How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  Nor is it strange these days for the man in a partnership to be the one who works from home, or the one who works part-time, or not at all. Since 1993 the number of stay-at-home dads in the UK has doubled, while the number of women who stay home to look after children has dropped by about a third. Put that way, it sounds like a wholesale revolution, but it actually equates to about a million more mothers going out to work, and only a hundred thousand or so extra dads staying behind to take up the slack. Even so, by last year the stay-at-home dad was a sufficiently widespread phenomenon to earn it an honored place in the Daily Mail’s demonic social pantheon, courtesy of a self-excoriating article titled “I was so proud to be a stay-at-home dad. Now I fear it’s harmed my daughter.”

  Even outside the Daily Mail’s peculiar worldview, the loss of self-esteem that comes from being a financially supported man lingers. I’ve felt it. I felt it for so long that I got used to it. I’d even begun to accept the possibility that it would always be that way, because I’d moved countries and altered the course of my life without much thought about how I was going to earn a living. My wife kept working, and I continued to be a drain on resources. A drain on resources who, frankly, should have been shouldering a larger share of the laundry.

  It probably shouldn’t be like this, because, by and large, men work too hard. It’s one of the biggest regrets of dying people, particularly men: I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. Men miss out on watching their children grow up, on holidays, on their marriages, on the weird private passions that consume them, all so they can work more, and harder.

  If you are lucky, you might end up with a job you can’t wait to start in the morning, work that brings you satisfaction, pleasure, and pride along with generous compensation for your time and effort. You won’t need to strike a work-life balance, because you’ll be too busy having a really nice work life.

  But most men have to work at jobs they don’t particularly enjoy in order to make money, doing stupid or humiliating things just because someone in charge told them to. If you don’t believe happy-go-lucky freelance writers like me ever have this problem, I can only direct your attention to a thirteen-hundred-word feature about me dressing up as a bus conductor and traveling round central London trying to lure commuters onto a cattle truck. Or the day I spent at Santa school. Or the eight-hundred-word piece about bananas that I wrote on 9/11—while the world turned inside out, I spent the afternoon ringing up chefs and asking for banana recipes. I’d have to do a lot of humiliating things in the future for that one not to make my Top Ten Deathbed Regrets.

  We hear a lot about the rise in the number of stay-at-home dads, and the increase in the number of households where women are the main—or sole—breadwinners, but these undoubted shifts don’t necessarily paint an accurate picture of where we are right now. British fathers still work the longest hours in the EU—those with children under eleven work an average of forty-eight hours a week. Even in this fast-changing world, it would be fair to assume that over the course of their lives most men still strike a work-life balance that has too much work in it. As long as our self-esteem continues to be bound up in our capacity to earn, to achieve, and to provide, the bulk of the nation’s husbands and fathers will continue to work a lot more than they want to, or perhaps even need to. As a result they will suffer from stress, from both the pressure of work and the need to juggle family commitments.

  Surely as a father one has a greater obligation to provide time, attention, and unsolicited advice than disposable income. It’s the same with being a husband—more breakups are caused by couples not spending enough time together than by an insufficiency of money. If wealth kept people happily married, rich people would never get divorced.

  None of this is really my problem because I, for one, don’t work too hard. I am both my own boss and my most troubling employee. My time is badly organized, and my highly variable workload always stretches to fill the available time—back when I was writing an article a month, it took me a month to write an article. In all the time we’ve been married my wife has never had to sit me down and tell me to take it easy.

  However, having spent years trying not to let work define me because I didn’t have any work, I now rather enjoy being able to claim occupational status, especially when family life encroaches on my employment (for this reason I always bring a little bit of work with me on holiday, just in case). I may not work too hard, but I work from home, so as far as I’m concerned I’m always at work.

  “Somebody needs to go to Sainsbury’s,” says my wife, ringing my office from the kitchen on a weekday afternoon.

  “This is my private work time,” I say. “Imagine that I am in a meeting.”

  “It’s difficult,” she says, “because I can hear you playing a harmonica.”

  “It’s a madhouse up here today,” I say. “Seriously.”

  You will have heard about home workers succumbing to stress, or putting in fifteen more hours a week than their office-based counterparts. That ain’t me. I do have stressful interludes, busy days, and hectic weeks. Very occasionally I take on too much work by accident, but even if I spent the next ten years pulling twelve-hour shifts in a salt mine, I still wouldn’t be able to catch up with the average overworked male. When politicians talk about rewarding ordinary, hardworking people, I pay no attention, because I know they can’t possibly be referring to me. I don’t want the rewards they’re offering in any case, which generally come in the form of small amounts of money taken from someone who needs it more.

  Frankly, you couldn’t pay me to work harder, because I can’t put a price on my sloth. Just this morning, at a time when most people are arriving at their offices, I was falling asleep in the bath. I tipped my whole coffee into it when I conked out, which is why my arms are now a manly brown and give off the faint aroma of an Ecuadorian mountain cooperative. Trust me: you don’t want to smell like money; you want to smell like coffee, like me.

