What we normals can learn from the Beckhams’ marriage

David Beckham and Posh Spice were in love, the kind of blinkered infatuation that makes you do loopy things such as get in your car and drive three hours just to see your girlfriend for 20 minutes, then turn around because you both have to be at work the next morning. Even if, as it was in their case, his work is being England’s most famous living footballer and her work is being a member of England’s most famous girl group.

They were in their 20s. They were still in the nebulous DTR phase that followed their celebrity meet-cute. She had “fancied” him from afar and finagled an appearance at a Manchester United charity game, she explains in a new Netflix documentary series, “Beckham.” He had fancied her from afar, and, upon learning that there were a couple of Spice Girls at the match, hopefully asked a teammate, “Which ones?”

Then what happened? Oh, God, life happened. Four kids, several more football teams, international moves, tabloid scandals. At one point in the series, Victoria Beckham watches some 20-year-old footage of her marriage and says of the young newlyweds, “I barely recognize them.” She says this not with bitterness, but with a mix of tenderness and pity.

“Beckham” has been the top-trending addition to Netflix for the better part of a week. It presents not only the building of a legend but also the building of a marriage. The glamour of it all, but also the slog. The putting-up-with. The babies and toddlers and pickup queues at elementary school. The fact that one of you refuses to go to bed until the kitchen is completely sterilized (David) and has taken up retiree hobbies such as beekeeping and master grilling (also David) and that one of you (Victoria) has a tendency to rewrite the past in search of a better story. In the first episode, she tells director Fisher Stevens that she grew up working class with a father who drove her to school himself every morning, and David pops his head in. “What kind of car was it?” He needles his wife until she admits that it was a Rolls-Royce. There’s a lived-in feel to their relationship, one that can’t be attained via shortcuts. Even the most sweeping love stories must be lived minute by minute by the participants.

I watched “Beckham” the same weekend that I watched “Kelce,” the Prime Video documentary about the family of another kind of footballer, Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, as he weighs the possibility of retirement. He met his wife, Kylie, on Tinder, and she showed up to their first date wondering whether it was really him or whether the profile had been created by a deranged fan. A few years later, Jason is icing his knees while trying to get their daughter to nap, and Kylie is marveling at the absurdity of buying expensive game tickets for her kids when she knows they won’t even stay in their seats.

Both documentaries are fascinating studies in what it takes to be great at what you do, when what you do is a punishing physical performance that is highly paid and highly scrutinized. The sacrifices are not only personal but also familial. In both instances, there are scenes where the heavily pregnant wives of these exceptional men realize that they might have to give birth alone — Kylie Kelce because her husband will be playing in the Super Bowl near her due date, and Victoria Beckham because her husband has an immovable photo shoot with Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez. Victoria admits, at a few different points, that she didn’t even like soccer when she met David. Yet there she was in the stands, year after year, doing her best to be supportive, even while thousands of fans around her chanted, “Posh Spice takes it up the arse!”

Are these rarefied problems? Yes. Not every wife of a workaholic can afford the creative solution of flying her OB/GYN out to Arizona in case she goes into labor during the big game. Not every wife, upon being reluctantly transplanted to a new city for her husband’s job, has the benefit of Tom Cruise volunteering as a one-man welcome wagon.

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But watching these stories makes it clear that money can’t, and doesn’t, fix everything. A truth is revealed: Mundane stressors (money, housework, busted water heaters, astronomical college tuition) may test middle-class marriages, but removing these stressors still leaves you with the fact that sharing your life with another person is its own sporting event. Not a football match, English or American, but a marathon. For all the modern talk about how marriages should always be an equal partnership, “Beckham” is at its strongest when it seems to acknowledge that maybe it never is; it’s just a series of fractures and runners’ highs, one of you cheering and the other limping until, if you’re lucky, you settle into a companionable lope.

There were two beautiful moments in “Beckham,” as far as I’m concerned. The first was when David was asked to reflect on a moment in the early 2000s when tabloids were reporting that he’d had an affair. (He denied the story when it came out; while its veracity is not relitigated in the new series, viewers will come away with a definite opinion.) Asked how they managed to get through it, David shakes his head, then repeats — several times, with increasing wonder — “I honestly don’t know.” It doesn’t seem like a feint; it seems like David Beckham is fully aware that he has no great wisdom when it comes to making a marriage work, so he just kept lacing up his trainers and showing up to run.

The second moment was Victoria’s addendum to her admission that she didn’t even like football. She still doesn’t like watching it, she says, but she does like watching David do what he does best. She has always, always loved watching David.

Then, a little while later, her husband tells her that he’s finished preparing her mussels on his outdoor grill. The whole family is there. Kenny Rogers — weirdly, endearingly — is playing on the loudspeakers. David Beckham and Posh Spice, middle-aged and wiser, dance dorkily to Rogers and Dolly Parton’s duet “Islands in the Stream.” Well beyond the point of infatuation, but in a deeper kind of love.