How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  If an envelope is addressed to both of you, it’s fair game, even if your name comes second. Whenever you receive exciting or scary post—test results, medical or academic; stark-looking letters from the bank; very large checks—it’s considered good form to wait and open it together.

  18. It’s okay to steal small amounts of money from one another. Under most circumstances it’s acceptable to liberate cash from the pockets/wallet/purse of your other half while he/she sleeps or is elsewhere. The ready cash that exists in your home at any given time is a form of joint savings account, and there is a maximum amount that may be withdrawn without permission or explanation. That figure may need to be adjusted for inflation occasionally, but at the time of writing it’s £10.

  19. Sharing can be ugly. People misplace stuff, forget stuff, run out of stuff, and neglect to buy stuff—it’s human—and in cases where you possess an identical or perfectly serviceable equivalent, you should not be difficult about handing it over to your spouse on request. This includes, but is by no means limited to, travel cards, bank cards, house keys, car keys, your mobile phone, a razor (male to female only, and don’t ask for it back; you don’t want it), your deodorant, and yes, on occasion, your toothbrush. You should fully expect your selflessness to be reciprocated in your time of need, even if it isn’t.

  20. A spouse’s appalling taste in music must be pardoned, since any effort to improve it is doomed to fail. If you think your spouse’s musical taste is appalling, chances are she doesn’t think much of yours either.

  21. If you don’t have someone other than your spouse—a friend, sibling, or colleague—that you can go to a movie with at short notice, you will end up seeing only about half the movies you wanted to see before you die.

  22. It is generally acknowledged that a cheap appliance is a false economy, destined to cast a pall of impermanence over your household. But the opposite is true of toasters. The cost of a toaster is in inverse proportion to the quality of toast it produces, and pricier models tend to be less robust, and are responsible for much unnecessary marital discord. A posh toaster is a false extravagance.

  23. Never go out on Valentine’s Day. As far as relationships go, February 14 is amateur night. Book a table for the thirteenth instead; you’ll have the restaurant to yourselves.

  24. Remember: marriage isn’t all good. Like anything ultimately beneficial, marriage has some unwanted side effects. It can leave participants feeling hemmed in, held back, and harried. It represents an ongoing threat to one’s individuality, personal privacy, fulfillment, and freedom. You will be happier once you understand that this works both ways. When you’re feeling resentment, for example, it helps to bear in mind that you are also, at some level, resented.

  25. Early on in marriage it’s vital for a couple to agree upon an easily recognizable gesture—a raised eyebrow, say, or a discreetly pointed elbow—that will henceforth serve to mean “You see this person I am talking to? Please use his name in a sentence immediately. I have forgotten it.”

  26. Naturally there is a lot of disagreement in any partnership, but make certain you’re on the same side when battling outside forces: unfeeling authority, intractable bureaucracy, strangers who have parked stupidly. Mindless solidarity is vital under these circumstances—fight side by side, or run away together giggling, but don’t be divided. Occasionally this them-against-us attitude can lead to couples resorting to criminal behavior—like Bonnie and Clyde—but even that can be very cementing, and you know what? I’m not a cop.

  27. Love is one of those emotions you occasionally have to talk yourself into. In the teeth of the shit storm of accusation and recrimination that marriage can sometimes turn into, it’s vital you take time out to dwell upon all the things about your partner that are admirable, exceptional, and charming. Sometimes it’s easier to do this when your partner is asleep.

  28. Own your stupidity. Self-awareness is a reliably endearing trait, and over time your spouse will come to admire your willingness to recognize precisely when you have been/are being an idiot. In fact an objective grasp of your own stupidity is almost preferable to not being stupid in the first place, and it’s much, much easier.

  29. Being married is like sharing a basement with a fellow hostage: after five years there are very few off-putting things you won’t know about one another. After ten years there are none. Don’t worry too much about having revealed yourself over time to be a weak, irritating, and physically disgusting human being—the trick is to maintain a daily standard consistently above your most unattractive self. Once your partner has seen you at your worst, she’ll realize how much effort you’re putting in just to make yourself presentable.

  30. As a periodic experiment, try pretending that everything your partner says during an argument is factually correct. It’s easy to be a good listener—you just close your mouth and sit on your hands—but it can be difficult to see other people’s opinions the way they do—as the truth—especially when they are wrong.

  31. When it comes to marriage, there is no such thing as a false sense of security. There is only security and its opposite, and nothing stays the same for long. Stop worrying that your feelings of contentment may be temporary or illusory; they’re all you’ve got. Snatch them up and enjoy them while they last.

  32. Never underestimate the tremendous healing power of sitting down together from time to time to speak frankly and openly about the marital difficulties facing other couples you know.

  33. The Department of Health currently recommends that men should drink no more than twenty-one units of alcohol per week, and women fourteen, a consumption ratio of three to two. This does not mean you can divide a bottle of wine according to these proportions. If you’re married, it’s half each—guidelines be damned.

