4 days Ago By Tom Nicholson
In a near-unprecedented move, I have spent money. In an even more nearly unprecedented move, I have spent money I didn’t need to spend and I have spent it on myself. (Shortly thereafter, our parked car was totalled by an 83-year-old driver surprised by the width of the road she was turning into, so that’ll teach me, but that’s not the lesson I want to look at right now.
) Specifically, I have treated myself to a three-month membership – with the budgetary possibility of extending it to six, especially if people stop driving into expensive things we own – of a lovely co-working space. You know – one of those places mostly populated by cool corporate types, hot desking and holding meetings and typing furiously on high-end laptops, with a few freelancers like me scattered around, looking at them in awe and wondering what it is like to have to iron a shirt to wear or have a shower every day, or to cope with donning tights or a tie on the regular. It’s wonderful.
It’s clean, it’s bright, you never have to replace loo roll, there is tea and coffee and snacks on tap for free, and an array of delicious breakfast and lunch options on offer with something to suit every palate. Numerous helpful staff are on hand to solve problems (forgotten your charger? No problem! Easier to leave your work bag behind while you pop to a dentist’s appointment? They will put it in a locker for you and hand you a security code for it) and cater to whims. I haven’t had any of those yet, but I am going to try and conjure one next week, just for the sheer delight of it.
It has taken me a while to figure out what the whole experience – this strange sense of everything being obligingly sorted out by someone else – reminds me of, and yet at the same time what feels so unusual about it, and it’s this: it is like having a wife . I have never had a wife. This, I know now, is a terrible oversight.
It was, after all, first recommended way back in 1971 when second wave feminism was cresting, in a satirical, pointed essay by Judy Brady Syfers in the launch issue of Ms. magazine. It was called “ Why I Want a Wife ” and explains itself in a single, heartfelt page densely populated with reasons.
“I want a wife who is a good nurturant attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling, makes sure that they have an adequate social life with their peers, takes them to the park, the zoo, etc...
My wife must arrange to lose time at work and not lose the job...
I want a wife to go along when our family takes a vacation so that someone can continue to care for me and my children when I need a rest and change of scene,” run a few examples. Read Next Radical optimism is the way through times like this “My God,” it ends, “who wouldn’t want a wife?” That was 53 years ago and I am struggling to reconcile myself to the fact that so little has changed – beyond, perhaps, the fact that a lucky few of us wives are now economically independent and flush enough to be able to pay for the basic services a wife (still) provides. To be fair, I don’t think this is an entirely feminist issue.
We live in a world now in which two incomes are necessary for a household (with or without children, though obviously it becomes more pressing in the former case) to function, and we therefore outsource a lot of what used to be relatively easy to take care of – boring, relentless, underappreciated things, but things there was time enough to do, at least, for the person who didn’t go out to work. That eats into the second income of course, but generally (after the worst of the childcare years anyway) you still come out ahead. But where does the remainder of the graft still, by and large, land? Why do I skip happily to an office complex every morning and feel like a load has been lifted from my shoulders for the day? Why is it impossible to imagine a Brady Syfers-esque litany of reasons entitled “Why I Want a Husband”? Because men are not yet sharing the invisible mental, emotional labour of life, love, domesticity or parenthood anything like equally.
I often wonder if this is an unacknowledged driver of the wellness and self-care industry – that women are flocking to sites, influencers and practices that purport to give them some relief from stress because otherwise there is so little freedom from it? The irony of course is that “self-care” can become its own burden – particularly if you find yourself needing more and more of it as the dopamine returns diminish and there is still no one else offering an alternative source. Still, I’ve now got three months of having a bit of slack in the system. I should dedicate it to reforming my domestic arrangements and redistributing visible and invisible chores.
More work, but this time in hopes of a tangible return on investment. I’m just going to finish this coffee first – a posh machine made it and it is delicious – and maybe ask the reception desk if they can book me one of the silent cubicles so I can finish a tricky bit of work. And after that, make my feminist moves.
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