How to be a Husband (15 page)

SOME INDEPENDENT FINANCIAL ADVICE

• All the financial planning advice you will ever receive as a couple comes with an unspoken but implicit step one: First, Get Hold of a Bunch of Spare Money. If you have completed step one, the rest is easy. If you haven't, any subsequent advice is useless.

• If you do come across a bunch of spare money, and you also have a mortgage, then you should use all the extra money to pay down your mortgage. You probably won't, but you should at least give it some thought, if only so you realize that it isn't really spare money at all.

• The most important financial skill in any marriage is the ability to treat money—or more specifically a lack of it—as
a common enemy. Don't fight about the money. Fight the money.

• Cede control where appropriate. It's simple: if you're stupid about money, then you need to defer to the person in your marriage who isn't. Earning more of the money, or all of it, shouldn't grant you any special influence over its dispensation. It's not your money—you're married.

• The priorities of family spending are remarkably straightforward, and should not normally leave you with leftover money to argue about. Knotty questions of pride, status, power, and independence are for people who have come across a bunch of spare money, in which case I should have your problems.

• If you're married, you need a joint account. An unwillingness to commingle your finances is, essentially, a reluctance to commit, and demonstrates either a lack of faith, a predilection for deceit, or a certain pessimism regarding the future.

• A periodic reckoning of where you stand financially is the best way to avoid a possible marriage-ending panic about debt. If your finances appear to be on a solid footing, including a comfortable savings cushion in case of future downturns or emergencies, check your figures. You've either forgotten something or you've added wrong.

IN SICKNESS

“It started four days ago, with a little sandpapery catch at the back of my throat,” I say, pausing to examine my tongue in the bathroom mirror. “Then came the usual blocked nose;
followed by streaming eyes and intense sinus pain. Yesterday, of course, was all about the chesty cough.”

I am saying all this to myself, because my wife left the room as soon as I uttered the words, “I'm ill.” She has no more interest in my symptoms than she does in my most recent dream.

“But now my throat hurts all over again,” I say. “Which is weird.”

In direct violation of the contractual clause that figures so prominently in old-fashioned wedding vows, neither my wife nor I has any patience when the other is in sickness. We have both developed a remarkable tolerance for illness in children—my kids are certainly the only people who've ever thrown up on me whom I've subsequently sought to reassure by characterizing the incident as no big deal—but our distaste for spousal ill health is unyielding.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Neither of us could be described as members of nature's nursing squad, nor are we model patients. Spouses often get the same contagious illnesses at the same time, generally from each other, so there's always the difficult question of where to lay blame. Malady is also a competitive arena, where men are said to cheat through exaggeration, while women possess certain genetic advantages: they are, for example, immune to man flu.

Make no mistake: this is a double failing, and a big one. When you see how much comfort a little sympathy, and a portable telly, can bring to a bedridden child, it's not hard to imagine what a fraction of the same could do for a marriage. Treating
a poorly spouse with an attitude that could best be summed up as “I'll love you again when you're better” is not at all conducive to Gross Marital Happiness. In our house this indifference is not confined to the odd head cold.

I have the normal range of maladies for a man my age, plus a few so rare I've been obliged to name them myself.
*
I also have a bad back. At one time I thought of it as a mildly interesting part of my character, a Kennedy-esque infirmity that I bore with much stoicism and a certain amount of silent wincing. It seemed, if nothing else, a noble enough reason to excuse myself from a parents' evening: “My back's gone; sorry.”

My wife does not feel the same way about my long-standing complaint. She thinks it's boring, and an unworthy topic of conversation. Whenever my back goes out she finds the timing opportune. If the problem persists for more than a day she grows suspicious, because it's impossible to determine the extent to which I'm exaggerating my symptoms.

“That rubbish needs to go out,” she says, pointing to two full-to-splitting black sacks side by side on the kitchen floor. She can see that I am leaning over in the doorway like a flower with a bent stem, but she chooses to ignore my obvious incapacity. I haven't come down for tea and sympathy—just tea. In hindsight, it was a hideous miscalculation. After a long sigh, I shuffle toward the rubbish.

“I know your back hurts,” she says. “Stop acting.” She
has always refused to accept that extreme lower back pain comes with its own set of behaviors: walking with a hesitant, asymmetrical gait, head to one side, as if the room had suddenly tilted; sinking to one knee to retrieve things from the floor; frequent small grunts of pain, or louder gasps, if your wife is in a different room; an expression of deep uncertainty when rising from a chair. Of course I'm acting; on its own a bad back doesn't look like anything. If I didn't walk around the house looking like a depressed question mark, no one would know I was suffering. In terms of visible signs of distress, those stigmatics have it easy.

I turn and position myself between the two sacks. Squatting and grabbing them each by their slimy top knots, I attempt a straight-backed clean and jerk. But one sack is much heavier than the other, wrenching me into a painful posture. I can't help it—I yelp like a kicked dog.

“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 nowhere 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.