How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  None of this thinking featured in my attempt to unpick the Sheilas’ Wheels conundrum for my son. His nose for actuarial injustice notwithstanding, he would have been quite perplexed by the idea of misandry. It wasn’t society’s inbuilt bias against men that led to their paying higher insurance premiums in the first place (Sheilas’ Wheels ain’t no radical feminist collective; it’s part of Esure). It was always just about the money.

  He would not then, or now, accept that the goofy, postadolescent male characters who populate Judd Apatow films collectively constitute some sort of gender slur. When he sees a bumbling, incompetent dad in an oven cleaner advert, it doesn’t hurt his feelings. When he compares Homer Simpson’s “half-assed underparenting” with mine, he does not spy a feminist conspiracy—only eerie parallels.

  I don’t suppose I have ever inculcated my sons with anything better than my own personal brand of feminism (full support from someone who gracelessly accepts he’s part of the problem), but I married a feminist with the same sort of foresight that led my mother to marry a dentist—she knew it would come in handy later on. If nothing else my sons will always know they have nothing to fear from feminism, that it’s not feminism’s fault that boys lag behind girls at school, or that there are loads more men than women in jail, or that men are involved in twice as many car accidents as women every year. If you are the son of a feminist, you can’t really argue that feminism has held you back in any way. In fact, feminists are really the only people who discuss male issues with any solemnity. Men, by and large, keep quiet.

  Whenever people seek to blame a specific group—immigrants, robots, feminists—for a difficulty that is transparently not their fault, it’s usually because the problem in question is intractable, with varied and disputed causes and no obvious solution. But in many cases the big problems facing men are simple and eminently solvable. And the solutions lie with men.

  We could improve male health statistics instantly, for example, if only men could be persuaded to go to the doctor more. Nobody really needs to be convinced of this. It’s not a solution that requires any great innovation, or even intervention. All men have to do is, you know, change.

  This is easier said than done, of course—ask women. Of course you should go to the doctor more—you know that—but I never go to the doctor, and I can’t think of an argument that would persuade me to go, much less make you go. This is not me not telling you not to, by the way. You definitely should.

  There are many things we could do to improve the lot of men, within and without marriage and family. My simple six-point plan is a bit brutal, and possibly a little anti-men, but I think it’s a start:

  Go to the doctor more. Try to think of looking after yourself as some kind of survival skill. Because that’s precisely what it is.

  Obey all safety guidelines issued by your workplace. Try to think of not getting injured as part of your job description.

  Take steps to protect vulnerable men and boys. They are among the most overlooked people in society.

  Seek common cause with feminists. They’ve done more to make the world a nicer place for men than men have.

  Remember that men includes gay men. If we’re going to stick up for our gender, let’s not forget those at the actual chalk face of discrimination.

  Avoid deploying casually sexist obscenities, even if you’re using them on men, unless you really need to make a point in short order.

  Stop driving like a dick.

  When the new EU rules dictating gender-neutral insurance premiums came into force at the end of 2012, Sheilas’ Wheels products were insulated from the worst impact of the inevitable price rises, ironically because most of its half a million car insurance customers were women (they’ve always offered car insurance to men—who knew?—but only fifty thousand of its main driver policyholders were male). Under those circumstances it makes more sense to subsidize cheaper insurance for the men already on the books. Now that they can’t charge them higher premiums, the only deterrent to men from signing up with Sheilas’ Wheels is the name and the overwhelming use of pink on the website. It may well be enough.

  I’m sure my son would have considered this outcome a victory for common sense, had he not by then turned eighteen and completely forgotten about his former outrage. But his innocent demand for fairness all those years ago seems to me to herald a future where men might fight their corner without rancor, without blaming feminism, without wasting time bemoaning the loss of some bygone notions of masculinity that were themselves imprisoning, and above all without the rank misogyny that taints, and frankly nullifies, much of the present debate.

  20.

  Subject to Change

  I am, in so very many ways, not the man my wife married. To present just one small example: I am, at the time of writing, wearing a beard. Not a false one—it’s attached.

  For almost twenty years my wife knew me as a clean-shaven man. Well, not entirely; there have certainly been times in my life where I’ve lost the will to shave, mornings when I’ve looked in the bathroom mirror, razor in hand, and said to myself, “Have you got a bail hearing today? No? Then what are we doing here?”

  But I always shaved for parties and photographs, and I never let it slide for more than a week, because I didn’t want to end up with a beard. The beard, along with the hat and the bow tie, was for most of my lifetime filed under the generic style heading “NO.” Beards, as far as I was concerned, were for lumberjacks and castaways. I couldn’t conceive of a beard being a positive attribute. I had what I thought were strong, if ill-defined, objections to facial hair. Whenever I saw a man who appeared to be sporting some intentionally I would think: What could possibly be wrong with your face that’s worse than a beard?

  Then one day about two years ago, I grew one. I don’t recall making an actual decision, but that’s the great thing about a beard—it just happens by itself. It’s the product of something you’re not doing, the point where sloth meets affectation—the sweet spot I’ve been searching for my whole life.

