How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  “Already?” she says when I move in for hug three at about sunset.

  “No one said this was going to be easy,” I say.

  When it comes time for hug four she is nowhere to be found. I know she’s home—the car is out front—but eventually I give up looking. I blame my lack of persistence for this particular strategy’s failure.

  A week or so later I read about something called “whisper therapy.” There isn’t much information about the technique—it’s only mentioned because Madonna and Guy Ritchie are said to be using it to save their marriage. Apparently it involves a lot of eye contact and the regular whispering of certain positive sentiments to one another. It sounds incredibly annoying and, for that reason, I can’t wait to try it.

  I’m not quite sure how to proceed. I don’t know whether Guy and Madonna have preselected and mutually approved the words they whisper to each other, but that seems wrong to me. It ought to be more spontaneous than that.

  Things get off to a bad start. When I steal up behind my wife and whisper, “You are special,” in her ear, she hits me over the head with the hairbrush she is holding.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she shouts.

  “Whisper therapy,” I say. “Ow.” I don’t cite the Grazia article where I first learned about the technique, because I don’t think it will help her understanding of its underlying principles.

  Over the next few days my wife grows eerily patient with my habit of leaning over at odd moments to whisper things like “Nice shoes,” “You’re magic,” and “Kind to animals.” I think she is in denial about the therapy’s awesome power to annoy. I increase the stakes, whispering in her ear when guests come round, to make it clear we are the sort of couple who still share romantic secrets.

  “He says he can’t wait for you to leave,” she tells them.

  “Not really, though,” I say. “It’s just a thing we’re doing. More coffee?”

  A week later Madonna and Guy Ritchie split up, and I call off the experiment. I’m not necessarily suggesting that whisper therapy destroyed their marriage; I just suddenly realized that the only people who resort to crackpot therapies like this one are people whose marriages are all but unsalvageable already.

  Some months later my wife and I enter a phase where we periodically jab each other in the neck with two fingers, accompanying each strike with a short, sharp hiss. We learned the technique from watching Dog Whisperer, and it began as an efficient, no-nonsense way to clear someone from your personal space, or get their attention if they seemed not to be listening. But over time it became a mildly painful form of affection, and then thankfully, it got old.

  Eventually, and largely for the sake of writing a few thousand words on the subject, I convince my wife to attend actual couple’s counseling. It is, in the words of our counselor Andrew G. Marshall, more of a “marriage checkup,” but that doesn’t make the prospect any less nerve-wracking. Although ostensibly nothing is wrong, we’re still making an appointment for a routine examination that could possibly end with us being told our marriage is in a serious condition. This is, after all, what sometimes happens with a real checkup.

  On the way to the first session my wife and I concoct a few problems for Marshall to solve, which is a bit like making up sins to confess so you don’t have to tell the priest what you’ve really been up to. This scheme quickly falls apart—even if you intend to treat it as a journalistic exercise, you can’t spend three hours in a room with a marriage counselor without some genuine issues coming to light.

  The take-home message from our three sessions is that my wife and I speak different “love languages.” She relies on “caring actions”—i.e., doing everything—to demonstrate her love, while I tend to concentrate on clumsy affection. Our problem, it seems, is that we would both prefer to be shown love in the manner we are accustomed to showing it. I am prescribed a course of caring actions: unsolicited aid; spontaneous-sounding praise; small, thoughtful presents. My wife is put in charge of clumsy affection. We continue to fail in this, albeit with a more solid understanding of what we are doing wrong.

  At the peak of the publicity surrounding the 5:2 Diet—the one where you fast for two days a week, and do what you like the other five—I am commissioned to write a piece about using the same on-again, off-again formula to revitalize your marriage. My wife, a devotee of the 5:2 Diet, is intrigued by the prospect of only being married to me two days out of seven, until I explain that it’s not how it works—for two days a week we will be extra-married. Of the multipronged program set up for us by our former marriage counselor Andrew Marshall, the only bit I really practice with any regularity is the sending of romantic texts. On the two nonconsecutive days we attend to our marriage, in between texts that read “pick up booze” and “What printer cartridge do i need,” I slipped in a few saying things like, “I appreciate everything you do.” I know that’s not terribly good, but it’s actually my first go at being saucy.

  More recently I came across a range of intimacy exercises so powerful they are said to be able to make strangers fall in love. Once again I zero in on the easiest of the lot: a few minutes spent facing your partner, with your flat, extended palms as close together as possible without touching one another. The power of this exercise is undeniable—my wife can only stand it for a few seconds without shuddering with something that looks, to the untrained eye, like revulsion. Such is its power to annoy that for two weeks I insist on having a go every time we cross paths.

  My findings on these quick fixes are twofold: none of them really works on its own, but taken together, they sort of do. If marriage teaches you anything, it’s that there is value in the occasional lame gesture and half-assed experiment. It shows you’re trying, and eventually one builds up a little repertoire of rituals that come in handy during those occasional periods when the strain of being together makes easygoing affection hard to come by.

  18.

