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The French have mistresses: the British have tea. A two-year Open University study of marriage to be revealed this week finds the humble cuppa to be a crucial factor in lasting relationships. They didn’t need to ask five thousand people: I could have told them that. Though I’m not sure I agree with most women that it’s more important than the grand romantic gesture, especially if my husband’s listening: there's much to be said for good old orchids, champagne and diamonds in my view. I wonder how we stayed married before tea? And how any other nation stays married now. Presumably, like our ancestors in the cartoon storybook Asterix in Britain, Americans and Europeans are drinking luke-warm water – or something worse – waiting to be shown how to heat a pot and pour boiling water onto loose leaves. After water, tea is the most drunk drink in the world. As love goes with marriage so tea goes with sympathy. The person you marry is your ‘cup of tea’. Like honey, tea soothes every contradictory ill: according to Gladstone, If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you're heated, it will cool you; if depressed, it will cheer you; if excited, it will calm you. When I was grieving a loss this winter, my husband brought me tea every morning. And he did today before six. Unlike coffee, tea can only properly be served by the pot, to share. One interpretation of Douglas Adams’ meaning of life (he was an avid tea drinker) is that it is not For-ty two, so much as Tea for Two. In the film The Cup, about football-mad Tibetan monks, the troubled Lama asks them, over his vast cup of tea, what is the point, the end of the game. A cup, they tell him... and at last he understands. Shepherd, songster and King David’s cup running over, in his psalm to the Lord his Shepherd, is an image of goodness and love so generous it can’t be contained. In a different psalm, the cup becomes his life, offered up to God in gratitude. The shared cup of Passover is now familiar to us as the cup of the Last Supper, blessed by another shepherd descended from David. After which Jesus went out into the night and prayed about a very different cup altogether. For the cup was also the symbol of suffering and sorrow, of God's anger and judgement, making us stumble but not with wine. He begged for the cup to pass from him. That He nonetheless drank it down to the dregs formed the basis of the next two thousand years. So His followers now enact their unity by sharing the same cup throughout the world, this new cup signifying the marriage between God and His people: another union sanctified and strengthened by a cup. Small wonder, perhaps, that a cuppa can keep us close. As Ogden Nash said: To keep your marriage brimming With love in the loving cup, Whenever you’re wrong, admit it; Whenever you’re right, shut up.