She's a Labour councillor and he's a Tory journalist – how do two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum make a relationship work?

After almost 20 years of marriage, people still find it difficult to understand why I have a Tory husband. After all, I am deeply involved in local Labour politics, I have stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour party and am now a councillor in Camden, north London. My husband, Andrew Gimson, is a Tory journalist and writer who thinks highly of David Cameron.

How can I live with someone with whom I must disagree so profoundly? It is a fair question and my answers aren't very satisfactory. "We are both interested in politics," is the first, slightly unconvincing answer. "I haven't got round to divorcing him yet," is the other more shocking reply. Neither is the complete truth.

Andrew and I met 10 days after the 1992 election, 10 days after I had sworn to myself that I was going to join the Labour party and really do something to get rid of the government. We were both on a selection course for the Samaritans. We got turned down, but he tracked me to a room above a pub in Islington and rescued me, as he jokingly says, from a "life of watching daytime television". I suppose I fell in love. He was literary, attentive, kind, decent and funny. The trouble was he was a Tory, and my friends were appalled. We married 18 months later in a traditional church wedding, which my mother and father arranged.

We were both enthralled by politics. It gives us something to talk about, and always has. But that was not the reason we married. I think, unlike previous boyfriends, he offered the stability for me to have children, while still having the bohemian cachet of being a writer.

His Toryism also provided something to kick against and to test ideas with. He was someone who I could not bully intellectually, but who would never leave me whatever outrageous things I said or did. I was always leftish, and passionate about all sorts of things from literature to politics but my passions were unfocused and sometimes transitory. I didn't always mean what I said and was unable, when I was younger, to deal with the fact that people often thought I did.

I was curiously worried about believing in anything, perhaps because it would exclude believing in other things, but I also wanted to throw myself into whatever I was doing wholeheartedly, as I did with Andrew.

And Andrew was in love with me.

My side of the bargain was to join in with dinner parties and get to know his Conservative friends. These were not the stultifying old Tories of the shires with a strong emotional attachment to an unchanging world where people know their place. Nor were they the powerful business people or demi-aristocrats who have so much money and entitlement that they believe the world has to fit around them.

The Tories Andrew mostly hung out with were bohemian older writers and academics, many of whom had written for the literary magazine Encounter, which was funded, as I quickly found out, by the CIA. They were cold-war warriors who had provided the intellectual basis for much of what Mrs Thatcher had done. It was a world I had never seen before.

At university I had been of a Labourish disposition, but was wary of being involved in politics. I watched the predominantly male political hacks who thought the SDP were the greatest new thing parade about, importantly stuffing pigeonholes with their literature.

I didn't feel much affinity with the Labour party struggling with the Militant tendency, and the Tory boys were pretty disgusting, trying to recreate Brideshead Revisited while television screens were full of pictures of miners and printworkers being brutally crushed by the police and the state. Only the politics of protest seemed open to women and I did not want to spend my life doing that either.

Andrew's friends found me amusing. To them I was Andrew's socialist, and I was brought up well enough to listen to their ideas and ask intelligent questions rather than challenge them outright. Someone once suggested to me that it was fine to be leftwing in one's youth, but of course you grew out of it. And as I became a more ageing leftie, I did became more challenging.

At one dinner party half way through our marriage, Michael Howard had been going on about an article in the Spectator, which purported to be a hard-hitting report on immigration, but was, it seemed to me like so many similar articles, a concoction of old-fashioned prejudice and even racism. I said this, and Howard hit the roof and started shouting at me, "Are you calling me a racist?" He went on to say that it was impossible to have a sensible discussion about immigration with lefties because we just accused anyone who started it of being a racist.

It was a very effective way of closing down the argument. Andrew's reaction was of amusement, not horror or anger. We wondered in bed why Howard had been so wound up, but soon afterwards realised he was on the brink of taking over the leadership from Iain Duncan Smith. It was about the time I finally joined the Labour party. I suppose Andrew was not angry because he never really wanted to practise politics himself. I made him promise before we were married that he would neither be a politician nor a clergyman.

I needn't have worried. Andrew is a writer, and a writer who likes to create emotional distance by comedy or irony. One of his favourite books is The Diary of a Nobody and one of his favourite authors is Max Beerbohm. He gets far more worked up about bad writing than he does about politics.

He is interested in history and British political history in particular but it is coupled with a great moral suspicion of ideas that could lead to dangerous passions and revolutions.

Though he was attracted to my passion, his emotional distance has stopped our marriage becoming untenable. He finds my political spats with his friends funny. He believes that my politics are not so important that they have to create a rift between us, however many times I try to persuade him that logically they do. I suppose it must be much more difficult for couples who are both actively political: the Bercows, for example: John, who is Speaker of the House of Commons, and a former Conservative MP, and his wife, Sally, a member of the Labour party. Perhaps some of Sally's more provocative behaviour in public is because of that frustration.

