How to be a Husband (16 page)

Insofar as I have a fashion esthetic, it places no upper limits on the amount of damage a garment must endure to be deemed unwearable. Because I work from home it hardly matters whether my collars are frayed or my sweaters have elbows. I
favor heelless socks and shirts with paint on them. The only thing I can't endure is a pair of trousers with holes in both pockets. No matter how much I liked them beforehand, once the pockets have gone, they're dead to me.

I wish I could maintain that my relaxed approach to dressing reflected an underlying self-confidence, but my lack of interest only serves to fuel my paranoia when I have to go places where my wardrobe might be judged and found wanting. For years I wouldn't even walk down Savile Row, for fear that someone with a tape measure round his neck would lean out of a window and shout, “Hey, pal! Gap's that way!”

To be honest, my interest in men's fashion only began when I started dressing my children. It is never lost on the fathers of small boys that their clothes boast both envious simplicity and effortless style. Toddlers can carry off blue shoes, even on the wrong feet. They know how to accessorize a dull ensemble by sticking a lollipop on the back. They dare to live by such bold maxims as “When in doubt, inside out” and they are entirely at home with the concept of asymmetry. Above all, they carry themselves with casual insouciance at all times. I once watched my middle son, then four, cinch up his too-big trousers by folding over the waistband until they were the ideal length.

“Did you invent that?” I said. He shrugged and turned his back, giving me a view of his front pockets.

“Actually, I think you've got those on backward,” I said.

“It doesn't matter,” he said. And he was right—it didn't.

It only works, of course, because they're young. Had I ever hoped that as my sons got bigger some sort of fashion cross-
pollination—their effortless style joined with my money—would end up benefiting my wardrobe, I would have been sorely disappointed. When the oldest one eventually grew to be the same size as me, we did not, as a mother and daughter might, start swapping separates to fill out ensembles that mixed old and new, the safe with the daring. Instead all my white shirts disappeared overnight, commandeered without permission to supplement the boy's school uniform list. The next time I found one and put it on I noticed it had little cocks drawn all over the cuffs in blue pen. I'm afraid I can't carry that off with insouciance.

IN THE MIRROR

The seminal 1936 handbook
Do
'
s and Don
'
ts for Husbands
retains, on most subjects, an admirable relevance. “Don't buy a motor cycle and side car without first consulting your wife,” for example, is still timeless advice. Unfortunately the book is curiously reticent on the subject of grooming.

“Don't expect to be numbered among the good mannered if you use a nail file, comb or toothpick otherwise than in a dressing room” is about all it has to say on the matter. Wise as it is, this counsel doesn't quite address the modern phenomenon known as metrosexuality. For men, you will have heard, the stigma of taking pride in one's appearance has long since evaporated. It's okay to exfoliate. In fact, it's become a bit of a faux pas to let your skin stay on.

Let's not get too carried away. Half of men between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five may be happy to describe themselves as “metrosexual,” but the word itself is a fairly cautious coinage, an adjective that basically means “I live in an urban area and I'm not gay.” It doesn't constitute an admission that you wear makeup to work. Men don't necessarily want to own up to being assiduous groomers, even if, as it is often claimed, we now are.

The evidence cited for this contention is an admittedly massive growth in the men's grooming sector: sales of men's skin-care products rose by £22 million last year, and the total market is worth something like £600 million. The top male moisturizer enjoyed a 188 percent annual sales hike. But this is not necessarily a sign that we are becoming more body-conscious, or measurably dandier, only that we are buying more stuff. Actually it's estimated that half of all male grooming products sold are purchased by women, so we're not even necessarily buying it. We're being gifted it, on birthdays and at Christmas, thanks to a national failure of imagination.

We're not so much exploring new territory here as going over old ground. At the turn of the twentieth century, men expended a great deal of time and effort on their appearance. Ordinary barbershop service often included a shave, a manicure, and the application of scents, tonics, oils, and unguents. When the Gillette disposable razor was introduced, self-shaving was marketed as a macho alternative to what advertisements called “the ladylike massage-finish of the tonsorial artist.” A hundred years later, the ladylike massage finish is all the rage.

