How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  It’s great that we live in a world where men can groom themselves to whatever extent they think is appropriate, from doing nothing at all to waxing your nuts weekly. I’m also aware that I may be safely to one side of an age divide—somewhere around thirty-three—below which men now routinely square off their eyebrows and go out in public wearing faces the color of tinted moisturizer. That’s fine; I certainly don’t want to put myself in the position of trying to stop young people behaving foolishly.

  But before you ask yourself whether it’s become acceptable to wear mascara, ask yourself if you can really be arsed. Men remain, compared to women, virtually maintenance-free, beyond a vague obligation to keep clean. This is your birthright. Think about what you’d be throwing away, in terms of dignity, complacency, and free time, by getting your chest waxed. I should know. I’ve had my chest waxed.

  One of the more rewarding aspects of being a journalist is the opportunity to try everything once, if necessary with an outward show of reluctance, or an arm’s length of ironic detachment, or even profound misgivings. It’s why I once got into a shark cage for money. The list of male grooming interventions I have undergone, ostensibly so you don’t have to (and also so I don’t have to ever again), is long, and includes pedicures, manicures, facials, and the aforementioned waxing, which extended to the hair in my delicate umbilical region and is something I would never willingly endure again while conscious. Given the choice, I would definitely prefer another go in the shark cage.

  I have endured a procedure which purported to tone my abdominal muscles through the attachment of electrodes. If you think running on a treadmill is a soulless pursuit, I’d suggest you try being hooked up to a machine that gives you stomach cramps on purpose. It would be cheaper, frankly, to drink a pint of old milk.

  I have had makeup applied on several occasions, always while being assured that even up close no one would be able to tell I was wearing any. “It’s literally just like an invisible gel,” one grooming expert told me in the middle of one of these makeovers. For all I know, it came from an invisible bottle. If you told a woman her makeover was undetectable to the naked eye, she’d ask for her money back.

  As far as I’m concerned, all these treatments proved either a complete waste of time or a woefully underpowered solution to an intractable problem. Trying to fix my feet with a pedicure is like trying to cure appendicitis with aromatherapy.

  It’s nice to be looked after, of course, and I’m sure many men endure pointless treatments on a regular basis simply because they like the attention. But after many years of sporadic prodding, primping, and pampering, I have learned two important lessons: a) I do not possess a sense of entitlement large enough to allow me to enjoy this sort of thing; and b) anyone who recommends tea tree oil as a remedy for anything is full of shit. Every cure we have today was invented because the tea tree oil didn’t work.

  15.

  Do I Need a Hobby?

  As a man you have probably had occasion to use the following conversational construct: “If you ever catch me X, then please feel free to Y,” where X may be “building a model railway in my basement,” “starting a pipe collection,” or “reenacting famous battles at the weekend,” and Y is either “shoot me” or “seek power of attorney.”

  I can only suggest you never put such a rash statement in writing. The fear of looking stupid fades dangerously with age, and without it, previously unacceptable pursuits can develop a perverse appeal. Getting older is, by and large, a process of rethinking all one’s little rules about engaging with the world in order to see if there might be a pleasurable or satisfying pastime you haven’t tried because you previously filed it under “would definitely make people think I’m a dick.” This is not an old-man thing: the process begins well before retirement age. Fifty used to be the traditional threshold of unembarrassability, but these days we’re seeing much younger men adopt uncool hobbies unironically.

  A ruling passion is, in spousal terms, something to be tolerated rather than encouraged, because it robs a relationship of time, interaction, and money. There are, of course, many sidelines both husband and wife can engage in, but I’m going to insist that anything promoting togetherness has too much obvious benefit to be considered a hobby. One might argue that an established hobby is good for marriage because it’s mentally therapeutic, but when a man insists his ten-thousand-strong moist towelette collection helps to keep him sane, we are right to question his understanding of the term.

  So what is a hobby? Perhaps our definition would be enhanced by a further exploration of what a hobby isn’t:

  Reading is not a hobby. Reading is something you don’t have time for anymore, because of your hobby—unless you’re reading about your hobby, which doesn’t count as reading.

  Gardening is not a hobby; it’s just outdoor housekeeping. Breeding hybrid orchids is a hobby.

  Relaxing is not a hobby.

  Exercising is not a hobby.

  Going on the Internet is not a hobby. Everyone is on the Internet, always.

  Gambling is not a hobby. Except for poker, and then only if you don’t suck at it. Generally speaking, gambling is an addiction, while a hobby is a disorder.

  Spending time with good friends, good food, and good wine is not a hobby. It’s the opposite of a hobby. You need to get a hobby.

  A hobby is not something you list in the “Other Interests” section of your CV, because a true hobby is something you would never want a prospective employer to know about.

  Perhaps you don’t think of yourself as the hobby sort. You may consider yourself a man of passing interests and ordinary recreations. And you may be right, but a mere pastime can, over time, become a hobby without your noticing. If you’re worried, ask yourself these three questions:

  1. Is your pursuit a banned topic of conversation at suppertime?

  2. Have you ever felt obliged to lie to your spouse about how much money you spend on it?

  3. When you tell other people about it, is their first question always “Why?”

  I never thought of myself as a hobby person. I have trouble concentrating on one thing for too long, and I have a tendency to regard anything I’m not good at straightaway as stupid. When you have children there is no “spare time” anyway—only stolen time, robbed from areas of your life that are meant to be productive. On the whole I prefer to spend my stolen time staring into space.

