by Tim Dowling
5.
Am I Relevant?
Men, you may have heard, are fast becoming outmoded. Permanent shifts in the economy and our social structures have created new employment opportunities and lifestyle options for women, rendering the human male obsolete. The market doesn’t need us and, more significantly, women don’t need us either. As far as women are concerned, men are useless. And a husband, from a woman’s point of view, is just a useless man on a long lease. Who will want to marry you, now the End of Men is nigh? What can men do, at this stage of the game, to make themselves indispensable to society, and to womankind?
The problem, it seems, is that men’s traditional cultural capital—breadwinning, repressing emotions, etc.—no longer has much trade-in value. Women have colonized the workplace without ceding any domestic territory. Men have been slow to adapt to the new dispensation. Our most valuable resource—sperm—is both less potent than it used to be and more widely available than ever. I think you can get sperm from Amazon. Now that the bottom has dropped out of the sperm market, men must diversify while they still have options. Nobody wants to get caught with a load of worthless sperm on his hands. You know what I mean.
This is hardly unfamiliar territory. You won’t get very far in life as a man without someone at work trying to make you feel irrelevant. Remaining indispensable at work is, of course, a simple matter of ensuring that your holiday replacement is a fool. This tactic is not generally recommended in marriage—you’re not really supposed to take time off—but the same cunning should be applied to your overall gender relevance strategy.
The biggest obstacle to relevance, as the chart below illustrates, is that the old standards by which a husband’s worth was measured no longer apply:
Being a Good Husband: 1950
Being a Relevant Husband: 2014
Every time you go out for cigarettes, you come back.
Every time you’re sent out for espresso pods and tampons, you come back with the right sort.
You are the primary breadwinner.
You are the primary bread-maker.
Your main role is to provide.
Your main role is to provide answers at the school quiz, thanks to your extensive knowledge of US state capitals and Marvel Comics heroes.
You never cry.
You cry only when you think it will work.
You put on a tie to change a tire.
You put on a bicycle helmet to go to the shops.
You’re good enough at plumbing to save hiring a professional.
You’re good enough at polynomials to save hiring a maths tutor.
You know to keep married life and your various extra-marital flings separate.
You know to keep whites and colors separate.
Regaining a sense of purpose is a vital first step to relevance. Modern masculinity is not a role per se; it’s more of a patchwork of disparate talents, specialist knowledge, nonlateral thinking, and a handy lack of people skills. You must become a troubleshooter, ready to solve problems and fill gaps. Do not be afraid to step in wherever you think you can be of use. Don’t wait—get out there and make yourself count. I don’t know what your particular niche skills are, but here are some of mine:
Whistling loudly. Even today, with the End of Men almost upon us, I still don’t meet many women who can whistle really loudly. I often see them in the park in the morning, making a pathetic flutey noise that their dogs can easily pretend not to hear. I guess if you don’t learn to whistle properly by a certain age, you’re never going to pick it up. This skill gap opens a vital window of opportunity for men. I don’t like to brag, but when I stick two fingers in my mouth and blow, all the dogs look my way. I haven’t quite figured out how to monetize this skill yet, but I’m hoping to use it to sell ads or something. I need to act quickly, though. Apparently you can just buy whistles in shops.
Monotasking. There are plenty of women out there who can hold down high-pressure jobs while simultaneously looking after children, baking cakes, and training for triathlons, but you know what they don’t have? Focus. If there’s anything men are good at, it’s doing one thing to the exclusion of all other things, until the task in question is either completed or mostly completed. I don’t wash up. I wash up the baking tray until that baking tray is so clean you could sell it on eBay under the description “like new.” Afterward, if there’s any hot water left, I might do the colander as well. If you want someone who can make work calls, write computer code, and deworm a cat at the same time, get a woman. If, however, you need someone to gouge all the old wax out of the base of a candlestick, then only a man will do.
Agreeing about curtains. Sometimes when you’re choosing curtains you want advice from someone who says things like, “Love the color, not sure about the pinch pleats” or “The pattern goes well with the sofa, but are they maybe a bit heavy for summer?” Other times, however, you just want someone who’ll say, “Yeah, fine, whatever.” If it’s the latter you require, please don’t hesitate to call me.
Making fire. Arguably the smartest thing man ever did was learn to make fire. Definitely the second smartest thing we did was to keep the technique a secret from women. Coaxing flame from wood and charcoal is still considered men’s work, even if nothing else is. Be poised to light the barbecue when asked, and do it when no one is looking. This would be a very bad moment in history for women to find out how easy it is.
Freelance fact delivery. I know some things. Would you like to know them too? Random information disgorged, all day, every day. No need to ask, just drift within earshot.