It could be that metrosexuality is not quite the revolution in body-consciousness we've been led to believe. In the US, sales
of men's skin-care products actually dipped by 10 percent in 2010. Superdrug's Taxi Man line of male makeup (products invariably attracting jokey names like “guyliner” and “manscara”), launched in 2008, has quietly disappeared from the shelves. Almost a third of the men's grooming market is actually composed of shaving stuff. The bulk of the rest is shampoo, conditioner, and deodorant. The market is undoubtedly growing, but the simple fact remains that three-quarters of men over the age of eighteen still don't use any skin-care products.

Perhaps, like me, you remain metroskeptical; maybe you've purchased one or more of these products, possibly because you were feeling buy-curious.
*
Don't worry—I am not going to speak out against men using beauty products, because I have tried many—mainly women's beauty products. One of the advantages of being a husband is that you don't need to buy any creams, gels, or scrubs of your own—they're sitting there already, one shelf over, begging to be sampled. You don't even need to buy deodorant.

These products may not be packaged to appeal to men, but if, like me, you've ever been reduced to using a baby wipe as aftershave, you are probably well beyond the insecurity that prevents an adult male from buying moisturizer unless it's marketed as a hangover cure.

My bathroom cupboard contains two types of face polish. Both are made by the same company. One is intended for women, the other for men, the main difference being that the latter container is a manly brown. One was purchased by my
wife, the other came from a goody bag I picked up at a party, even though the bag was clearly marked “David Walliams.” Let Walliams buy his own face polish, I thought. There were some gin miniatures in there as well, which I drank in the taxi home. Anyway, the ingredients listed on both versions of the face polish are identical. They even smell the same.

It's probably a good test of the value of any male grooming product you're tempted to buy: is it so remarkably effective or confidence-boosting that you would happily purchase its female-targeted equivalent, the one with the butterfly on the label? Male vanity is nothing new, after all, and if you still won't countenance using a treatment that isn't disguised as a box of cigars, then perhaps you're not as metrosexual as you think you are. Fortunately for you, I have nothing to prove; I've tested many of these products over the years. Here are some of my findings:

• Facial scrub.
  Hurts to use. Doesn't really do anything—if you shave more than once a week, what's left to exfoliate?—and you end up with microbeads in your ears.
  
• Under-eye repair gel.
  Stings if you get it in, rather than under, your eyes. Doesn't repair anything. Occasionally handy for sticking down wayward eyebrow hairs, but this would be an expensive solution for such a chronic problem.
  
• Anti-aging mask.
  Doesn't do anything. At the end of the day, it's not even a very good mask—most people would know it was you.
  
• Face polish.
  Requires one to embrace the rather alien notion that it is desirable, even important, to polish one's face. Doesn't do anything.
  
• Beauty serum.
  No added beauty detected after several liberal applications. Wife no less beautiful despite mysterious disappearance of half the contents of tube.
  
• Lift and luminate night cream.
  Doesn't do either. No adverse effects if accidentally used during the day.
  
• Tinted moisturizer.
  Gives the skin on your face an even, “natural” tone, in the same sense that morticians use the word “natural.”
  

While it's perfectly acceptable—from a gender parity perspective—for men to slather themselves in the same stuff that woman slather themselves in, we are still stuck with the troublesome fact that none of it works. No one is sorrier about this than I am, although I'll admit I take a certain pleasure in being the bearer of bad news.

The modern male is in the happy position of being alive in an age where the stigma associated with high levels of vanity (levels of vanity that have always, of course, existed) has faded, and yet none of us is actually required to adopt the new paradigm of grooming. Only one of the goalposts has moved. Our male cultural conditioning does not oblige us to take heroic measures against time and nature, to indulge in pointless expenditure, or to waste half an hour rubbing face polish into our cheeks and then blotting it off with a special cloth that costs extra. We are men; thanks to a lucky accident of birth, the
beauty myth does not apply to us. Our skin is meant to be dry. We're supposed to look like shit first thing in the morning. Only a small fraction of the hair on our bodies falls into the “unwanted” category. Age is meant to wither us, and custom stale our infinite variety.

For decades this industry has made money out of women by trading on their insecurities, by commodifying beauty and setting unachievable standards for presentability. It's unfair, of course, but men won't help the situation by succumbing to the same con. We can treat ourselves to a wide range of notions of masculinity. We shouldn't have to buy any.

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.

Do I Need a Hobby?

A
s 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.