  Then one day I decide to make some sourdough bread instead. I’d probably once read an article about sourdough that made it sound easier to master than I now know it to be. But something about making bread without commercial yeast appealed to me. I could just use some of the wild yeast that’s in the air all around us, and keep it in captivity. I’m often drawn to skills that sound as if they’ll be useful in some post-apocalyptic landscape (“I am breadmaker, master of the yeasts of the air—please don’t shoot me”) although I’m rarely moved to act on such fantasies. There must have been absolutely nothing on telly that day.

  Making bread also struck as a serviceably domestic indulgence: it would keep me in the kitchen, and could conceivably be counted as a form of household chore. I didn’t make too many claims for it out loud, but I quietly figured a well-turned-out loaf was worth two loads of laundry.

  It’s easy enough to get started with sourdough. You just mix some flour and water in a bowl and leave it somewhere. In that respect it’s a great entry-level hobby. After a few days the mixture gets a bit ripe and starts to bubble. There follows a cycle of feeding—more flour, more water—until the sourdough starter matures, expanding to the extent that you have to start getting rid of it. You do that by making bread with it.

  My first sourdough loaf doesn’t rise at all; it looks like a paving slab and weighs nearly as much. The second doesn’t rise either. Nevertheless, for reasons which are not clear, I’m convinced I’m on the right track. It takes weeks of trial and error to come up with
a loaf that my children can eat, but they don’t like it. My wife keeps trying to talk to me about cleaning up the kitchen between failures, but all I want to talk about is bread.

  I spend hours looking for help online, typing things like “sourdough loaf why giant holes” and “starter going weird help” into Google. I order special implements, DVDs, exotic flours, books, baking stones, and proving baskets. I tinker with the environment my wild yeast lives in, leaving explicit written instructions for its care when I have to go away. When I meet friends they ask me about my bread thing, because they know I have no other topics. For six months I turn out one troubled loaf after another, at the rate of about three a week. I estimate that in all that time I produced five loaves my wife and children actually liked and ate, loaves you might conceivably pay £5 for in a shop, provided you were told some of the money was going to a charity seeking a cure for whatever was wrong with the people who made the bread. I reckon they cost me £44 each.

  At the end of the six months the urge to make bread suddenly leaves me. I think I must have eaten some really nice bread at a restaurant and thought, Why am I wasting my life? I cease all baking. The wild yeasts are left in the cold to perish.

  “Can we throw that away yet?” says my wife, pointing to the moldering bowl of gloop at the back of the fridge two months later.

  “I can’t look at it,” I say. “It’s too sad.”

  “It’s turned black, is all.”

  “If you must,” I say. “I’ll leave the room.”

  That was years ago now, but I’ve had a few bread relapses since—the dark days of January are particularly difficult—so I know I’m susceptible to hobbies. I keep watch for telltale signs of burgeoning enthusiasm, and I squash them.

  On my forty-fourth birthday, my wife presents me with a banjo. This is a surprise for two reasons: 1) I knew she thought my having one was a bad idea; 2) she is not normally given to such extravagance in any case. The next year, she gave me a salad spinner.

  She had known I wanted a banjo, though. I’d briefly held someone else’s the previous Christmas, and became convinced that having one of my own would be the solution to all my least tangible problems.

  It wasn’t. I couldn’t play the banjo. I didn’t understand the instrument at all, and I found the beginner’s instruction manual confusing and disheartening. I’d never even listened to much banjo music before and, on further investigation, I discover that I don’t really like a lot of it. Two months elapse without any discernible progress on my part. I long to give it up. But I can’t.

  This is hard to explain. I’ve quit many things. I’m normally adept at coping with the self-reproach that comes with giving up. But I am kept awake at night thinking about the banjo. I become acquainted with all the many different styles of banjo playing, all of them equally beyond me. I spend a lot of time tuning it up, so it will be ready on the day I can finally play, although I am increasingly certain that day will never come.

  It was clearly a mistake to invest the instrument with any sort of redemptive promise, but I still liked holding it, and most afternoons I end up sitting at my desk with a banjo on my knee, plunking away, and getting nowhere.

  Eventually I discover a series of online instruction videos that start at the very beginning—a bit before the beginning, really—and proceed in small, idiot-friendly increments. I make halting progress, learning a simple song, then another, then another. When I look up from the strings, I notice that a year has passed.

  I begin to sense that I am improving, enough to realize I have a long way to go before I can even consider myself bad. I decide I cannot make further progress without first buying a better banjo. Once I forsake her birthday present for a superior model, my wife relinquishes any obligation she might have felt about pretending not to hate my hobby. She lets it be known that the sound of it is like a curse that has descended on our home. I know what she means—even I am not completely immune—but I am undeterred.

