How to be a Husband (19 page)

As I bend to retrieve tent pole number one, something like a cello string snaps in my lower back. I make a strange, involuntary sound, and as I jerk upright I jab the tip of the tent pole through the fly sheet, tearing a six-inch, L-shaped gash. I turn to see my two children staring at me as if I were an insufficiently diverting repeat of
Red Dwarf
. A light rain begins to fall.

In the morning, I can barely move. A night in a sleeping bag on a slope has done nothing good for my back. The sun is blazing as I shuffle, crabwise and listing slightly to port, in the same direction as the streaming crowd, my two children ahead of me.

“We need to stay together,” I say. What I mean is: don't leave me. The festival has four main stages, a number of smaller tents, a vast array of foodstuffs, even a special children's area, but it lacks the one thing I am desperate for: a chair. There is no sitting down to be done anywhere; there is only standing up and lying on the hard earth.

We walk the festival from end to end, alternatively listening to music and eating food. My wife's hostility toward my bad back is nothing compared to my children's cold indifference. They ignore the sudden, sharp intakes of breath and the quiet swearing. They consult the schedule, then the site map, and then they start pulling my arms.

“Ow!” I say.

“This way!” shouts the middle one. “It's starting.”

I jostled by crowds and struggle to cope with uneven grounds. Under the weight of the rucksack that contains our stealables, my twisted frame contorts further; one of my shoulders rises up to touch my ear. By the middle of the afternoon, however, I realize that I'm not going to die of a bad back after all, because I'm going to die of exposure first. We all are.

“We must have hats,” I say. “Find hats.”

After scouring the site for suitable headgear we choose two trilbies and a porkpie hat from an overpriced stall. It makes me smile to see my children in stupid hats, until I remember I am wearing one too.

It is after midnight when we finally get back to the tent and I can lie flat and suck on my giant wine bottle. Both boys are hyped up and in no mood to sleep. They are not the only ones. People are playing drums next to my head.

When we finally get home the next evening my wife insists on the usual debriefing session following any foray where I'm in sole charge.

“What was the worst bit of all?” she says, eyes shining.

“Definitely the end,” says the middle one. “When we had to pile all the stuff on Dad and lead him to the car like a donkey.”

“I could carry,” I say. “I just couldn't bend.”

“He was so slow,” says the oldest. “It took ages.”

“What was the second-worst bit?” says my wife.

“Do we have any painkillers?” I say. “Would the ER be busy right now, do you think?”

Life does not fly by when you're trapped at a festival with a bad back, or stuck in standstill traffic on the M5, or listening to a child play “Moon River” on the violin for the 230th time. But this stage does end abruptly: before you develop any sort of knack for dealing with it, it's over.

Suddenly you find yourself looking at photos on a pin board: three boys, arranged by height, sitting on a bench with an apple apiece; a moon-faced eight-year-old in a stripy sweater, holding a kitten; two brothers arsing about at the top of a sand dune. They look just like your life, until you compare them to the hulking creatures rolling fags in your kitchen.

It's true what the old people say—it does go by fast, and you'll miss it when it's gone. But you shouldn't feel too guilty about letting these years breeze past you. If you try and savor them, they just go by faster.

*   *   *

A
t least once a week my wife is wont to declare, without prior consultation, that “tonight's supper is free-range.” “Free-range” does not, in this sense, refer to the dignified and highly ambulatory life of the chicken that gave its withered left breast to tonight's edition of Spicy Ricey. “Free-range” in this context means “you can take your food and go wherever you want with it, provided it's nowhere near me.”

No one in our house has ever objected to a free-range supper. I usually take my plate and a brimming glass of wine and sit in front of the television. I might be joined by a child or two, but they usually head for the computer, or the Xbox. I think the youngest one sometimes eats his supper in the bath while
watching a movie on a laptop—an indulgence I find objectionable for many reasons, but have also vowed to try one day. My wife eats in the kitchen, alone and at peace.

The shared meal is the very center of our family life, which is probably why we have so many methods of escaping from it. “Today's lunch,” my wife will sometimes announce, “is silent reading only.” A range of newspapers and magazines is provided, but diners may also bring their own books, or even laptops. Everything is permitted, except talking.

Sitting down together every night was not necessarily part of the original parenting plan. When the children were tiny they ate separately from us, but over time their supper hour got later while ours got earlier, until the two merged into a single, problematic sitting. As a meal the shared supper more or less succeeds—everyone sits, everyone eats—but as a social occasion it leaves a lot to be desired. As a proving ground for civilized dining, it's positively counterproductive.

Conversation is by turns bad-tempered—“Why are you being such a dick?” is a routine, if officially proscribed rejoinder—and exuberantly inappropriate. The youngest usually makes a bid to leave the table before I've even sat down. Catastrophic spills are common, and fights sometimes break out. Meals embarked upon with the best intentions occasionally end with my wife saying, “You're all horrible,” and walking out.

