How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  “If you’re in so much agony, why don’t you go to bed?” says my wife.

  “Because bed also hurts,” I say, taking tiny steps toward the front door. “Besides, I can’t go to bed. I’ve got business. I’m a businessman.”

  “You are not a businessman.”

  “I am a businessman,” I say. “Presently one who has sharp tendrils of pain running up his left shoulder and across to . . .”

  “I’m not listening to this again,” says my wife. “La la la.”

  This is a common exchange, repeated between two and four times a year, depending on how regularly I do the back exercises I’ve been given. Then one day about fifteen years into our marriage, my wife hurts her back. She’s not at home when it happens, but she rings me from wherever she is.

  “It really, really, really hurts,” she says, panting.

  “Yes,” I say. “I know.”

  When she comes home it’s clear she’s in considerable discomfort—she’s hunched over and her eyes are watering, so I can’t really accuse her of shamming. I think to myself: watering eyes—that’s one I can use.

  “When it first happened I couldn’t stand up,” she says. “It’s like everything just went.” I can’t believe she’s trying to appropriate my complaint. After years of being a banned topic, suddenly back pain is trending.

  “This is just the beginning,” I say. “Wait until tomorrow.” For obvious reasons, my wife quickly loses interest in discussing her back with me. She rings friends who can offer undiluted commiseration, empathy without the taint of history. The next morning I overhear her telling one of them that it hurts more than childbirth. I briefly wonder if I am under any obligation to be the bigger person. Since when?

  “I was talking about the very, very early stages of labor,” says my wife.

  “I knew what you were talking about,” I say, “because I get those childbirthy twinges a lot.”

  “Shut up,” she says. “Ow.”

  “Worse than childbirth,” I say. “Childbirth plus.” It is not my finest hour, although it certainly feels like it at the time.

  The best thing I can say about our double failing is that it’s a sign of a finely balanced interdependency; we need each other, present and correct, every day, in order to make life work. And since the intolerance is perfectly mutual, we manage to work round it—at least there is never any great debt of sympathy owed to anyone.

  The impatience with infirmity toughens you up as well. I no longer talk about my symptoms in any detail. If I feel the need to communicate the extent of my unwellness, I tend to do it by asking loaded questions (“Do we have any painkillers?” “Is the ER busy this time of day, do you think?”) rather than resorting to theatrics. It feels like progress.

  IN FASHION

  As a husband you assume an obligation—unspoken, unless it was in your vows—to dress in a manner your wife finds tolerable. How “tolerable” is defined in this context will vary considerably from couple to couple, but when it comes to avoiding the intolerable it is unlikely you will be starved for advice. And what is tolerable today may well be intolerable tomorrow.

  This is the main problem with fashion: the rules change the whole time. While women’s fashions cycle round with a reliable frequency—somewhere on the globe, someone is always championing the pencil skirt—men’s fashions travel in a long parabolic orbit, like comets, and revisit less often. Certain unfashionable types of male apparel may not come back in style during your lifetime. I honestly thought this was true of hats. When I was thirty I assumed the hat was extinct.

  As a rule of thumb men are always right not to trust a returning trend. If you were old enough to sport a particular look the first time round, you will be, by definition, too old to join in by the time it comes back.

  I have never been fashionable, except perhaps for a brief period in the early ’90s, when grunge was popular and all of us habitually sloppy people were accidentally swept into the vanguard. I didn’t need to buy any new clothes for three years.

  Wardrobe deficiencies should not unduly hamper a man’s search for a partner. Women tend to be forgiving about a lack of fashion sense, although in what might be considered a primitive form of speed dating, a significant subset of womankind will instantly write you off for wearing the wrong footwear. This would not be a terribly difficult obstacle to surmount if there were some general agreement among women about which shoes were bad, but there isn’t. My own advice is to exercise caution when it comes to dressing your feet: nothing too pointy, nothing too square-toed, too cheap, or too expensive; no innovative fastening mechanisms, no experimental materials, no colors beyond brown or black. Women will not, in my experience, get off on your blue suede shoes.

  Footwear aside, a woman who likes you enough may agree to marry you in spite of your party shirt collection, on the unspoken condition that she shall subsequently be permitted to remodel you according to her own sensibilities. For her purposes a man who has no interest in fashion is preferable to a man with an assured sense of style that is, unbeknownst to him, horrible. Though there is undoubtedly something denaturing about turning control of your dress sense over to a woman, I advise you to surrender yourself to it at the outset. It’s just easier.

  For me it was not so difficult. Having moved continents, I was prepared to take on faith my wife’s assertion that my American wardrobe did not travel well, and was, on some hard-to-quantify level, unpardonable. I often have to refresh her memory regarding the details of our first meeting, but not about what I was wearing at the time: “a bottle-green V-neck jersey over a nasty stripy button-down shirt.” Needless to say, I do not remember this ensemble at all.

  My wife was not herself a particular student of high fashion, and for years we both wore nothing but jeans and a series of interchangeable gray sweaters. Literally interchangeable: I often wore her clothes to work without realizing it.