  * * *

  My first magazine article appears on the back page of the November 1993 issue of GQ magazine. There is even a reference to it on the cover, alongside Sean Bean’s face. It says, “RENT BOY—How to live off your girlfriend.” I have mixed emotions. Making the cover of a magazine on your first go seems like an achievement to be proud of. At the same time, I don’t think I should send a copy to my mother.

  For years afterward I would receive the occasional call from a production assistant who, having found that GQ article in a cuttings file, tracked down my details in order to ask whether I might be interested in going on the radio, or on daytime TV, to discuss the ins and outs of being a shiftless, unapologetic scumbag.

  “The thing is,” I would say, “I wrote that piece, like, seven years ago. My life isn’t really like that anymore.”

  “I see,” the voice at the other end would say, sounding terribly disappointed.

  “I’m actually pretty busy these days,” I’d say. “In fact, I’ve just started writing a column for the . . .”

  “So it’s all working out for you,” says the voice. I’m clearly making someone’s bad day at the office worse.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  Despite my late start in journalism, things progressed slowly but steadily after that first GQ article. I became a regular contributor to the magazine and started writing for other publications. It was a long time, however, before I had the nerve to give up my day job to be nothing but a freelance writer. I suspected it was possible to earn more money if I could spend all day ringing people up and pitching them ideas, but I also knew myself better than that.

  Also, my wife kept mentioning that she was pregnant.

  10.

  A Very Short Chapter About Sex

  I would dearly love to assume that no one wants to read about my sex life, largely because I don’t really want to write about it. Even a sexually confident, well-adjusted man might wish to draw a veil over this facet of his business, an
d I am neither of those things. And also, my wife forbade me to write about it, thank Christ.

  But you can’t write a book about being a husband and just skip sex, according to certain publishers I know. Even if sex is no longer marriage’s unique selling point, it remains an important component of any union, and in that context it deserves at least cursory treatment in a brief chapter all its own. You may, if you wish, infer that the following highly informative sexual bullet points have been gleaned from decades of personal experience, but officially, I learned all this from watching television.

  • There is an old and unattractive joke which holds that marriage isn’t about having sex with the same person for the rest of your life, but about not having sex with the same person for the rest of your life. There is a depressing truth to this. While the actual amount of sex undertaken will vary from couple to couple, there is no getting round the fact that marriage is in part an epic exercise in sexual rejection. Being a good husband means hearing the word “no” (variants include “stop it,” “fuck off,” “leave me alone”) countless times over many years without going hot in the face with hurt and self-loathing, or at least not appearing to. It means gallantly turning down halfhearted offers of perfunctory, mechanical sex from someone too tired to contemplate anything else, and then finding a way, five minutes later, to say that you’ve changed your mind.

  • Not having very much sex is not just normal, it’s the norm. According to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), people between the ages of sixteen and forty-four have sex, on average, less than once a week. The rate has been falling steadily, even among cohabiting couples (a mean of four times a month, down from five a decade ago) for some time, with experts variously seeking to blame either the recession, higher stress levels, or the increasing use of smartphones and tablets in the bedroom. There is one upside: you don’t have to have sex very often in order to be having more than most people.

  • Believe it or not, if you’re married you’re almost certainly having more sex than you would be if you were single. If you were single, chances are you’d be having none.

  • If wanting more sex than you’re getting is a depressingly common state of affairs, it is quite possibly preferable to having more sex than you want. There are points during a marriage where you may briefly experience the latter. Let’s imagine for the sake of argument that your wife’s desire for a second child has not been answered with the immediacy—indeed the surprise—that attended the conception of the first—and you find yourself obliged to investigate the mechanics of fertility with an eye toward improving your odds. Under these trying circumstances you will, as the preferred sperm supplier, find yourself more or less on call, required to perform often and at short notice, with little in the way of preliminary chat, beyond an admonition to get the job done before Coronation Street starts. You will learn what it’s like, perhaps for the first and only time in your life, to have so much sex at your disposal that it becomes an inconvenience. You should probably find someone to complain about it to, in case you never get the chance again.

  • No matter how much of a traditional British male you consider yourself to be, you must eventually learn to have sex while sober. If you don’t, twenty years of marital bliss will kill you.

  • The basic strategies for maintaining a healthy sex life are not, in themselves, sexy. It has a lot more to do with emptying the dishwasher without being asked than you think. I’m sorry about this.

  • If you can’t do it with the cat watching, you’re probably not as interested as you think you are.

  • Sex, for the most part, happens between couples who go to bed at the same time. It’s fine to stay up later than your partner, as long as you bear in mind that you are effectively choosing between sex and Newsnight. Waking up your partner for sex is famously not a good idea, although I’ve always imagined I would be totally accommodating about it if it ever happened to me.