  34. A little paranoia is a good thing in marriage; complacency is the more dangerous enemy. You should never feel so secure in your partnership that you are unable to imagine the whole thing falling apart over a long weekend. I can’t give you an exact figure for how many sleepless nights per year you should spend worrying that you’re going to die alone and unhappy if you don’t get your shit together spouse-wise, but it’s somewhere between five and eight.

  35. Try to speak at least once during the day, every day. If nothing else, it keeps vital channels of communication open and operating.

  My wife has a habit of ringing me in the middle of the afternoon, wherever she is. Often there is some cryptic pretext for the call (“Measure our sofa and tell me how deep it is”) but occasionally she checks in for no reason.

  “Anything to report?” she says.

  “I’m watching a YouTube compilation of dogs wearing shoes for the first time,” I say.

  “Sounds rewarding,” she says.

  “I mean the dogs are wearing the shoes for the first time. I’ve actually seen it a number of times already.”

  “I won’t keep you, then,” she says. “Take the mince out of the freezer.”

  It doesn’t sound like much, but on such regular exchanges of inanities are rock-solid marriages built.

  36. Most marriage counselors recommend that you say five positive things to your partner to counteract every negative thing you say. If five sounds like a lot to you—and it sounds like a lot to me—that ratio at least gives you an idea of the impact of a single negative comment. Dole them out as if they were unbelievably expensive.

  37. On those occasions when you cannot bring yourself to say what you feel, at least try to act as though you feel what you say. If you’re going to insist that everything’s fine, then you should have the decency to behave as if everything is fine.

  38. Every partnership is unique: don’t feel the need to judge the success of yours in comparison to other relationships you see out there. For the most part, whatever you do to make it work between you is fine, even if no one else seems to handle things in quite the same way. You’re even entitled to c
herish your relationship’s quirks and odd accommodations—just don’t mention them to any psychologists you meet at dinner parties.

  39. It’s never too late to apologize. By which I mean, when it’s obviously far too late for saying sorry to do any good at all, you still should.

  40. Never bother me when I’m reading. For the sake of balance I asked my wife to contribute a Gross Marital Happiness tip of her own, and this is what she said. My guess is that sooner or later she’s going to regret not taking proper advantage of this opportunity.

  41. It’s okay to talk about your kids when you go out to a restaurant together. You’re with the only other person who’s actually interested in your kids. Seize the moment.

  42. In marriage it’s good to express your emotions freely, bar one: surprise. Unless you’ve just arrived at your own surprise birthday party, looking surprised can be dangerous. It means you’ve either forgotten something important, or you’ve misjudged a situation badly. Remember: if you don’t look surprised, you aren’t surprised.

  9.

  Bringing Home the Bacon

  I have been married for nearly a year. I’m doing all the things that traditional husbands do, apart from providing. Having spent two years more or less unemployed, I do at least have a job, entering basic information about films into an enormous database. It’s one of those odd occupations that existed before web 2.0 came along and the public was somehow persuaded to fill in the Internet themselves, for free.

  But it doesn’t pay much, my new job. And it doesn’t really have a future, beyond the implicit promise that there will always be more data to enter the next day. My wife is working at the BBC, making programs and earning considerably more than me. I have decided that I am modern enough not to let this shame me, but I am not comfortable enough with the situation to imagine things can stay this way. My small financial contribution is vital, but it also isn’t enough.

  With my twenties behind me, I no longer have much in the way of prospects. For the previous two years I’d done little beyond sitting at the bar of the restaurant where my friend Pat worked, downing free espresso and doing the crossword. Although I have a degree in English, the only actual skill I possess is basic page layout—the sort of cutting and pasting of copy that involves actual cutting and pasting, with a knife and glue—an occupation that basically disappeared on both sides of the Atlantic during the two years I spent sitting on my ass drinking coffee. Moving to London amounted to starting again from rung one.

  In truth the peak of my career had occurred several years before, when I was parking cars outside a restaurant in Boston. It was possible to earn $300 in tips in a night, although $80 to $100 was more the norm. It was a high-adrenaline profession—we had no actual car park, so we worked in pairs to compete for spaces on the streets and in the allies. During my brief training the rules of parking were explained to me by a seasoned valet known as The Iceman. Rule one was “It’s okay to hit the car in front.” Rule two was “It’s okay to hit the car behind.” Rule three was “It’s okay to steal pot from people’s glove compartments.”

  I got mugged on my first shift, but I went straight back the next night. The hours meant I could hold down another job during the day, and it was as close as I’d ever come in my life to making ends meet. All the time I’d been working at the magazine in New York, I’d been gently tipping into financial ruin.

  The months of idleness that followed were not initially difficult—I am naturally indolent; it’s a gift—but both my wife and I had, I think, similar expectations of what a proper man should be, and I was not living up to them. She accepted that circumstances had prevented my working, but I could sense she found my lack of ambition irritating and disappointing, largely because I’d seen this disappointment in other women before. Back when I was still parking cars, my future as an embittered underachiever must have seemed set in stone.