I wish I could say that the family lunch becomes easier to stage as the children get older, but it actually gets harder. Teenagers fight among themselves more. The swearing only gets more baroque. With each passing year, everyone learns to eat a little faster. I never imagined I would pine for the days when
the youngest two were still in high chairs, and spent the entire meal delicately applying food to their faces like makeup.

I'm not saying I do not enjoy a chaotic Sunday lunch, because I do. I have a reserved seat at the end of the table, so for once I feel nominally in charge. The children aren't usually in a rush to be elsewhere, because they've usually just got out of bed, and the meal gives me a chance to catch up with their business. As someone who rarely leaves the house other than to walk the dogs, I find the recounting of an ordinary school day fascinating, especially if they do the teachers in different voices. I have a particular fondness for stories about people being arrested on the bus, and I am rarely disappointed on that score. When this avenue of inquiry has been exhausted, I enjoy hearing a brief summation of my children's weekly achievements.

“What's the best thing that happened to you this week?” I say, indicating the youngest with the tines of my fork.

“I missed maths because of a fire,” he says.

“Well done,” I say, turning to the middle one. “What about you?”

“They read out my tweet on the poker channel,” he says.

“You must be very proud,” I say.

“I recorded it on my phone,” he says. “Look.”

“No phones at the table,” says my wife.

“I'm finished,” says the youngest.

“No, you're not,” my wife says.

“Pass the salad,” I say.

“You're the salad,” says the middle one.

“Ah,” I say. “Touché.”

I'm sure I will miss these days once the children excuse
themselves from the table in order to move to Australia, but at the moment the best thing about a big Sunday lunch is that it means Sunday supper is automatically downgraded to free-range.

TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL FAMILY MEAL

• Where possible, don't limit it to family. Sunday lunch with other people invited is much easier, provided you can get other people to come. The presence of non–family members has an eerily civilizing effect on adolescent boys in particular. And the presence of other children helps to dilute the bad behavior of yours.

• Contrary to my wife's opinion, you cannot curtail a graphic dinner table discussion about newsreaders vomiting live on air by introducing the topic of homework.

• Sometimes the best time for a family meal is a day when the whole family is not present. Partial gatherings are usually more successful, and removing one child from the equation always makes things go more smoothly. I don't know whether family meals are more harmonious in my absence. I don't give a damn how they behave when I'm not there.

• You can cram a lot of togetherness into twenty minutes. Children do not, as a rule, like to linger over meals, and consider any noneating time spent at the table to be a form of imprisonment. Obviously manners, discipline, and a parent's tiresome need to make a point occasionally require a child to
stay in his chair longer than he might care to, but if you get a quarter of an hour out of him, you're doing well.

• Introduce new recipes and exotic foodstuffs only on free-range nights and at silent reading lunches. It takes children some time to acquire new tastes, and you don't want to hear anybody's opinion the first
time.

Keeping the Magic Alive

M
y wife and I do not say “I love you” to each other every day, or even once a month. I don't begrudge couples who do, but I would like to put in a good word for the ones who don't. It can't be the end of the world, this failure to be consistently demonstrative, and if your relationship—like mine—is partly founded on a shared distrust of the falsely effusive, it's hard to invest any faith in the power of some snuggly incantation.

I personally believe there are lots of ways to express one's feelings that don't rely on those three words uttered in that exact order on a regular basis. It's perfectly possible to replicate the gist of a commonplace exchange like “I love you” and “I love you too” using slightly different language. In our house, for example, we prefer “You'll be sorry when I'm dead” and “I know.”

Unfortunately, nothing I have read about maintaining a
happy, healthy relationship supports my position. All the tips I've absorbed over the years have stressed the importance of making an effort, of saying the actual words out loud and forcing oneself beyond the embarrassment that comes with doing anything out of the ordinary for the first time. Almost every prescription for upholding romance mandates ritual reinforcement, regular doses of affection, and the constant transformation of positive regard into demonstrative behavior. It's invariably presented as difficult and time-consuming work. “We have a myth that love should be easy,” a relationship counselor once told me when I had the temerity to complain about the effort implied by his advice. “Love is a skill; you have to learn it and practice it.”

I still want love to be easy, and for that reason I am terribly susceptible to any method that sounds as if it might constitute a shortcut. This was what first attracted me to a newspaper article suggesting that four hugs a day is the secret to a happy marriage. I know from experience that my wife is suspicious of unscheduled displays of affection, but written down like that, four hugs just didn't seem like that many.

“Four hugs a day,” I say as my wife tries to squirm her way out of hug one. “I think it's the way forward.”

My approach for hug two, just before lunch, is from the front—moving in slowly, arms low, palms showing, approximately the technique you would use to take a picnic basket away from a bear.

“Thank you,” says my wife, petrifying under my touch. She doesn't seem to be responding positively to the treatment, but that's okay. One of my favorite aspects of the quick-fix
prescription is the total lack of nuance, subtlety, or follow-up. The newspaper article doesn't suggest alterations to the technique in the event of a poor outcome. It just says “four hugs.” I find I'm even beginning to enjoy her irritation a little. It doesn't matter whether she likes it or not. I win either way.

“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.