Andrew's emotional distance also means that he deals with things that I think would drive some Tory husbands mad with an astonishing degree of equanimity.

He does have occasional outbursts of indignant rage that we have sent our children to state schools where they are not taught proper French, let alone Latin. But he has not turned into the furious paterfamilias on questions of sex, drinking or belly-button piercing, but accepted it with remarkable pragmatism. A Tory response to change, I suppose he would argue.

Although we have arguments about politics, Andrew always seems to give in when it comes to practical decisions.

I suspect in his heart of hearts he doesn't give in, but he doesn't want to have to push it emotionally. On the schools question, he would have liked our kids to go to private school. But we couldn't afford it easily and Andrew knows we would have had constant rows if he had his way and we had had to sacrifice other things in order to do it. So in the end he reacted pragmatically.

I think he persuades himself now that our children will be better equipped for the 21st century in the state system. The biggest conflict we ever had, curiously, was over whether I should work or not when the children were small. I had fallen out of work six months after having a baby in Berlin, where we lived for the first six years of our marriage. It didn't matter a lot because it was cheap to live there. I had, after all, been the one who persuaded Andrew to go to Germany, and he was making a success of it, having spoken no German before we arrived, in due course becoming the Daily Telegraph's Berlin correspondent.

I had tried to make clothes and cook (not my sort of thing at all it turned out). But when we came back to London I did want to go and earn a living and continue a career. I even wanted to write a novel. He really felt that for most of the time I should be at home with the children and even wrote an article for the Telegraph along those lines. His mother had tended the house happily enough, and he considered it "very loving" to cook for people. My mother had been scornful of this.

Children needed, as he used to say seriously, and has now been reduced to saying ironically "the mother's hand". And anyway he wanted someone to buy the Christmas presents for his godchildren and allow him to go on with his career without having to attend to domestic details.

He hasn't very exacting demands in the domestic sphere. He didn't want me to keep a perfect house or dress the children beautifully or even do the ironing, but he did expect some basic level of service. I tried to put the arguments to him about having some extra income, it wouldn't have to be full-time. It was spreading the risk of him losing his job.

Eventually, I found out that it was action that overcame everything. I went out to Labour party meetings. My helpful neighbour introduced me to the local community centre and I went on the board. I became a governor of a school. Andrew at the beginning considered these vaguely suitable occupations for his wife.

But actually I was learning that to believe truly in something you had to make choices, to practise your beliefs. I also understood that that was what I was happiest doing. It made the things I believed in about the world more tangible. It wasn't just about having an intellectual argument and taking a position one way or the other. It wasn't about observing and writing about things, but being on the pitch playing for more equality and for a more collective view of the world.

When I stood for the first time as a Camden councillor in 2006, I spent every evening out on the streets of the area where I lived talking to local people. Andrew had to start looking after the children and cooking them supper in the evenings. He expanded his repertoire beyond bacon and eggs. And then he had to look after them at the weekend too.

When I got a full-time job in running campaigns at a charity after I failed to win the election, we shared the domestic chores almost equally because unless he was earning enough to pay someone (and he wasn't) they wouldn't be done. And manic juggling has never really been my thing.

I do not know whether my increasing engagement with politics has strengthened our relationship or whether my desire to do things will in the end loosen the bonds. We are not invited to so many rightwing parties any more. I have a group of Labour friends with whom I do politics – discuss ideas, go to meetings.

Andrew says he admires what I do. "Sally is a woman of action," he says when asked. "I am the Denis Thatcher figure." But he didn't come to hustings during the general election, or come out canvassing with me at the council byelection. I usually go to fundraising dinners and parties alone. He does help entertain Labour friends from time to time in our house and professes to get on very well with them. It feels hard sometimes when I'm publicly putting myself on the line in politics that my nearest and dearest is not in the crowd cheering me on or helping me to deliver leaflets. Others have partners who are more involved – they are lucky.

I wasn't with Andrew, thank God, on election night and the coalition's rule hasn't affected our relationship as much as I feared, mostly because I feel I can do something about kicking them out of office. Our marriage wouldn't work if we were both activists. It works because one of us is and the other isn't. We have irreconcilable political differences, but our marriage is still a kind of joint adventure.

Does Sally's story ring a bell?

We'd like to hear from other couples who have radically different political views – or people whose parents do/did. Tell us your story in no more than 200 words and attach a photograph if you have one, scanned as a JPEG in a large size. We will pay £25 for every story we publish. Please put "Couples" in the subject line of the email. Deadline for entries 3 January 2012. Email  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include your address and phone number.

{loadposition user38} source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/17/tory-labour-married-couples

source: http://www.europerank.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/58770-our-own-coalition