  I suppose I did have vague ambitions, or at least desired some sort of future for myself. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, but I had a fair idea what it wasn’t, which is why I would quit any job as soon as somebody tried to promote me. I wasn’t actively bad at most of the paid work I undertook, but I was afraid of getting stuck on a rung somewhere, and I preferred to keep moving. If you’re willing to delude yourself, change can feel like progress.

  I quit my job at the ice factory after three weeks, shortly after they moved me from block ice to bagged cubes. When they offered to make me assistant manager of the art shop where I worked, provided I was prepared to “work on my attitude,” I worked hard to make sure my attitude got steadily worse. Then I quit.

  A couple of years later, when I was temping in the financial aid department of Northeastern University in Boston, my supervisor called me into his office. I thought it was probably about my timekeeping, or the tie I wasn’t wearing.

  “You’ve only been here three weeks,” he said, “and you’ve revolutionized our filing system. What’s your secret?”

  “Alphabetical order,” I said.

  “I’m not sure why you’d want to be facetious at this point,” he said. I rarely spoke at work, and sometimes had trouble controlling my tone.

  “Seriously,” I said. “I just put things back where they go.” I hadn’t meant to be facetious; it was clear to me, from all the times I’d tried to retrieve a file, that few of my predecessors had considered alphabetical order to be a guiding principle.

  My tone notwithstanding, he said he was willing to consider me for a permanent staff position, with better money, paid vacations, and health insurance. So I quit.

  Even the failing magazine in New York offered me a belated promotion when I told them I was planning to leave. But I already had a plane ticket to London and a big, blank future ahead of me, so I quit.

  That’s how I got to be thirty years old, newly married, and still at the foot of the ladder. The previous two years of doing nothing—of sacrificing money for love—had proved more than a little dispiriting. Being a loser, dependent on your girlfriend for a packet of fags, was, in the end, hard work.

  My only plan is to put all that behind me, to stick at my new dead-end job and keep an eye out for a better one. I figure I don’t need a career path anymore. Being married can be my career; I can be professionally uxorious. All I need is the money.

  One August afternoon I get a call from someone who works at GQ magazine. The woman at the other end is, she explains, a friend of a friend of mine, but I don’t really understand why she’s calling me. I haven’t applied for a job at GQ. It seems unlikely that my reputation for data entry precedes me.

  “We have a regular section at the back of the magazine called ‘Man Enough,’” she says. “It’s a different topic every month.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And we’d like you to write one, if you want to; they’re about seven hundred fifty words.” I suppose I’d dreamed that something like this would happen to me one day, although I somehow figured I would have to be the one who dialed the number first. I can’t figure out how such an offer could just drop into my lap. Then I think: Who cares how?

  “Yeah,” I say. “Great. What’s the subject?”

  “It’ll be ‘Man Enough to Live Off Your Girlfriend.’”

  “Oh, right,” I say.

  Nobody enjoys being summarized. We each have a sense of self that is fluid, expanding, and resistant to definition. That’s why it’s so painful to read a potted biography of yourself, even when you’ve written it yourself. I am so much more than this tepid little précis, you think. Words can’t contain me.

  Now I was being presented with a seven-word summation which, for all I know, is how everyone described me when I was out of the room, or when distinguishing me from other Tims of their acquaintance: you know—the one who lives off his girlfriend.

  I realize I have been silent for along time.

  “I could send over some copies of the maga
zine,” says the woman on the phone, “so you get the general idea.”

  The general idea is clear from the three back issues I receive the next day: the monthly topic for the first-person “Man Enough” column was evidently selected by the editorial staff, who then went in search of a real-life man who fit the bill. I suppose they just asked round until someone of their acquaintance said, “Somebody who doesn’t work? Who just sponges off his girlfriend and does nothing all day? Yeah, I know a dude like that.”

  I don’t think being an actual writer is a prerequisite for the slot, which is just as well. In the course of my recently acquired day job I’d summarized the plots of four thousand films I’d never seen, but it doesn’t amount to much of a cuttings file.

  I don’t say anything about my inexperience, nor do I mention that I am now both married and gainfully employed. I just say yes.

  * * *

  What I wrote did not do much to challenge the stigma that came with being a man who was not the chief earner in a relationship. Instead, if I recall correctly, I embraced that stigma and reveled in it.

  It’s not the sort of piece one could write today. In an economy that generally obliges both halves of a couple to work in order to survive, in an era where wage parity is, if not a reality, a commonly accepted goal, and where employment markets are increasingly fluid, we’re a lot more at ease with the idea of a man who earns less than his partner, or earns nothing. In nearly a third of couples with children today, the mothers are considered breadwinners, in that they earn as much as or more than their partners.