Pru Goward tells us that given her career, her partnership might have been ‘a small and insignificant thing’ had it not been saved by David Barnett’s ‘inexhaustible capacity to find life, including my life, fascinating’. Alan Gold says he and Eva Gold reached mutuality only after he abandoned his macho independence and settled for being mothered just as, thank his lucky stars, Eva discovered her ‘deep-seated mothering instinct’. Nikki Gemmell’s contribution is a love story built around Andrew Sholls’ passionate pursuit and his humble refusal to give up on her.

Either sex can play the devoted or devotee role; and the relationship needn’t be straight. Susan Varga tells her partner Anne Coombs:

You boss and mother me in an almost comical way. I love it, of course, but occasionally when I get stroppy and assert myself, I am amazed how I can reduce you to tears by just being cross with you.

‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’, even in French, makes only a fuzzy sense and Partners, if it existed at all, would have been a different book thirty years ago. But there are familiar patterns. One pattern is Rascal and Practical Supporter, another Power Princess and Believing Backer. The first appears in all the gender combinations, the second seems mainly female (perhaps ‘new’ female) and male – Goward and Barnett give a clear example. It’s a pattern that recurs in the contributions of Chip Rolley and Anne Summers. They are the only people to discuss inequality and partnership directly, specifically the perils of being younger man/older woman. Summers, representative of a generation whose lives and careers were shaped by the politics of sociological categories such as male/female, old/young, finds her thinking nicely complicated by a young American with a sense of humour and a soft heart.

There are problems of style in Partners. Anne and Gerard Henderson do the simple thing, brief autobiographies of the early days of their relationship that are also cameo histories of young Catholic Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s, while Michael Freundt and Geoffrey Williams let it appear they are responding to questions in an interview, which works well. We expect special effects from Gerry Connolly and he gives us a conversation with his Highness QE2. But too many contributions are arch and unconvincing: two people on a stage self-consciously pretending to be alone/who might be toasting each other at their wedding anniversary/apparently renewing their vows or exchanging cautious confessions, again while all of us look on. I am not sure if the trouble is their having private conversations while pretending we’re not there or their playing to the audience too much, telling their partners things they know just so we can follow the plot.

Language, of course, is the politicians’ problem (though it’s not for their partners). Beazley and Beattie disappoint in the usual way, wordy, worthy, saying both things and neither, taking the problem of the absent partner on board and setting it down later, unchanged.

My favourite contribution is by Lyndal Moor, partner of the Ur-Rascal co-editor of Partners, Ross Fitzgerald – who, far from absenting himself like a politician, pops up in his partner’s bio at the end of the book! This is how she begins: ‘Although my husband Ross came from a working class family, he was raised like royalty.’ This is followed by a hilarious list of Ross’s preferred illnesses, concluding with ‘Anything anyone else has, especially if it’s in the news.’ There is a ruggedness about Moor’s contribution – and she seems to prefer ‘husband’ to ‘partner’ – that may reflect her serious interest in psychoanalysis.

Overall, I don’t know how to respond to a book like this, or to similar testimonies in the weekend magazines. We are offered intimacies, even secrets, but in public and from a united front – one partner’s story checked by the other – which means blandness and slim pickings for the most dedicated student of relationships. There’s certainly angst here, some indications of the stresses and strains endured, but not much for comparing lives, and partnerships, in depth. Amiable, upbeat and – just because of the nature of the book –complacent, I don’t think we’re meant to ask questions, analyse, speculate on how things really were or how they’re really going; that would be impertinent. These sorts of books are – have to be – for the appreciative, not to be taken too seriously whatever the importance of the topic or the reality of the lives set before us. I think you’re supposed to say, in the phrase of the moment, ‘Oh, okay’ and get on with your life. There may be more to react to in the sequel, the X-Partners book.