  Although I’m perfectly capable of choosing my own clothes, I also know that I can only wear a garment in defiance of my wife’s disapproval so many times before I give in and retire it. And I do not like having to replace retired items, because I don’t enjoy a minute of the time I spend buying clothes. I go to shops infrequently, often under duress, to pick up the thing I need most in the style I hate least as quickly and painlessly as possible. That’s why I like shopping in airports—the selection is limited and the clock is always ticking.

  This is not to say that I do not occasionally make mistakes. I have a special drawer for shirts purchased on a bold whim—a drawer I never open other than to remind myself that a foolish certainty is the hallmark of poor decision making. My most ill-advised attempts at self-expression are probably my Internet shoes, including an expensive pair that turned out to be much pointier than they looked in the picture on the website, and some too-large loafers I still occasionally wear when my wife is out. Frankly it’s easier to buy love online than it is to buy shoes.

  If I don’t dress as badly as I should given my whole approach, it’s because my wife supplements my wardrobe with purchases made on my behalf. The convenience of this arrangement is undeniable, although our tastes are not always perfectly aligned.

  “Nice,” she says, holding the neck of a cable-knit sweater against my Adam’s apple. “Do you like it?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say, trying to weigh how much I actually dislike it against how easy it was to come by. “It’s a bit, erm, textured, isn’t it?”

  “It’s supposed to be like that,” she says.

  “I wasn’t suggesting it was an accident,” I say.

  “It suits you,” she says. I never know whether this constitutes a compliment or not.

  “Does it?” I say. “Okay.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Thank you,” I say, although I’m fairly certain I will never wear it outside.

  My wife’s campaign to expand my wardrobe is n
owhere near as concerted as her ongoing bid to rid me of about a third of it—the old, the holed, the stained, the faded, and the frayed. She’s not interested in binning the old clothes I no longer wear, only the ones I do—my favorites—because I have worn them out.

  Insofar as I have a fashion esthetic, it places no upper limits on the amount of damage a garment must endure to be deemed unwearable. Because I work from home it hardly matters whether my collars are frayed or my sweaters have elbows. I favor heelless socks and shirts with paint on them. The only thing I can’t endure is a pair of trousers with holes in both pockets. No matter how much I liked them beforehand, once the pockets have gone, they’re dead to me.

  I wish I could maintain that my relaxed approach to dressing reflected an underlying self-confidence, but my lack of interest only serves to fuel my paranoia when I have to go places where my wardrobe might be judged and found wanting. For years I wouldn’t even walk down Savile Row, for fear that someone with a tape measure round his neck would lean out of a window and shout, “Hey, pal! Gap’s that way!”

  To be honest, my interest in men’s fashion only began when I started dressing my children. It is never lost on the fathers of small boys that their clothes boast both envious simplicity and effortless style. Toddlers can carry off blue shoes, even on the wrong feet. They know how to accessorize a dull ensemble by sticking a lollipop on the back. They dare to live by such bold maxims as “When in doubt, inside out” and they are entirely at home with the concept of asymmetry. Above all, they carry themselves with casual insouciance at all times. I once watched my middle son, then four, cinch up his too-big trousers by folding over the waistband until they were the ideal length.

  “Did you invent that?” I said. He shrugged and turned his back, giving me a view of his front pockets.

  “Actually, I think you’ve got those on backward,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. And he was right—it didn’t.

  It only works, of course, because they’re young. Had I ever hoped that as my sons got bigger some sort of fashion cross-pollination—their effortless style joined with my money—would end up benefiting my wardrobe, I would have been sorely disappointed. When the oldest one eventually grew to be the same size as me, we did not, as a mother and daughter might, start swapping separates to fill out ensembles that mixed old and new, the safe with the daring. Instead all my white shirts disappeared overnight, commandeered without permission to supplement the boy’s school uniform list. The next time I found one and put it on I noticed it had little cocks drawn all over the cuffs in blue pen. I’m afraid I can’t carry that off with insouciance.

  IN THE MIRROR

  The seminal 1936 handbook Do’s and Don’ts for Husbands retains, on most subjects, an admirable relevance. “Don’t buy a motor cycle and side car without first consulting your wife,” for example, is still timeless advice. Unfortunately the book is curiously reticent on the subject of grooming.

  “Don’t expect to be numbered among the good mannered if you use a nail file, comb or toothpick otherwise than in a dressing room” is about all it has to say on the matter. Wise as it is, this counsel doesn’t quite address the modern phenomenon known as metrosexuality. For men, you will have heard, the stigma of taking pride in one’s appearance has long since evaporated. It’s okay to exfoliate. In fact, it’s become a bit of a faux pas to let your skin stay on.

  Let’s not get too carried away. Half of men between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five may be happy to describe themselves as “metrosexual,” but the word itself is a fairly cautious coinage, an adjective that basically means “I live in an urban area and I’m not gay.” It doesn’t constitute an admission that you wear makeup to work. Men don’t necessarily want to own up to being assiduous groomers, even if, as it is often claimed, we now are.