  Head of Security

  If you were to ask me what, as a husband and father, keeps me up nights, I would answer straightaway: it is the night itself. Nothing brings me more constant, unrelenting anxiety than the obligation to protect my family from unknown, unpredictable harm, the kind that swirls up from the darkness—or occasionally drops from a clear blue sky—without herald. It’s not really anxiety—it’s just plain fear: the fear that I’m not up to the job. Or more precisely, the knowledge that I’m not up to the job. Were the position vacant, I certainly wouldn’t hire myself to fill it.

  It’s not that I am insufficiently paranoid. Whenever I see my children enjoying themselves, my mind begins to enumerate potential hazards. And for every potential hazard I can conceive of, I have a corresponding, gruesomely detailed imagined outcome, all because I spotted a sharp edge and said nothing. So I say something.

  My wife has a name for me that she deploys whenever I start fretting about having more car passengers than seat belts, or I insist that sharp knives are loaded into the dishwasher points down. She calls me Mr. Health and Safety.

  That’s what she called me at that drinks party where the host had just proposed to light the two dozen or so candles decorating her Christmas tree. I was in the middle of making an unpleasant little scene, and ignoring criticism from several guests who said I was being kind of a downer.

  “Have you ever heard of a candlelit Christmas tree not catching fire?” I shouted.

  “I think you’re being a bit paranoid,” said someone.

  “Have you met my husband?” said my wife. “Mr. Heath and Safety?” I made no apologies for my reaction then, nor do I now. Because of my tireless, swivel-eyed insistence, the candles stayed unlit, and thirty people were spared the prospect of dying like characters in an Edith Wharton short story. My children weren’t even there; I was just trying to keep them from being orphaned.

  I wasn’t always this way. I have a history of personal recklessness. Once, on coming home witho
ut keys after a night out, I climbed the facade of my apartment building in Boston with a knife in my teeth to slit the screen of an open second-story window. I don’t suffer from any debilitating or unattractive phobias; I don’t much enjoy being in the same room as an uncaged bird, but I can cope.

  I do, however, suffer several disorders on behalf of my children, the most crippling of which is acrophobia-by-proxy. I cannot watch them hang over balcony railings, or gambol on clifftop coastal paths, and I will not share anything described as a viewing platform with them. They’re the ones who stick their heads through the bars to spit on the cars below, but I’m the one who gets the vertigo: my heart pounds, my palms sweat, my vision undulates. When they were little I used to hold them by their shirt collars whenever we had to use a pedestrian bridge. Now that they’re teenagers they won’t permit this, but the urge, I assure you, has not left me.

  I still remember the feeling of panic that came over me watching the youngest crawl around on the glass floor of our London Eye capsule, and I still get dizzy recalling our two-day visit to the Grand Canyon. I can’t even look at the photos.

  Although my antennae are always attuned to danger, real and imagined, that is no cause for anybody to feel secure in my presence. I could go round saying I’d do absolutely anything to protect my family, but I have a rough idea of what I’m capable of, and I know perfectly well it isn’t good enough. All the time I’ve spent looking anxiously out of windows, or fretting late into the night, or crawling through playground equipment with one hand gripping a tiny ankle, or standing on the shore, scanning the waves and counting heads—these have amounted to no kind of vigilance at all. Keeping my family safe and well is largely a matter of hoping circumstances will conspire to keep my limits untested.

  And for the most part, they have. But not without some notable exceptions. Occasionally that nameless dread that keeps me up nights takes on hard edges, rears up in my face, and tells me its name.

  In January 1998 the oldest one, who had just turned three, developed a high fever over a number of days. Our GP took one look at him, stabbed him in the thigh with a massive injection of antibiotics, and told my wife not to wait for an ambulance, but to drive straight to hospital. By the time she got in touch with me she was hysterical, having had to beg a stranger for his parking space so she could carry a listless toddler through the doors of the emergency room.

  “What do they think it is?” I said.

  “Suspected meningitis.”

  I was holding the middle one at the time, who was ten days old. He couldn’t go to the hospital and my wife, who was breastfeeding, couldn’t stay. As soon as the oldest one was admitted we swapped places. I spent three nights on a mat next to his bed, while a nurse came every hour to note his vital signs and check the drip that ran into his arm, secured with bandages and a splint so he couldn’t pull it out. It was the first time I’d felt that peculiar combination of terror, powerlessness, and a very bad back, but it would not be the last.

  * * *

  In November 1999 my wife woke me to say that she’d heard a noise.

  “What kind of noise?”

  “Like a bang,” she said. “From downstairs.”

  I got up and walked to the landing, from where I stared down into the blackness and listened. After five minutes I went back to bed. Only when I woke up in the morning did I notice the splintered front door hanging loosely from a twisted dead bolt. Although the perpetrator did not ultimately gain entry, he did manage to destroy one of the most expensive things we owned: our front door.

  My wife called the police. I went and had a bath, where I spent a long time thinking about the risk an intruder might have posed to my family, and my failure to investigate a noise even to the extent of turning a light on, because I was sleepy. By the time I got downstairs a policeman was examining trainer prints on the outside of the door.