Professional Goldilocks. While women continue to rise to prominence across most employment sectors, they remain hampered by a gender-wide insensitivity to extremes of hot and cold. If you’ve ever seen a women handle a mug straight from the dishwasher at the end of its cycle, you’ll know what I mean. With their weird tolerance of overhot baths and underheated houses, women simply cannot be relied upon to gauge appropriate temperatures. Fairy tales are lovely, but if you really want to know when your porridge is “just right,” don’t hire a little curly-haired girl. Get a man in.
Human pocket. Need me to carry anything? Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of pockets. In fact I’m all pockets: trouser pockets, coat pockets, front pockets, back pockets, inside pockets, outside pockets, breast pockets, ticket pockets. It’s okay—bring that tiny bag just big enough for a lipstick and a mint; or better yet, no bag at all. I will carry your phone, your water, your glasses, your other glasses, your keys, your book. THAT’S WHY I WAS PUT ON THIS EARTH.
Once you start looking, there are all sorts of little ways you can make yourself useful. It’s largely about being in the right place at the right time with the right skills. Above all, don’t panic. It’s probable that scare stories about male obsolescence are a trifle overstated. They said the same thing about the horse when the motorcar was invented, and you know what? I saw a horse just last week.
* * *
Married life does not, at first, seem much different to what went before. We don’t argue less or more. We don’t get any headed stationery. We don’t behave more responsibly, or with a sense that people are expecting something new from us. When we bowl out of a party drunk at three a.m. and I turn to wave good-bye, only to turn back and find that my wife has completely disappeared, I do not regard her decision to ditch me as a marital impropriety, but simply a rotten thing to do. When I then hear a small voice saying “Help me” and realize that she has actually fallen over and become inextricably lodged in a hedge, I don’t see it as being somehow incompatible with our vo
ws. I just think about how hard it’s going to be to get a taxi to stop for us if she’s covered in leaves.
“I’ve lost a shoe in here,” she says.
“Stop struggling,” I say. “You’re damaging the hedge.”
Mostly, we are taking the time to enjoy being together without the imminent threat of having to break up. Eventually, however, things do begin to change. Speaking of my wife as “my wife” stops being funny—not that anyone ever laughed—and starts to seem oddly normal. The tiny flat is now full of wedding presents, many of which have a distinctly domestic agenda: You’ve got a flan dish, so when are you going to make some flan? I find myself in a position to open a current account. People ask us to dinner three weeks in advance, instead of three hours. I’m left notes in the morning reminding me to pick up the dry cleaning. From where? I think. Suddenly being married seems to come with an awful lot of stuff to do.
THE TWELVE LABORS OF MARRIAGE
Although there is an inevitable amount of sharing involved, a good marriage is, at its heart, an efficient division of labor. Couples in the first blush of love may go to Sainsbury’s together, but they soon learn that this is a poor deployment of resources. Why should two people suffer? It makes far more sense to split the chores, especially those that are recurring and disagreeable. Certain dispiriting tasks can, by mutual agreement, be skipped completely. In our first two years of marriage neither my wife nor I did any ironing at all. Even today I only iron on a need-to-wear basis, and moments where I take off my jacket in public are invariably accompanied by the words “Yeah, sorry, I don’t really do sleeves.”
A key aspect of long-term compatibility is a complementary mix of domestic talents; ideally you each bring something to the table. But a finely honed skill usually reflects a corresponding belief in the importance of the chore in question—the things you’re bad at tend to be the things you don’t care about. For this reason too big a divergence of expertise can lead to disagreement about what to prioritize. Although it may leave you light on skills, in the long run you could do worse than marry someone who shares your position regarding the pointlessness of ironing. Ironing and drying up. Why make a chore out of the one thing dishes can do by themselves?
The division of labor is not an entirely satisfactory arrangement. There is nit-picking. There is cheating. There are inevitable imbalances—debts of labor run up and never repaid. Old skills atrophy from a lack of use because the relevant tasks have become someone else’s problem. But you cannot, in the end, escape the Twelve Labors of Marriage. They must be negotiated, day in, day out, for as long as you both shall live.
Precisely how these labors are divided is a difficult question. One might simply split them—six apiece—but some are definitely more onerous than others. Certain tasks a single person must perform anyway—making the bed, say—are no more burdensome in a household of two; in other cases the workload doubles. A couple might choose to divide each labor in half—you do it one week, I’ll do it the next—but this system doesn’t take into account natural inclination or innate ability.
An equable division of labor is one of the main planks of successful partnership. For reference purposes, I can give you an idea how my wife and I split the Twelve Labors of Marriage. I’m not necessarily recommending that you do it our way. That is not what I am recommending at all.
1. Social organization. Unattractive as it may sound, in my marriage this chore is divided along rather traditional lines: my wife does all of it. She holds all the phone numbers and addresses, and she keeps me apprised of upcoming social events with only as much notice as is necessary. I have a diary of my own, but I don’t really write in it, because it has no official status. Instead I just tell my wife about any bookings I may have accidentally made, and she either writes them down or cancels them.
