How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  3. Broken toilet handle. The mechanics inside the average toilet tank are agreeably primitive: flicking the handle yanks up a plunger, releasing the stored water into the bowl. The plunger then falls back into place, and the tank refills until a floating ball on a stick rises high enough to shut off the valve.

  The most common problem you’ll face is the handle becoming detached from the plunger. They may have been connected by a length of wire which has rusted through, or by a chain that has decoupled. Anything of adjustable length and sufficient sturdiness (a cable tie, for example) will serve as a replacement. Mine is presently hooked together with an E string from a guitar.

  From this point, with these meager skills, you can take DIY as far as you please. You can start building Shaker furniture, or, like me, you can remain the sort of barely skilled person who is not afraid to pull apart a malfunctioning Xbox controller, on the grounds that the problem might just be a loose spring, and you will be a complete hero if you can get it working again. If you can’t, it was always going to end up in the bin anyway.

  And you know what? Eventually, through experience and practice, you get better at DIY. As long as the trial and error doesn’t kill you (Have you turned off the electricity?), some of these jobs can even begin to seem like routine maintenance, i.e., boring. But there is no satisfaction quite like standing under a formerly malfunctioning light fitting while switching it on and off and explaining in some detail to your wife what exactly was wrong and how you—in the face of considerable adversity, and using a butter knife for a screwdriver because you couldn’t find one thin enough—managed to put it right.

  Each DIY project successfully completed constitutes a small personal triumph that sits in your house like a trophy in a case. I could take you on a tour of mine. Look at this skylight shade—I had to replace the old broken one, which was not, I can tell you, a simple matter. Now this one is now broken too, but that’s because people are always pulling on it too hard. See the new tiles around the edge of the shower? I did those—straight or what? In the right light you can’t even tell they don’t match the old ones. Who knew there was more than one kind of white?

  Come downstairs. Notice how the phone extension wire hugs the skirting board? Not as easy as it looks. Check out the way this sink drains—quite slowly, I’ll admit, but you should have seen it before. And look up, up to the ceiling, to the brown, Australia-shaped stain caused by a leaking toilet tank; a stain which, thanks to my timely intervention and a huge blob of sealant, hasn’t got any bigger since 2006. I’m the one who drew the pencil outline round it to prove it.

  7.

  Extended Family

  I am sitting in a restaurant with my wife and my mother-in-law. They are busy making calculations on some paper napkins—calculations having to do with money—and I am keeping very quiet. Without warning, they both turn and look at me. It must have something to do with the expression on my face.

  “Don’t worry,” says my wife. “We’re only going to do this if it’s what you want to do.”

  “I’m cool,” I say, refilling my wineglass.

  I have already decided that it would not do for me to have strong views on the matter. For a start, none of the money being transferred from napkin A to napkin B is mine. I would incur no financial risk as a result of what’s being proposed.

  Here is what’s being proposed: my wife sells her one-bedroom flat, my mother-in-law sells her home in Wiltshire, and we use the money to buy a house in London, a house substantial enough that we can all live in it together comfortably.

  There are several reasons why this is a good idea. My mother-in-law has medical reasons for wishing to be in the capital. My wife and I, meanwhile, are looking for more living space, but are reluctant to move toward the fringes of London in order to get it. The One Big House plan provides an efficient solution to several problems, a solution so blatantly traditional that it seems almost modern. My wife and her mother are acting as if they invented it.

  There are also some reasons why it is a bad idea. My wife and her mother have a close but slightly intense relationship. Much of the time they get along famously, but I have seen them shriek at each other for entire weekends, and I find it awkward being in the middle. I accept that I am part of the family now, but maybe not this much.

  Secretly, I harbor only the strongest of reservations. I believe that a good working relationship with one’s mother-in-law requires a certain distance, and I can’t imagine her opinion of me will be improved by proximity. Even at thirty I feel a bit young to enter into an arrangement that strikes me as being both emotionally and financially irreversible—if we all move in together, it will be permanent.

  It’s not exactly a dilemma I’m facing. I can sense that my marriage depends on my responding to the plan in the right way, and I am prepared to endorse the proposal wholeheartedly, which is why offering an actual opinion at this point would be a waste of everybody’s time. In any case I’m fairly certain the scheme will never get off the ground. For the kind of money they’re spending, in the kind of neighborhoods they’re looking, I’m betting there is no such house.

  I’m wrong. Not only is there such a house, there is one less than a mile from the flat. And not only is it on the market, it is languishing on the market. The price has just been dropped because the owners are desperate to return to Australia. Before I really know what’s happening I find myself standing in its cavernous sitting room, surrounded by boxes.

  Not all our friends think this is such a great idea. To some it sounds a retrograde step, or a forward leap toward social ossification. Maybe they think there’s something a bit Edwardian about it, or that they’ll have to keep their voices down when they come over. I find myself in the odd position of having to defend the project.

  “Look,” I tell them. “It’s really two entirely separate dwellings. We just happen to share a front door.”