  “Here’s the have-a-go hero himself,” said my wife. I tried to explain that I was guilty not of cowardice, but of a total failure to grasp the situation. In the cold light of day it sounded a rather lawyerly distinction.

  “I would have done the same thing myself, sir,” said the policeman, but we both knew I hadn’t done anything.

  When the youngest was a newborn I left him asleep in his pram in a fish shop, completely forgetting that I owned an infant. I then walked half a mile to a playground to meet my wife, without it once occurring to me that I might be missing something. I was still wondering how to explain my decision to purchase two dozen goose barnacles to her when she looked at me and said, “Where’s the baby?” I was lucky. I know for a fact that no one in that shop would have batted an eyelid if a sweaty, panting, furtive-looking oddball had suddenly burst through the door and run off with a sleeping infant, because no one took any notice when I did it.

  On a beach in Cornwall the following summer, the middle one, aged two, toddled behind a rock formation and tipped soundlessly into a deep pool, conking his head on the way down. At the time I had my back to the sea and was busy trying to get my towel laid out just so. The first I heard of the incident was when a stranger with a wet child in his arms started shouting, “WHOSE BABY IS THIS?”

  Not long after that, the youngest one was rushed to hospital with a high fever. Once again, my wife rang me from the hospital.

  “What do they think it is?” I said.

  “Suspected Kawasaki disease.”

  By this time the Internet had become quite a thing, and there was no need for my fears to be contained by the limits of my imagination: within seconds I was reading a terrifying list of complications. Fortunately the hospital where the child was lying listless and feverish was Britain’s leading treatment facility for Kawasaki disease. Even more fortunately, he didn’t have it. But before we found that out I spent another sleepless night on a hospital floor, trying to find the words to ask a God I simultaneously feared and didn’t believe in for help.

  On the morning of July 7, 2005, when bombs were detonated across London as my children were on their way to school, I was on a train to Paris with a bunch of sandwich-board signs with French slogans ostensibly designed to console Parisians over their loss of the Olympics to London the previous day, or, if you like, to rub their noses in it. I was meant to march around the city with them strapped to me, front and back, in order to attract as much opprobrium as possible. So much did I regret accepting this assignment that I’d spent most of the previous night wishing a disaster would arise to prevent my carrying it out, although to be honest I was thinking of something more along the lines of a small fire in the Channel tunnel.

  A month later a nail bomb was discovered in the park across the road from where we live, having been dumped there a week previous by one of the more reluctant July 26 bombers. I spent the next forty-eight hours of enforced indoor living—while policemen with machine guns patrolled the pavement—trying to reassure my children that the world was still a nonterrifying place, basically by shouting, “Look! Our house is on TV!” A week after that, when we discovered that the bombers were more or less our neighbors, I employed the same tactic: “Look! Our house is on TV again!”

  One night the following summer I was awakened by a loud noise I could not square with the deathly silence that followed. Can you dream a noise loud enough to wake you? While I was considering the possibility I fell back asleep. In the morning I found the front window wide-open, and everything portable of value—money, credit cards, laptops, phones, iPods—missing from downstairs. I realized we’d been robbed by the sort of burglar who wants you to be home—he’s after the stuff you take with you when you go out—and is probably prepared for the possibility that you might wake up and raise objections. I was rather grateful to have slept through the whole thing. It saved me having to make a difficult moral choice between cowering in fear and getting beat up.

  Not long after that, my oldest son reached the age where boys start getting mugged by other bo
ys on their way to and from school. The other two soon followed. As a father I find few things more upsetting than having to hear these regular tales of confrontation. For a child there are few things less useful than advice rendered after the fact. I’m never quite sure what to say anyway.

  As someone who spent the better part of his childhood poised on a continuum somewhere between fear and embarrassment, I am perhaps not in the best position to offer tips on how to cope with bullying and intimidation. There’s only one instructive story from my past I ever trot out for them, and I don’t actually come out of it very well.

  When I was twelve I got cornered by a larger boy—although my age, he was six inches taller, with a dense beard—between two rows of lockers after gym class. He walked over and rested a giant foot on the bench where I was sitting. “You,” he said. “Tie my shoe.”

  At first I pretended not to hear, and continued getting dressed. When he repeated the words, I looked up as if I had not realized he was speaking to me. Then I affected not to understand the exact nature of his demand. I acted as if it were merely rhetorical, an insult requiring no action from me other than to seem a bit hurt. Then I pretended to assume the demand was actually a generous offer that I was, alas, too humble to accept. Then I admitted—as if this were the real secret I’d been trying to hide all along—that I was really bad at tying laces, and that he was better off seeking help almost anywhere else. I expressed all this haltingly, sometimes drifting off in midsentence while I did up a few more buttons on my shirt. Eventually a bell rang, a gym teacher strolled by, and my tormentor lost interest in me as a victim.

  “In the end it doesn’t matter what you say,” I tell my children. “The point is, you must never tie the shoe.”