Although I was never very good at organizing my social life, I was actually better at it twenty years ago, simply because back then I still had to do it. Now, in return for never having to plan anything ever, I’m more or less obliged to go where I’m told. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing; I certainly don’t miss having to make decisions, but I’m pretty certain that when you tell people you’re going on holiday next week and they ask where, you’re supposed to know the answer.
2. Housework. Most of the Twelve Labors of Marriage are divisible solely on the basis of either preference or talent, but not this one. Housework isn’t cool, and nobody likes doing it. It requires no particular aptitude or bent. And you can’t simply trade it for one of the other labors, because it’s mammoth. An imbalance of responsibility for housework is one of the greatest causes of resentment between married couples, and my marriage is, in this regard, pretty typical. The only fair way to deal with housework, you might think, is to divide it up evenly.
Or perhaps not. There is a popular notion that housework should actually be assigned according to the economic theory of “comparative advantage.” Simply put, this means that whichever of you can perform a task comparatively more efficiently should specialize in it, so long as this labor is effectively traded for another chore at which the other person excels. This way, less time overall is expended on housework, and both parties end up happier.
You might think that comparative advantage is the reason that women still end up doing most of the cleaning: because so many of them have the misfortune of being good at it. In the UK men still only manage about a third of the housework, and that’s enough to put them at the top of the European table. According to US Bureau of Labor statistics, 48 percent of American women, as opposed to just 20 percent of men, do housework on an average day.
You can blame the men, but you can’t really blame comparative advantage, because that’s not quite how it works. With comparative advantage it still makes sense for a husband to do the washing up even if he’s the less efficient washer-upper, as long as there’s another chore—mopping, let’s say—at which he is so hopeless that there is a net gain of efficiency when he trades in one for the other.
The classic example used to demonstrate the benefits of comparative advantage, set forth by the economist David Ricardo in 1821, is the manufacture of wine and wool in Portugal and England. Portugal can make wine much more efficiently than England, so it makes sense to trade it for English wool, but even if Portugal can also produce wool more efficiently, it still makes sense to specialize in wine, as long as the comparative advantage in winemaking is bigger than the one for wool production.
There are a few problems with this system. You can be good at something and still really hate it—I can’t imagine that being better at ironing would make me like it more—which means that the efficiency gained from chore specialization may not outweigh the accrued resentment. Male domestic inefficiency is often willful, and rarely reflects a genuine lack of aptitude. How long can you stay terrible at doing the washing up? Unless you’re really trying not to, wouldn’t you eventually get the hang of it? I’m living proof that through sheer dogged repetition a man can halve the time it takes him to put a cover on a duvet. Finally, comparative advantage cannot, by itself, erase the gender gap in housework. Maximum efficiency is not the same as fairness.
I did not, it must be said, bring a great number of comparative advantages to the domestic sphere. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I only do a third of the housework because, frankly, that statistic sounds a bit generous to me. What’s even more shameful is that I’m home all the time, so any housework that is not done by me has to be done around me.
While I like to think I make a significant contribution, I don’t imagine the Househusbands Union would be too kindly disposed toward my application. I only really use the Hoover after I’ve caused a catastrophic spill I don’t want anyone to know about. There are certain forms of cleaning—dusting, for example—that I have never in my life engaged in. Like many men, my biggest contribution to housework reduction is that I’ve managed to lower the bar for cleanlin
ess. But I’m glad I haven’t had more influence here. I know what the house would look like if I were solely in charge of its cleaning. It would look like my office. My office looks like a compulsive hoarder’s box room, the sort of place you might expect to find a skeleton in a bathrobe holding a copy of the Radio Times from December 2007.
Just remember what I said at the outset: this is not a self-help book. Do not be like me.
3. Dealing with people who come to the door. This is generally the task of whichever of you is foolish enough to open the door in the first place, but because I work from home, in our house it falls almost exclusively to me. In fact my entire daytime social circle is composed of Jehovah’s Witnesses, fish sellers from Newcastle, postmen with packages for next door, charity muggers holding clipboards, and reformed criminals selling dustcloths.
I would like to be able to say that over the years I have developed a flair for deflecting a pushy sales pitch or being polite but firm with people who would attempt to save my immortal soul while my coffee gets cold. The truth is I am abrupt and susceptible by turns. I was once so comprehensively dismissive of an ex-convict who wanted to charge me six quid for a lint roller that he was moved to shit on my doorstep, an act which doubtless set his rehabilitation back months. And yet I have also been known to agree to switch gas suppliers in order to get someone to go away before Bargain Hunt starts.
Even if I perform this particular labor brilliantly, I have nothing to show for it. When my wife comes home in the evening and asks me how my day was I do not say, “Today I dodged a freezer full of plaice and once again managed not to change broadband providers.” But on those occasions when I am less than 100 percent successful, I am inevitably obliged to own up. “Today,” I have to say, “I gave a con artist ten pounds for a sponsored walk he is never going to do, and then bought three months’ worth of organic vegetable boxes from a pretty lady.”
