How to be a Husband (11 page)

34. A little paranoia is a good thing in marriage; complacency is the more dangerous enemy. You should never feel so secure in your partnership that you are unable to imagine the whole thing falling apart over a long weekend. I can't give you an exact figure for how many sleepless nights per year you should spend worrying that you're going to die alone and unhappy if you don't get your shit together spouse-wise, but it's somewhere between five and eight.

35. Try to speak at least once during the day, every day. If nothing else, it keeps vital channels of communication open and operating.

My wife has a habit of ringing me in the middle of the afternoon, wherever she is. Often there is some cryptic pretext for the call (“Measure our sofa and tell me how deep it is”) but occasionally she checks in for no reason.

“Anything to report?” she says.

“I'm watching a YouTube compilation of dogs wearing shoes for the first time,” I say.

“Sounds rewarding,” she says.

“I mean the dogs are wearing the shoes for the first time. I've actually seen it a number of times already.”

“I won't keep you, then,” she says. “Take the mince out of the freezer.”

It doesn't sound like much, but on such regular exchanges of inanities are rock-solid marriages built.

36. Most marriage counselors recommend that you say five positive things to your partner to counteract every negative thing you say. If five sounds like a lot to you—and it sounds like a lot to me—that ratio at least gives you an idea of the impact of a single negative comment. Dole them out as if they were unbelievably expensive.

37. On those occasions when you cannot bring yourself to say what you feel, at least try to act as though you feel what you say. If you're going to insist that everything's fine, then you should have the decency to behave as if everything is fine.

38. Every partnership is unique: don't feel the need to judge the success of yours in comparison to other relationships you see out there. For the most part, whatever you do to make it work between you is fine, even if no one else seems to handle things in quite the same way. You're even entitled to cherish your relationship's quirks and odd accommodations—just don't mention them to any psychologists you meet at dinner parties.

39. It's never too late to apologize. By which I mean, when it's obviously far too late for saying sorry to do any good at all, you still should.

40. Never bother me when I'm reading. For the sake of balance I asked my wife to contribute a Gross Marital Happiness tip of her own, and this is what she said. My guess is that sooner or later she's going to regret not taking proper advantage of this opportunity.

41. It's okay to talk about your kids when you go out to a restaurant together. You're with the only other person who's actually interested in your kids. Seize the moment.

42. In marriage it's good to express your emotions freely, bar one: surprise. Unless you've just arrived at your own surprise birthday party, looking surprised can be dangerous. It means you've either forgotten something important, or you've misjudged a situation badly. Remember: if you don't look surprised, you aren't surprised.

Bringing Home the Bacon

I
have been married for nearly a year. I'm doing all the things that traditional husbands do, apart from providing. Having spent two years more or less unemployed, I do at least have a job, entering basic information about films into an enormous database. It's one of those odd occupations that existed before web 2.0 came along and the public was somehow persuaded to fill in the Internet themselves, for free.

But it doesn't pay much, my new job. And it doesn't really have a future, beyond the implicit promise that there will always be more data to enter the next day. My wife is working at the BBC, making programs and earning considerably more than me. I have decided that I am modern enough not to let this shame me, but I am not comfortable enough with the situation to imagine things can stay this way. My small financial contribution is vital, but it also isn't enough.

With my twenties behind me, I no longer have much in the
way of prospects. For the previous two years I'd done little beyond sitting at the bar of the restaurant where my friend Pat worked, downing free espresso and doing the crossword. Although I have a degree in English, the only actual skill I possess is basic page layout—the sort of cutting and pasting of copy that involves actual cutting and pasting, with a knife and glue—an occupation that basically disappeared on both sides of the Atlantic during the two years I spent sitting on my ass drinking coffee. Moving to London amounted to starting again from rung one.

In truth the peak of my career had occurred several years before, when I was parking cars outside a restaurant in Boston. It was possible to earn $300 in tips in a night, although $80 to $100 was more the norm. It was a high-adrenaline profession—we had no actual car park, so we worked in pairs to compete for spaces on the streets and in the allies. During my brief training the rules of parking were explained to me by a seasoned valet known as The Iceman. Rule one was “It's okay to hit the car in front.” Rule two was “It's okay to hit the car behind.” Rule three was “It's okay to steal pot from people's glove compartments.”

I got mugged on my first shift, but I went straight back the next night. The hours meant I could hold down another job during the day, and it was as close as I'd ever come in my life to making ends meet. All the time I'd been working at the magazine in New York, I'd been gently tipping into financial ruin.

The months of idleness that followed were not initially difficult—I am naturally indolent; it's a gift—but both my wife and I had, I think, similar expectations of what a proper man should be, and I was not living up to them. She accepted that
circumstances had prevented my working, but I could sense she found my lack of ambition irritating and disappointing, largely because I'd seen this disappointment in other women before. Back when I was still parking cars, my future as an embittered underachiever must have seemed set in stone.