  Although it hardly counts as an achievement, the beard nevertheless became a talking point. “Hey, nice beard,” friends would say, as if I’d knitted it. I really could not have done less to earn people’s interest in me, or the subsequent polarization of opinion: I soon became aware of a section of the female population that doesn’t like beards at all, but also of another section that will treat you as if you have a cute puppy strapped to your chin. I realized that I didn’t know whether my wife fell into either of these categories. So taken was I with my new image—indeed, with having an image at all—that I forgot to consult the one person who mattered.

  I was more than a month in when I finally said to my wife, “So, do you, um, like the beard?”

  She appraised my face as if the question had not yet occurred to her—as if this were the first time she’d actually noticed anything was different.

  “I don’t mind the beard,” she said. She looked at me again, as if perhaps she’d spoken too soon, but then she walked away without adding anything. And that was it—another odd change accommodated, folded into the marriage without protest or ceremony.

  My wife is—in just as many ways—not the same woman I married. The woman I married claimed such a profound dislike of theater that I assumed she had a phobia about sharing an enclosed space with actors. I spent years trying to convince her she was wrong, but even when I was permitted to buy theater tickets she would invariably develop an illness on the day of the performance, and I would have to take one of the children. The thought of going actually made her sick.

  Then, without warning, she changed her mind. She went to something and, to her surprise, she enjoyed it. She overcame her lifelong resistance to musicals. She started buying tickets for shows she’d read about. If I couldn’t come, she’d go on her own. She went from phobic to aficionado, inside a year.

  “I love a play, me,” she says as we eme
rge from a seven-hour adaptation of The Great Gatsby, the one where they read the entire book out loud. This is a little irritating for the person who spent years sitting next to a child, but it’s definitely an improvement: I can add it to a long list of things she has suddenly seen the point of after years of dismissiveness or hostility: shellfish, exercise, certain friends of mine, the Internet, etc.

  It is perhaps the most unforeseen aspect of a long marriage, this need to accommodate change—sometimes abrupt or remarkable change—in the other person. The best thing about marriage, at least initially, is that no change is required: someone is willing to marry you as you are, rubbish bits included. You don’t have to fix anything—in fact you’re under a bit of an obligation not to tinker. You can get richer or poorer, sicker or healthier, but you are meant to remain fundamentally you.

  It doesn’t quite work that way. You can know someone, but not for long. After twenty years of marriage even your cells will have been replaced several times over. Along the way opinions change, certainties erode, beliefs evaporate. Circumstances oblige us to become very different people in a relatively short space of time. At the beginning neither of you knows what kind of parent, or middle-aged person, the other will make. If you’re lucky you both accede to full adulthood at roughly the same rate, in vaguely complementary ways.

  Not all change in marriage can be hailed as progress, or even neutral adjustment. Sometimes people adopt unpleasant habits or objectionable political views. My wife has recently acquired a taste for the sort of rubbish reality television you find on MTV, and she’s started playing Candy Crush on her phone in bed. The latter, in particular, drives me insane.

  “Why?” she says. “Is it because you hate me being good at things?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s because I’m tired, and there’s a multisocket extension lead on my pillow.”

  “My phone needs charging, and the cord wouldn’t reach.”

  I’ll admit that I myself am not necessarily getting better every day in every way, and that many of my changes for the worse were unexpected. My wife couldn’t have known when she met me that I would one day be nearly impossible to contact by e-mail, because there was no e-mail. How could I warn her? Back then I could never have envisaged a dystopian future where strangers could submit written questions to you while you were sitting alone in a room minding your own business.

  She could not have predicted that I would develop a pathological hatred of the bread-slicing machine at Sainsbury’s, that I would refuse to slice and bag our bread, even when specifically instructed to do so, and would instead make false claims about the machine being out of order.

  “That’s a lie,” she says. “You just couldn’t be arsed.”

  “I think there were some fingers stuck in it or something,” I say. “No one wanted to talk about it.”

  Cumulatively these changes, both little and large, add up to two totally different people over the course of two decades. My wife is patently not the same woman I married, the woman who used to smoke but now chews nicotine gum, and who deposits the chewed pieces in the little well of the door handle of the driver’s side of the car until it’s practically overflowing with them, so that sometimes when she slams the door a few bounce out and land on the seat, and then the next person who drives sits on them unawares, and gets stuck there.

  This disgusting and wholly unforeseen habit aside, to me she remains very like the girl I met in New York almost a quarter century ago, in that, from time to time, she still scares the shit out of me. That much, I think, will never change.

  Conclusion

  One day, midmarriage: I have a terrible assignment, and I hate it. In the service of an article I’m writing about life coaching, I’ve signed up with an Internet life coach, and he has e-mailed me some exercises to complete. For the first one I’m supposed to make a list of my qualities. Each statement must subscribe to the format “I am [quality].” The life coach wants a list of twenty qualities, but I’m not even sure I have twenty. The assignment is almost a week overdue, and the prospect of even beginning it makes me feel light-headed. I prefer to engage in introspection on my own terms.