  Soon I am thinking about buying another banjo, one much better than my abilities warrant. I begin to lie about how much I am willing to spend, so that the actual outlay, when it comes, will seem a comparative bargain. My wife refuses to offer any opinion on the figures I present to her, hoping, I suspect, that my conscience will prevail. In the end the amount I pay is closer to my worst exaggeration than it is to my actual limit.

  I still don’t consider it a hobby. It’s worse than that. I play the banjo every day. All day. It sits on a stand next to my desk so I can play when I’m supposed to be working. I just stopped to play it for fifteen minutes between this sentence and the one before it. In fact I wrote that last sentence solely as an excuse to play the banjo for fifteen minutes. For all the effort I put in, I really should be much better than I am.

  It is an entirely private passion, unless you are one of my neighbors. It does not bring joy to those around me—quite the opposite—and it contributes nothing positive to my marriage.

  I know the thing that bothers my wife most about my hobby is not the noise—though she dislikes this intensely—or the time it takes up, or the money I’ve spent. What really irritates her is the fact that I pursue it with a rigor that exists nowhere else in my life. I practice methodically. I look after my banjo with fussy precision: I always keep two sets of spare strings on hand; I have an extra bridge, various accessories (including a banjo mute, which I cannot recommend highly enough), and a collection of banjo tools neatly stored in the case. When it breaks, I arrange for its repair immediately. When we go on holiday, my primary concern is how—not if—I am going to get my banjo there and back. If the banjo doesn’t fit in the car, then neither do I.

  It cannot be pleasant to watch your husband rise to the occasion in a way that he always maintained he was incapable of, all for the sake of a hobby he didn’t have when you met him. I have no excuses for my behavior, or any justification to offer. Unlike bread-making, in a post-apocalyptic landscape my banjo skills would get me killed, possibly after prolonged torture. I am sorely tempted to say that it keeps me sane, which is itself a deeply worrying sign.

  16.

  Fatherhood for Morons

  At the outset of parenthood you may wonder what kind of father you are going to be. Don’t worry: you are going to be your father, more or less. You may have long ago promised yourself you wouldn’t emulate certain questionable parenting choices (“I’ll never lock MY kids in a car while I watch an entire baseball game in a bar!”), but your disciplinary scowl, your strategy for tuning out those parts of a conversation that make no sense, and your habit of telling instructive stories from your past in which you figure as a terrible moral coward, all these will be based directly on your dad’s child-rearing techniques. You won’t even have to think about it; it will just happen. It’s not your fault—you’ve only got the one role model, if that.

  Or perhaps not quite just one. Some people don’t grow up with full-time fathers, or even part-time fathers, or even fathers, but those of us who did still looked further afield for supplementary role models who seemed more progressive, more patient, and more at home in the modern world where we would eventually come to live as grown-ups. They might be the fathers, or the much older brothers, of school friends, or even faintly groovy teachers. Most of my off-site role models came from television, and even then I cherry-picked, ignoring the typical TV dad’s eagerness to punish dishonesty while still admiring his propensity to book vacations to Hawaii.

  My father, however, remains the primary template. Every father-son experience is, in some sense, a son-father experience relived, with the roles reversed and the script unchanged. When it came time for my oldest son to learn to ride a bicycle, I turned it into the sort of rite of passage from which neither party emerges with much credit, simply because that’s how I remember it. That way I could make direct comparisons, improve on my father’s performance, and thereby contribute in some small way to the great sweep of human progre
ss. I would show myself to be trustworthy: if I promised not to let go, I would not let go. I would not allow myself to run short of patience or let it show if I did. It would not be a frustrating, bruising experience. Not this time.

  The bicycle is the boy’s most prized possession, a reward for learning to swim, even though he hasn’t learned to swim. By this time I’ve given up on swimming, fully intent on leaving all future instruction to professionals. But I don’t think you can hire someone to teach your kid to ride a bike.

  For six months I’ve pulled him around the park by a rope wrapped round the handlebars. He does not pedal, although he occasionally squeezes the brake once we’ve got going, in order to pull me off my feet. His balance is not good; whenever we take a bend he leans toward the outside stabilizer, and the bike lists alarmingly. Even after six months, the bike is still a bit big for him. He is apprehensive in the saddle and, like his father, prone to panic. Unfortunately, he is also persistent. He does not get this from me. I don’t understand why we can’t just give up, like we did with swimming.

  Eventually I untie the rope. I tell the boy I’m going to push from behind so he can learn to steer himself. He doesn’t like it. He repeatedly tells me to slow down, even though we’re proceeding by inches. I’m beginning to admire my own forbearance, which is, I have since come to realize, a bad omen. He pedals apprehensively as I jog along behind, applying constant forward pressure to the seat to stop his grinding to a halt. Twice he accuses me of letting go. I repeat my promise, but when my back starts aching from stooping and pushing, I do let go. He is about eight yards ahead of me when the bicycle drifts to the edge of the paved path. He tries to correct himself with a sharp left turn and—this is with the stabilizers still on, remember—tips the bike over. He spills onto the grass and lets out a bloodcurdling scream. The other people in the park turn toward the noise.