs.

Friends told us how their Christmas Eve trampoline saga nearly ended in finding a good divorce lawyer.

I’d like to agree that assembling a trampoline can leave you just as smoking mad as a barbecue build, except for the fact the year we built ours we happened to be hosting a Swedish exchange student who was more than willing to help out.

Turns out, the Swedish trampoline instructions were much clearer than the English ones.

As a work colleague pointed out, it’s not always the building of said items together that’s the real problem.

The issue lies in having a husband who’s not a natural handyman but thinks that he is.

Case in point: When the side burner collapsed and a washer fell to the floor, his solution was, “Just put that aside and I’ll fix that later”.

Reader, the washer is still on the table.

Despite the hiccups, there was no beef between us during the entire build – just a lot of dramatic sighs and deep breaths. (The sales assistant did advise those, though I suspect they were more for her amusement than our benefit).

Finally, we finished.

We stood back, admiring our wobbly masterpiece, and decided to christen it with its first cook-up.

That’s when the barbecue decided it had other plans.

A strange pumping noise emerged, the temperature wouldn’t climb past 100 degrees Celsius, and the meat was eventually carried – defeated and raw – back inside to be cooked on the stovetop.

Hubby muttered a string of colourful words under his breath, which I believe is the universal language of “Why did we even buy this bloody thing?”

So if your holidays involved assembling anything more complicated than a jigsaw puzzle, know that I feel your pain.

And if your barbecue works on the first try, you should raise the stakes and buy a lottery ticket immediately.

You’re clearly living a charmed life.