  But there is work to be done on that front: before our flat can be self-contained and self-sustaining, we need to convert the attic into a bedroom, and one of the bedrooms into a small kitchen. Work progresses slowly, but by winter we’re all moved in, and there seems to be plenty of space. If my wife and her mother choose to argue, I can simply remain upstairs, out of sight and out of earshot.

  In February my wife goes away for work for three days. It is the first time my mother-in-law and I have been alone in the house together, and I am unsure of the etiquette. When I get home that evening I slip quietly up the stairs to our dusty, half-built kitchen. I have a vague plan for a mean little meal and an early night, but there is no food, so I will have to slip quietly back down the stairs to go to the shops, and quietly back up them again. I sit in the gathering gloom for a while, preparing to make my move.

  The phone rings. It is my mother-in-law, calling from downstairs.

  “What are your plans for supper?” she says.

  “I don’t really, I hadn’t . . .”

  “I have lamb,” she says.

  The Winter Olympics has just started, so we sit in her kitchen eating lamb, drinking a bottle and a half of wine, and watching the figure skating on a portable telly. It’s the pairs compulsory.

  “It’s rather amazing, isn’t it?” she says.

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  On the second night my mother-in-law rings again.

  “I bought a chicken from the butcher,” she says. We watch the individual routines.

  On the third night I feel as if I ought to give my mother-in-law a break from cooking for me—not least because my wife is due home and I don’t want to get caught sponging—but she rings again, right on time.

  “It’s only spaghetti, I’m afraid,” she says. “But it’s also the pairs long routine.”

  My wife arrives home in the middle of supper; she’s had a difficult few days filming on location, and she’s in a corresponding mood. She drops her bag and sits down betwee
n us.

  “Why are you watching this?” she says.

  “It’s the pairs final,” her mother says.

  “I hate fucking figure skating,” says my wife, “and so do you.”

  “Actually,” says my mother-in-law, looking at me, “we find it rather fascinating.” My wife turns to look at me.

  “No, you don’t,” she says.

  “He loves it,” says my mother-in-law. I find myself on weird and dangerous ground. I’ve never had to commit to an opinion about figure skating before. On the one hand, I agree: it’s preposterous. If I were alone in my own kitchen, I’d be watching something else. But I’ve built up an unprecedented three-day rapport with my mother-in-law based entirely on its intricacies. To disavow figure skating now would be both disloyal and disastrous. Also, I’ve invested a lot of emotion in this pairs final.

  “No comment,” I say. “Would you excuse me?” I go to the loo and sit there quietly for a bit, in the hope that my absence will draw some of the heat from the situation. At this point I realize my new living situation will oblige me to draw on reserves of a quality I happen to possess in abundance: spinelessness.

  When I return to the table three minutes later, I find the pair of them holding handfuls of spaghetti over each other’s heads.

  “Well, this has escalated,” I say.

  “If you don’t accept that figure skating is interesting,” my mother-in-law says, “I’m going to put this spaghetti on your head.”

  “If you don’t say figure skating is stupid,” says my wife, “I’m going to put this spaghetti on your head.”

  “Did you take that from my plate?” I say. “I wasn’t finished.”

  The standoff continues. I decide not to intervene, curious to see how this sort of thing resolves itself. Eventually my wife reaches up and pokes her mother’s spaghetti hand with the tines of her fork. My mother-in-law drops the spaghetti. She squeezes the back of her hand until four little red dots appear.

  “I’m going to show this to your sister,” she says.

  8.

  The Forty Guiding Principles of Gross Marital Happiness

  Successful cohabitation requires a couple to address many disparate and competing aims, but it may help to think of your overall strategy as being analogous to Bhutan’s mandated objective of Gross National Happiness. First proposed by the fourth Dragon King of Bhutan in 1972, the concept of Gross National Happiness alloyed living standards, physical and spiritual well-being, environmental impact, and stability to develop an index to measure the nation’s progress. And it works pretty well in Bhutan (the land of Gross National Happiness), as long as you’re not a member of the 20 percent of the population—mainly Hindus of Nepali origin—who were expelled from the country in the 1990s.

  In marriage you and your partner must work together to construct a domestic operation that will make both of you as happy as possible without sacrificing the collective health, security, or long-term stability of the partnership. I realize that put that way it sounds boring, which is precisely why I coined the catchy term Gross Marital Happiness.

  When I said this wasn’t a self-help book, that was because everything I know about staying married can be boiled down to forty pretty basic insights. Actually, only thirty-nine—three of these are bollocks—but I wanted a round number.

  1. Go to bed angry if you want to. It is often said that a couple should never let the sun set on an argument, but this isn’t practical. Some arguments are, by their nature, two-day events: too much is at stake to set an arbitrary bedtime deadline. Faced with a stark choice between closure and a night’s sleep, you’re better off with the latter in almost every case. I’ve gone to bed angry loads of times, with no particular deleterious effects. You don’t actually stay angry. It’s a bit like going to bed drunk; you wake up feeling completely different, if not necessarily better.

  2. Not liking cats isn’t really a good enough reason to put your foot down. You have to be properly allergic, or weirdly phobic.