I suppose I did have vague ambitions, or at least desired some sort of future for myself. I didn't know what it was, exactly, but I had a fair idea what it wasn't, which is why I would quit any job as soon as somebody tried to promote me. I wasn't actively bad at most of the paid work I undertook, but I was afraid of getting stuck on a rung somewhere, and I preferred to keep moving. If you're willing to delude yourself, change can feel like progress.

I quit my job at the ice factory after three weeks, shortly after they moved me from block ice to bagged cubes. When they offered to make me assistant manager of the art shop where I worked, provided I was prepared to “work on my attitude,” I worked hard to make sure my attitude got steadily worse. Then I quit.

A couple of years later, when I was temping in the financial aid department of Northeastern University in Boston, my supervisor called me into his office. I thought it was probably about my timekeeping, or the tie I wasn't wearing.

“You've only been here three weeks,” he said, “and you've revolutionized our filing system. What's your secret?”

“Alphabetical order,” I said.

“I'm not sure why you'd want to be facetious at this point,” he said. I rarely spoke at work, and sometimes had trouble controlling my tone.

“Seriously,” I said. “I just put things back where they go.” I hadn't meant to be facetious; it was clear to me, from all the times I'd tried to retrieve a file, that few of my predecessors had considered alphabetical order to be a guiding principle.

My tone notwithstanding, he said he was willing to consider me for a permanent staff position, with better money, paid vacations, and health insurance. So I quit.

Even the failing magazine in New York offered me a belated promotion when I told them I was planning to leave. But I already had a plane ticket to London and a big, blank future ahead of me, so I quit.

That's how I got to be thirty years old, newly married, and still at the foot of the ladder. The previous two years of doing nothing—of sacrificing money for love—had proved more than a little dispiriting. Being a loser, dependent on your girlfriend for a packet of fags, was, in the end, hard work.

My only plan is to put all that behind me, to stick at my new dead-end job and keep an eye out for a better one. I figure I don't need a career path anymore. Being married can be my career; I can be professionally uxorious. All I need is the money.

One August afternoon I get a call from someone who works at
GQ
magazine. The woman at the other end is, she explains, a friend of a friend of mine, but I don't really understand why she's calling me. I haven't applied for a job at
GQ
. It seems unlikely that my reputation for data entry precedes me.

“We have a regular section at the back of the magazine called ‘Man Enough,'” she says. “It's a different topic every month.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And we'd like you to write one, if you want to; they're
about seven hundred fifty words.” I suppose I'd dreamed that something like this would happen to me one day, although I somehow figured I would have to be the one who dialed the number first. I can't figure out how such an offer could just drop into my lap. Then I think: Who cares how?

“Yeah,” I say. “Great. What's the subject?”

“It'll be ‘Man Enough to Live Off Your Girlfriend.'”

“Oh, right,” I say.

Nobody enjoys being summarized. We each have a sense of self that is fluid, expanding, and resistant to definition. That's why it's so painful to read a potted biography of yourself, even when you've written it yourself. I am so much more than this tepid little précis, you think. Words can't contain me.

Now I was being presented with a seven-word summation which, for all I know, is how everyone described me when I was out of the room, or when distinguishing me from other Tims of their acquaintance: you know—the one who lives off his girlfriend.

I realize I have been silent for along time.

“I could send over some copies of the magazine,” says the woman on the phone, “so you get the general idea.”

The general idea is clear from the three back issues I receive the next day: the monthly topic for the first-person “Man Enough” column was evidently selected by the editorial staff, who then went in search of a real-life man who fit the bill. I suppose they just asked round until someone of their acquaintance said, “Somebody who doesn't work? Who just sponges off his girlfriend and does nothing all day? Yeah, I know a dude like that.”

I don't think being an actual writer is a prerequisite for the slot, which is just as well. In the course of my recently acquired day job I'd summarized the plots of four thousand films I'd never seen, but it doesn't amount to much of a cuttings file.

I don't say anything about my inexperience, nor do I mention that I am now both married and gainfully employed. I just say yes.

*   *   *

W
hat I wrote did not do much to challenge the stigma that came with being a man who was not the chief earner in a relationship. Instead, if I recall correctly, I embraced that stigma and reveled in it.

It's not the sort of piece one could write today. In an economy that generally obliges both halves of a couple to work in order to survive, in an era where wage parity is, if not a reality, a commonly accepted goal, and where employment markets are increasingly fluid, we're a lot more at ease with the idea of a man who earns less than his partner, or earns nothing. In nearly a third of couples with children today, the mothers are considered breadwinners, in that they earn as much as or more than their partners.

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.