  The evidence cited for this contention is an admittedly massive growth in the men’s grooming sector: sales of men’s skin-care products rose by £22 million last year, and the total market is worth something like £600 million. The top male moisturizer enjoyed a 188 percent annual sales hike. But this is not necessarily a sign that we are becoming more body-conscious, or measurably dandier, only that we are buying more stuff. Actually it’s estimated that half of all male grooming products sold are purchased by women, so we’re not even necessarily buying it. We’re being gifted it, on birthdays and at Christmas, thanks to a national failure of imagination.

  We’re not so much exploring new territory here as going over old ground. At the turn of the twentieth century, men expended a great deal of time and effort on their appearance. Ordinary barbershop service often included a shave, a manicure, and the application of scents, tonics, oils, and unguents. When the Gillette disposable razor was introduced, self-shaving was marketed as a macho alternative to what advertisements called “the ladylike massage-finish of the tonsorial artist.” A hundred years later, the ladylike massage finish is all the rage.

  It could be that metrosexuality is not quite the revolution in body-consciousness we’ve been led to believe. In the US, sales of men’s skin-care products actually dipped by 10 percent in 2010. Superdrug’s Taxi Man line of male makeup (products invariably attracting jokey names like “guyliner” and “manscara”), launched in 2008, has quietly disappeared from the shelves. Almost a third of the men’s grooming market is actually composed of shaving stuff. The bulk of the rest is shampoo, conditioner, and deodorant. The market is undoubtedly growing, but the simple fact remains that three-quarters of men over the age of eighteen still don’t use any skin-care products.

  Perhaps, like me, you remain metroskeptical; maybe you’ve purchased one or more of these products, possibly because you were feeling buy-curious.* Don’t worry—I am not going to speak out against men using beauty products, because I have tried many—mainly women’s beauty products. One of the advantages of being a husband is that you don’t need to buy any creams, gels, or scrubs of your own—they’re sitting there already, one shelf over, begging to be sampled. You don’t even need to buy deodorant.

  These products may not be packaged to appeal to men, but if, like me, you’ve ever been reduced to using a baby wipe as aftershave, you are probably well beyond the insecurity that prevents an adult male from buying moisturizer unless it’s marketed as a hangover cure.

  My bathroom cupboard contains two types of face polish. Both are made by the same company. One is intended for women, the other for men, the main difference being that the latter container is a manly brown. One was purchased by my wife, the other came from a goody bag I picked up at a party, even though the bag was clearly marked “David Walliams.” Let Walliams buy his own face polish, I thought. There were some gin miniatures in there as well, which I drank in the taxi home. Anyway, the ingredients listed on both versions of the face polish are identical. They even smell the same.

  It’s probably a good test of the value of any male grooming product you’re tempted to buy: is it so remarkably effective or confidence-boosting that you would happily purchase its female-targeted equivalent, the one with the butterfly on the label? Male vanity is nothing new, after all, and if you still won’t countenance using a treatment that isn’t disguised as a box of cigars, then perhaps you’re not as metrosexual as you think you are. Fortunately for you, I have nothing to prove; I’ve tested many of these products over the years. Here are some of my findings:

  Facial scrub. Hurts to use. Doesn’t really do anything—if you shave more than once a week, what’s left to exfoliate?—and you end up with microbeads in your ears.

  Under-eye repair gel. Stings if you get it in, rather than under, your eyes. Doesn’t repair anything. Occasionally handy for sticking down wayward eyebrow hairs, but this would be an expensive solution for such a chronic problem.

  Anti-aging mask. Doesn’t do anything. At the end of the day, it’s not even a very good mask—most people would know it was you.

 
Face polish. Requires one to embrace the rather alien notion that it is desirable, even important, to polish one’s face. Doesn’t do anything.

  Beauty serum. No added beauty detected after several liberal applications. Wife no less beautiful despite mysterious disappearance of half the contents of tube.

  Lift and luminate night cream. Doesn’t do either. No adverse effects if accidentally used during the day.

  Tinted moisturizer. Gives the skin on your face an even, “natural” tone, in the same sense that morticians use the word “natural.”

  While it’s perfectly acceptable—from a gender parity perspective—for men to slather themselves in the same stuff that woman slather themselves in, we are still stuck with the troublesome fact that none of it works. No one is sorrier about this than I am, although I’ll admit I take a certain pleasure in being the bearer of bad news.

  The modern male is in the happy position of being alive in an age where the stigma associated with high levels of vanity (levels of vanity that have always, of course, existed) has faded, and yet none of us is actually required to adopt the new paradigm of grooming. Only one of the goalposts has moved. Our male cultural conditioning does not oblige us to take heroic measures against time and nature, to indulge in pointless expenditure, or to waste half an hour rubbing face polish into our cheeks and then blotting it off with a special cloth that costs extra. We are men; thanks to a lucky accident of birth, the beauty myth does not apply to us. Our skin is meant to be dry. We’re supposed to look like shit first thing in the morning. Only a small fraction of the hair on our bodies falls into the “unwanted” category. Age is meant to wither us, and custom stale our infinite variety.

  For decades this industry has made money out of women by trading on their insecurities, by commodifying beauty and setting unachievable standards for presentability. It’s unfair, of course, but men won’t help the situation by succumbing to the same con. We can treat ourselves to a wide range of notions of masculinity. We shouldn’t have to buy any.