done in my column. I do lots of stupid and unkind things in the course of my marriage, but with the column I get a whole week to figure out where I went wrong and, in effect, apologize.
An obligation to write about one’s marriage carries the risk that one might be reduced to creating conflict simply in order to fulfil a weekly word count. The truth is, I’ve never had to. People may find this hard to believe, just as I find it difficult to imagine a marriage so well conducted that it lacks the disquiet required to sustain a weekly column. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want to be part of a marriage like that, anyway. Chances are the couple in question wouldn’t be that into it either.
Twenty years ago my wife and I embarked on a project so foolhardy, the prospect of which seemed to us both so weary, stale and flat that even thinking about it made us shudder. Neither of us actually proposed to the other, because neither of us could possibly make a case for the idea. We simply agreed – we’ll get married – with the resigned determination of two people plotting to bury a body in the woods. Except that if you did agree to bury a body in the woods, you probably wouldn’t ring your parents straight away to tell them the news.
Two decades on we are still together, still married and still, well, if I hesitate to say ‘happy’, it’s only because it’s one of those absolute terms, like ‘nit-free’, that life has taught me to deploy with caution. It feels inherently risky to express contentment: I know that twenty years of marriage doesn’t necessarily guarantee you ten more.
I can only really speak for myself, and while I would concede that I am, on balance, content, there also isn’t a day that goes by without me stopping to think: what the hell happened to you? Not, you know, in a bad way. But I’m still surprised, every day.
This is not really a self-help manual. If you come across anything that resembles advice in it, I would caution against following it too strictly, although I’m aware that is, in itself, advice. The kind of people who read self-help books are not, I’m guessing, looking to be more like me.
This is simply the story of how I ended up here, and along with it an examination of what it means to be a husband in the twenty-first century, and what is and isn’t required to hold that office these days. I can’t pretend to offer much in the way of solid advice on how to be a man. Just as my sons think admonitions such as ‘Don’t panic!’ sound a bit rich coming from me, so would any tips I could possibly give them about attaining manhood. I tried to become a man, but in the end I just got older.
But ‘Husband’ – it’s one of the main things on my CV, right below ‘BA, English’ and just above ‘Once got into a shark cage for money’. ‘Husband’ is the thing I do that makes everything else I do seem like a hobby.
Although I wear the distinction with pride, I’m aware that the title ‘husband’ is not one that affords much respect these days. It was always a bit of an odd word. Of Old Norse derivation, ‘husband’ basically means ‘master of a household’, a sense that still lingers in the word husbandry, referring to the stewardship of land and/or animals, and doesn’t apply to me at all.
No other European language uses a word like ‘husband’ to mean ‘husband’. In Sweden they say ‘man’; in Denmark, ‘mand’. The French use the much more egalitarian ‘mari’, which just means ‘married male’, although it’s easy to confuse with the girl’s name Marie, and also the French word for mayor’s office. As a consequence I often mistake the most basic French pleasantries for admissions of intrigue.
‘Husband’, on the other hand, sounds like an arcane office long shorn of its trappings, and is therefore faintly comical. It’s like calling someone for whom you have no respect ‘chief’. So while I feel able to use the word ‘wife’ with a mixture of pride and delight (‘Hey look! Here comes my wife!’), my wife only ever uses the phrase ‘Have you met my husband?’ as a punch line, generally when she overhears people discussing the perils of self-googling.
But, I hear you ask, are you a good husband? Ultimately that is for my wife alone to judge, but I think I know what she would say: no. Still, I can’t help feeling there’s a longer answer, a more considered, qualified way of saying no. If nothing else, I can look back and point out the detours round some of the pitfalls I was fortunate enough to overstep, and relate a few cautionary tales about the ones I fell headlong into.
When the well-off and the well-known retrace their path to success for the benefit of people seeking to follow their lead, the accounts tend to be coloured by ‘survivorship bias’ – they simply don’t reckon with the examples of thousands of other people who followed a similar route and ended up nowhere. In hindsight success can look like a repeatable formula comprised of hard work and a series of canny decisions. No entrepreneur ever wrote a memoir that said, ‘Then I did something terribly risky and not all that clever, but once again fortune chose to reward my stupidity.’
I don’t have the luxury of revealing the secret of my success, even in hindsight. I didn’t get where I am today – husband, father, gainfully employed person – by executing a deliberate strategy. I got where I am today by accident. One cold winter’s evening twenty-four years ago, my life jumped its tracks without warning. As far as I’m concerned, all I did was hang on.
My successful marriage is built of mistakes. It may be founded on love, trust and a shared sense of purpose, but it runs on a steady diet of cowardice, impatience, ill-advised remarks and low cunning. But also: apologies, belated expressions of gratitude and frequent appeals for calm. Every day is a lesson in what I’m doing wrong. Looking back over the course of twenty years it’s obvious the only really smart thing I did was choose the right person in the first place, and I’m not certain I did that on purpose.
And even if I did choose wisely, I also had to be chosen. How often does that happen? This is what I’m saying: luck, pure and simple.
It is a few days after Christmas, 1989. I am living in New York, working in a dead-end job. It’s worse than that; I’m employed by the production department of a failing magazine. I probably won’t even have my dead-end job for much longer.
I’ve just taken the train in from my parents’ house in Connecticut. It’s cold, and the city has an air of spent goodwill: there are already Christmas trees lying on the pavement. I drop by the apartment of some friends, two girls who share a grand duplex in the West Village. I know they have people visiting, English people. But when I get there my friend Pat – who is himself English but lives in New York – answers the door. He gives me to understand that the two roommates are in the basement having a protracted disagreement. They argue a lot, those two, and have a tendency towards high drama.
I first see the English girl as she comes up from downstairs, where she has been attempting, in vain, to broker some sort of truce and salvage the evening. Her short hair, charged with static, is riding up on itself at the back. She walks into the room, pauses to light a cigarette, and then looks at me and Pat.
‘It’s like a fucking Sartre play down there,’ she says.
We all go out to a bar. The English girl has a bright red coat and swears a lot. Her voice is husky, lower than mine. She is at once afraid of everything – she thinks she’s going to be murdered on the streets of Greenwich Village – and nothing. She is funny and charming, but also peremptory and unpredictable, with shiny little raisin eyes.
‘So,’ I say, turning to her, ‘how long are you here for?’
‘Look,’