  At some point I decide it’s worth trying to convert my problem into my wife’s problem, because she has a knack for making the stupid and impossible seem stupid and simple. It’s okay with the life coach—one is encouraged to enlist the aid of friends and family—but on this occasion it proves to be a mistake. My wife looks at the sheet of paper on which I have written nothing other than “MY QUALITIES,” and a single, trailing, “I am . . .”

  “Let’s see,” she says. “Helpful? No. Compassionate? No. Engaging? No. Sympathetic? No . . .”

  “I see I’ve caught you in a peculiar mood,” I say.

  “. . . Brave? No. Thoughtful? No. Enthusiastic? No . . .”

  “Okay, thanks for your help,” I say. “I can take it from here.”

  I leave the room thinking I should just write “I am married” and be done with it. The episode is not unlike one of our periodic unscheduled assessment evenings, when my wife suddenly decides to update my biographical index: Tim, the recent failings of; as bad parent; as emotional half-wit; laziness of; selfishness of; various undischarged obligations of. It is a condition of her gracious acceptance of my shortcomings as a husband and father that she is allowed to sit me down from time to time to tell me all about them.

  When you become a husband there is no minimum requirement for competence; it is no surprise to me that I’m not terribly good at it, even after all this time. The bar was always set low, and insofar as it’s been raised by cultural forces during my tenure, I have been content to limbo under it. Personally, I’ve always felt that being a good husband and father is a simple matter of occasionally reminding one’s wife and children that they could do a whole lot worse.

  “Seriously,” I say. “Look around you.” There is, of course, a bit of misdirection involved in pointing out that lots of families are saddled with terrible menfolk. I’m not only trying to draw their attention away from me, but also from all the husbands and fathers who are doing a much better job than I am—the fearless, the engaged, the charming, the well dressed. Forget about them, I’m saying. Concentrate on the deadbeats, and consider yourselves lucky.

  Another assignment: in the middle of our first ever marriage counseling session, a recent episode from our lives is being scrutinized in some detail. The roof needed urgent repair, and my wife had to organize the entire project. I was, I freely admit in a spirit of full disclosure, no help at all. The counselor turns to my wife.

  “What’s it’s like,” he says, “for you to always have to be the adequate person?”

  Ultimately, my experience of being a husband has been one of inadequacy, of not doing enough or being enough, and that having to suffice. It’s often painful—by getting married I opened myself to a pretty comprehensive exploration of my capacity to disappoint. I could have easily arranged for myself a more solitary and insular life, where my deficiencies were less apparent, or obvious only to me. But the struggle to improve my performance, though rarely met with reward, is itself rewarding. Just like with DIY, I try not to let repeated failure get me down. To be an inadequate little man and still get up every morning and carry on—there’s a kind of weird dignity in that.

  My marriage is not, I would argue, a stereotypical tale of a hapless idiot rescued by a woman of great competence and extreme emotional literacy (though if you wish to read it that way, I can hardly object). The balance of capability may be tipped in my wife’s favor, but like many pretty-successful-so-far marriages, ours is the product of a number of trade-offs. Occasionally there are instances when being married makes my life so much easier that it feels like I’m cheating, but this is just an aspect of the gear-like meshing of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. One of us is outgoing and proactive; the other remembers what happened in the previous episode of Breaking B
ad. One of us can’t gut and scale a fish, and one of us can’t be in the same room as an uncaged bird. I don’t think it’s important that you know which one is me.

  * * *

  Over twenty years ago I took a series of decisions, not all of them transparently wise, to which I have ascribed a single motivation: love. But if I’m honest, leaving my old life behind had, at that time, many unspoken attractions (it’s not a bad idea to examine one’s past for mercenary taint occasionally, since the fingerprints of self-interest can turn up all over the purest of intentions). Frankly, someone as timid and unhappy as I was then would have to be a fool to turn down a chance to reinvent himself at twenty-seven, to slip his moorings and sail off somewhere else, with love as his justification.

  It was also easy, and the moment it got hard, I considered retreat. In those early days, when I found myself obliged to return to America for long periods whenever my tourist visa expired, my old life inevitably regained some of its former traction, the familiar tug of the path of least resistance. In dark moments I began to think about my future in terms of what wasn’t meant to be. There were a few phone calls during which my English girlfriend expressed similar doubts, and suggested it might be better if I didn’t come back.

  “I just thought it was hopeless,” she said when I asked her about it recently.

  “What made you change your mind?” I said.

  “What makes you think I’ve changed my mind?”

  Fortunately for me (and her—let’s not forget her), I didn’t listen.

  Ultimately I don’t want to give love too much credit, if only because it was clear from the beginning that love alone would not be enough. Love may be the reason we embarked on the whole voyage in the first place, but the success of the expedition so far is, I think, down to another factor: we made a deal. Marriage is a bargain struck, and ours has held. Not bad for a contract that from the beginning contained the words “We can always get divorced.”