Steve J Waterfield's "True Love" begins like a complaint and ends like a toast. For six stanzas the speaker lists everything that irritates him about "she": the pointless phone calls, the lights left blazing, the snoring, the back-seat driving. Then comes a turn, "And yet I still love her", and the whole list is recast as evidence of devotion. The central idea is simple and rather wise: long love isn't proved by grand gestures but by how much you can put up with, and how much you would miss if it stopped.
The poem's shape does a lot of this work. It is built from rhyming couplets (death/breath, away/say, lights/'nights) in lines with four strong beats and a bouncing, galloping rhythm: "She TELLS me at LENGTH stuff that BORES me to DEATH." That tune belongs to nursery rhymes and comic verse, and it signals from the first line that we aren't in for a tragedy. The neat chiming of the rhymes also makes the speaker's grumbling sound rehearsed, as if he has told this routine many times and half enjoys it. The punchlines tend to fall on the rhyme word, as in "Well, I'll give you one guess," where he winks at the reader and invites us to join in.
Nearly every line begins with "She" or "If she", a relentless repetition that makes the poem feel like a charge sheet. But look at what is actually charged. Nobody is cruel or unfaithful here. The offences are tiny and domestic: she rings the doorbell "though she's got a key", she changes her mind about the blue paint after he has finished the room. The doorbell detail is the funniest and perhaps the most telling. Judging by the text, it is a habit so fixed that it has become a private ritual, and the speaker records it as an annoyance while clearly knowing it by heart. Only someone who has lived beside another person for years could produce a list this specific.
The poem is also quietly built on symmetry. She talks "at length", but when it's his turn she says "don't waste your breath". She demands things "right away", but when it's for him he's "waiting all day". Each complaint has a mirror, so the grievances feel less like a portrait of one difficult person than a picture of two people tangled in each other's habits. The repeated "right" (her "right away", her "right mess", and finally "a right little pain") works as a verbal tic that links the stanzas. By the last use, the phrase has softened from accusation into something close to affection.
The driving imagery supplies the poem's best joke. "She loves back seat driving – it drives me insane!" plays on the word, and the idea returns at the end when "she drives me round the bend." Driving suggests a shared journey, and the speaker is stuck in the front seat of a life with a passenger who won't stop commenting on the route. Yet she is also his "trusty sidekick," a phrase borrowed from adventure stories that casts the two of them as a team. The colloquial voice, with "kibosh", "scrimp and save", "mince words" and "Flipping heck!", keeps everything warm and unpretentious, the sort of talk you'd hear across a kitchen table.
The final couplet is where the comedy and the sincerity meet. "Nigh on forty years and I've not wrung her neck" is a joke about restraint, but it also states a length of time, and the speaker offers his self-control as proof of love. Then he turns the question on us: "And if that's not love, then what is?" The mild exclamation "Flipping heck!" lets him end on bathos rather than gush, which is exactly how a man who has just said something tender might protect himself from embarrassment.
Part of the poem's value lies in that disguise. The "nagging wife" routine is a well-worn comic type, and the poem leans on it, but it surprises by refusing to stay cynical. Its argument is that irritation can be a form of closeness, and that being driven mad by someone for four decades is a kind of loyalty. It is light verse, but it knows what it is doing, and the title, which looks ironic at first, is meant quite literally by the end.