  • Strive to have sex regularly, even if you don’t feel like it. This is not my personal tip—lots of relationship experts advocate it—although I’m pretty sure the words “even if you don’t feel like it” have escaped my lips before. The trick is to forget all about passion, spontaneity, and experimentation. True carnal open-mindedness extends to embracing the idea that run-of-the-mill sex is still worth having.

  • Don’t just wait for the right moment to have sex. Schedule the right moment. Be punctual.

  • Scheduled sex is no guarantee of sex, mind. When the appointed hour rolls round you may find your best-laid plans unceremoniously vetoed, or at least undermined. If your partner greets your prebooked advances with the words “Is it the first Friday of the month already?” you may safely assume she’s attempting to sabotage the mood.

  • According to some other experts the secret of long-term sexual attraction is a carefully maintained air of mystery: discretion regarding nudity, the banishment of domestic drudgery from the bedroom, and some boundaries regarding one another’s bodily functions and ablutions. I’m not saying I agree or disagree. I’m just saying: good luck with that.

  • Young men: your talent for being able to get sex over and done with really quickly is probably not much prized at the moment, but it will come in handy down the road, so don’t forget how. It may be hard to believe at your age, but one day you’ll reach a stage in your relationship where “Honestly—you’ll hardly know I was here” becomes a surprisingly successful chat-up line, especially if your spouse knows you can deliver on the promise.

  11.

  The Pros and Cons of Procreation

  Being a father is a fairly standard adjunct to being a husband. It’s not mandatory, of course, but it’s considered churlish to refuse.

  There are many different ways for a couple to broach the delicate conversation about starting a family, the most traditional of which, in my experience, begins with the woman saying, “I don’t believe this—I’m fucking pregnant.”

  That only happened the first time, to be fair. In later years my wife would simply emerge from the loo and throw the positive pregnancy test at me. As magical as each of these moments were, it is my suggestion that you and your partner give serious consideration to the idea of having children intentionally, with an eye on a fixed total, not least because they cost £67,000 each just to feed and clothe. The ideal number is a very personal choice. I have three, so I know that for me, three is too many.

  When you first discover you’re going to be a father, you will be giddy, but also filled with a sense that something terrifying and life-changing is about to happen to you. The present becomes tinged with an ominous hue, like the glow of a warehouse fire on the horizon. After a few weeks you will be struck by the sudden realization that the terrifying thing isn’t going to happen to you at all. It’s going to happen to someone else, and you are going to watch. It’s still going to be terrifying, but you should not say that out loud. In fact, the complete etiquette for male behavior in the first and second trimester can be boiled down to a list of things you shouldn’t say to a pregnant woman. They include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

  “I know what you mean—my back is killing me.”

  “I think I’m losing weight. Do I look thin to you?”

  “Thanks for driving. I’m absolutely hammered.”

  “Let’s face it—it’s not an illness, is it?”

  “A hundred quid for a car seat? Are they high?”

  Above all else the partners of pregnant women are expected to be supportive, “supportive” being one of those terms that has caused a whole generation of men to nod while furrowing their brows slightly, in a feeble attempt to impersonate comprehension. Once upon a time “supportive” could be understood to refer to financial and/or material support, and when someone spoke of your need to be supportive, they were basically hinting that now would be a really bad time for you to get fired.

  Allow me,
with all the benefit of my experience, to translate the woolly imperative “Be supportive” into a more man-friendly command: in the context of pregnancy, it means “Suck it up.” Repress any instinct to express needs or to share counterproductive emotions, for the duration.

  You don’t want to spend a Saturday shopping for a crib fully six months in advance of having anything to put in it? Suck it up.

  Don’t feel like going along to prenatal class? Suck it up. I was the only man who turned up to my first one, and I was made to lie on a mat and exercise my vagina for half an hour. All the women there later told my wife that I was very brave and caring, which made me feel a bit bad about running off during the first tea break.

  Don’t fancy spending another night arguing with someone who suddenly thinks Howard is a good name for boy? Suck it up. But don’t give in on Howard.

  Suck up the anger, the tears, and the tiredness. Not yours—hers. You should have sucked up yours, like, yesterday.

  You will probably still feel that you are not doing anything much, beyond exhibiting a certain resentful forbearance. You may never again in your life feel quite this useless. I suggest you find a displacement activity that gives you a sense of being proactively preparatory, like a father-in-waiting should be. Select something important you lack, and fix it. Take butchery lessons, or a first aid course. The choice is yours. Me, I learned to drive.

  Actually I already knew how to drive, but as a UK resident, my American license had ceased to be valid. By the time my wife became pregnant with our first child, I hadn’t driven a car for three years. The longer I went on not driving, the easier it became. My wife drove everywhere while I looked out the window, or dozed while drooling onto my seat belt. Secretly, I loved not driving.

  But even I could not imagine strapping my first child into his car seat in the hospital car park, and then slipping into the passenger seat while my postpartum wife eased herself behind the wheel and checked her mirrors. I don’t actually think it would have been allowed, but I wasn’t stupid enough to ask anyone. I just went out and signed up for a load of driving lessons.