  3. Marriages and other long-term relationships have a significant public element. Like an iceberg, the bulk of a marriage is hidden from view, but the top bit, the bit that you take out to parties and show off, should appear exemplary to outsiders: charming without being cloying; happy without being giddy; entertainingly spiky, but also mutually respectful. Above all, the whole thing should look effortless. Everybody knows marriage is hard. No one wants to watch you do the work.

  4. The question of whether a woman should adopt her husband’s surname after marriage (or whether some double-barreled compound is preferable) is politically freighted, but what no one tells you before marriage is that changing your name is a huge drag. You’ll need to pay for a new passport (£72) and you can be fined for driving on your old license. You’ll have to inform your bank, your employer, HMRC, the insurance company, PayPal, and the Nectar card people. You’ll need to take your marriage certificate to the bank to cash checks in your old name. Complications resulting from the switch will plague you for years afterward. And the benefits? There are no benefits. It’s a complete waste of time. Forget principle and tradition: refuse to change your name on the grounds that you can’t be arsed.

  5. Even a marriage with healthy levels of communication can’t make a dent in the huge stockpile of things that simply never get said. If the pair of you spent all day every day trying to express what’s in your soggy little hearts, you’d never manage to get through a box set together. For purely practical reasons certain of your partner’s desires, ambitions, and motivations will have to be guessed at. You should also learn to become an efficient curator of your own inner life: display the important stuff, shove the rest in storage, and rotate occasionally to keep things interesting.

  6. The time-honored debate about leaving the loo seat up or down is not a genuine source of friction in marriage; only between roommates who don’t like each other anyway. The real rule, simple and inarguable, is this: don’t piss on the seat. If you have sons, it is your sworn duty as a father to impress the importance of this rule upon them. When it comes to maintaining a happy marriage, I can’t tell you what my failure to do so has cost me.

  7. The marital bond is also a kind of codependency. The stronger your marriage, the harder it is to refrain from alcohol for two days a week if one of you thinks it’s a stupid idea. It’s rather sweet that you feel your spouse’s refusal to join in amounts to permission for you to backslide, but it’s not good for you.

  8. When your wife carries on the next morning as if yesterday’s argument never happened, you should interpret her behavior as a willingness to forgive and forget, and not as a sign that she actually has forgotten. The benefit of the doubt is a key aspect of Gross Marital Happiness, and even if she has forgotten there is nothing to be gained from guessing right.

  9. If there is a single, immutable difference between men and women, it’s that women will almost never pretend they didn’t see a heap of cat sick on the stairs.

  10. Or at least I used to think so. It turns out anyone can learn this tactic, and quickly become better at it than you.

  11. Think of the work of your relationship less as negotiation, and more as navigation. Marriage isn’t an ongoing dispute to be settled; it’s a lifelong course to be plotted. Also, you should really try to enjoy the journey, because the destination sucks.

  12. When it comes to questions such as “How do I look in this?” “Do sideburns suit me?” “Are these trousers all right?” and “Do you like my new hair?” everyone, male or female, appreciates something that sounds like an honest answer. This is not necessarily the same as an honest answer.

  13. There is no good rejoinder to the exclamation “I am NOT your mother!” but among the especially not good ones is “Then stop buying me ugly sweaters!” Take my word for it.

  14. Spending time together is an important component of Gross Marital Happiness, but it shouldn’t seem
important; you don’t want to feel undue pressure to enjoy yourselves. One of the most solemn promises I have made to my wife is that I will never, ever take her on a minibreak.

  Doing normal, everyday things as a couple counts as relationship maintenance, in the same way that housework counts as exercise. Walking the dog counts. Eating breakfast together counts. Wandering aimlessly through a deserted shopping precinct together counts. Watching TV together doesn’t count, unfortunately, although I’m currently appealing this.

  15. One of the easiest ways to make a spouse feel needed is to seek their counsel on a particular subject, as if your spouse were your line manager. Remember: you’re just after a bit of guidance or wisdom. Don’t present yourself as a mess to be cleaned up, which you also shouldn’t do with your line manager.

  16. Buy the second-biggest bed you can afford. Even if you are now happy sleeping stacked like cordwood in what is known as a “small double” (that’s four feet across), you should think about acquiring a future-proof mattress, one that can accommodate many nights of going to bed angry, strange new sleeping positions aimed at alleviating back or shoulder pain, a six- to eight-year interval in which at least one child with nits is in your bed at all times, and a late middle period where the strict rule you made about dogs on the bed breaks down. The reason you should buy the second-biggest bed you can afford is so you know there’s one remaining upgrade available in case of emergency. I occasionally price up a “European super king” (6'6" × 6'6"), which would enable my wife and me to sleep in a T formation. I’ll probably never buy it, but I’m glad it’s out there.

  17. Postal etiquette is important. If an envelope is not addressed to you, you shouldn’t open it unless you have been expressly instructed to do so for the purpose of reading its contents out loud over the phone. This includes any envelope addressed, ironically or otherwise, in the old-fashioned style of “Mrs. [Your Male Christian Name, Followed by Shared Surname],” although on these occasions you can always claim to have made an honest mistake (“I thought it was meant for me!”). Exceptions to this rule include any catalog you might wish to peruse over lunch.