WE WERE at a dinner party the other night, meeting some cousins of mine, and our host, hearing Him Beside talking about our going home together, enquired whether or not we were living together. I said, with a sociable grin, that we weren’t, but were thinking about it. I was quite cool, considering the subject at hand. I have never lived with a lover before, and the last time a lover asked me to live with him I couldn’t be seen for dust.

However, Him Beside then chipped in helpfully that his greatest fear about living with me was the prospect of coming home from work late and finding me waiting for him, (this said with sulphuric undertones equating the state of being waited for with intolerable smothering and suffocation). He suffers from this delusion, totally groundless I assure you, that I stay at home and do nothing all day, doodling on my computer and generally wasting my life daydreaming unproductively, and that my emotional life revolves around his eventual arrival, the hero worker, battling with the material world, and that given half the chance I would dedicate myself solely to meeting his every need, down to the slippers by the fire.

In other words, he thinks I want to be his wife. Fear not, I shall disabuse him of this notion (on the rack, if necessary). And, bless him, I am grateful that he is frightened of my becoming a wife to him, instead of wishing that I was.

What a wonderful thing it must be, to have a devoted wife, and to feel comfortable about it. Let’s not muddy the waters here – I’m not talking about those wives who are also mothers. I am talking about the time-honoured, full-time, stay-at-home Love-Honour-and-Obey role of caterer, cleaner, launderer, caretaker, account manager, social secretary, business asset, emotional crutch and prostitute. Superwife.

Whenever a man and woman are considering getting married, the spectre of Superwife looms menacingly just over her shoulder. People who ask if she’s going to give up her job, or if he’s any good around the house, are all throwing Superwife in her face, reminding her of that bitterly unattainable goal, contentment in slavery.

The Smell of

rotting veg

When two men are considering setting up home together, Superwife still haunts the relationship. Somehow when a couple face the prospect of living with each other, old demons and preconceptions magically appear, some from our own experience of our parents and how they got on, some from social conditioning, and some as if by magic, rising up from the kitchen sink like the smell of rotting veg.

Most people who ask me what it’s like being gay always have a question which is related to the issue of roles – who is the effeminate one, who is the butch one in the relationship. They imagine, with the best will in the world, that we gays and lesbians must slavishly copy the rest of humanity, and polarise. And of course most people are dying to know who fucks whom in a gay relationship. But, dear reader, I couldn’t possibly comment on that . . .

Research has shown that marriage suits men more than women, that on every psychological scale a married man is happier than a single man. However, the reverse is true for women – a single woman scores considerably higher in terms of satisfaction with her life than her married sister. I am indebted to Susan Faludi’s excellent Backlash for this information, because I had fallen for the myth, that is part and parcel of the backlash to feminism, that there were more and more “career women” scoring high on the bitter and twisted scale because they had abandoned the role of Superwife and Supermum and were torturing themselves with an unconscious sense of failure. Not true, apparently.

But what I have noticed is that when it comes to housework, of all the people I know well enough to be familiar with their domestic arrangements, I am one of only a handful of men who cleans the toilet bowl regularly. Not because I have a pathological fear of germs, but because I hate to see a dirty toilet bowl. 99% of the men I know don’t bother with it, and will only splash a little bleach on it when it begins to walk, and all the women I know keep their toilet bowls spotlessly clean.

Because I work from home, it could be more tempting, if I were to live with Him Beside, to slip into the role of Superwife, and pick out the slimy hair from the bath plughole as if I were born to it, and hoover assiduously under the bed, and remember to put the tea-towels in the wash. All these things I could do, because I have lived on my own and take pride in looking after myself. But if I live with him, I am going to banish Superwife from my life. Everything will be negotiated, and nothing will be taken for granted.

One evening, after a nice meal at my place, Him Beside decided to do some work on my computer, and I said, go ahead, please, be my guest. I then wondered what to do, and did the washing up, even though I had cooked. When I had finished, I found myself gripped with the most unreasonable black anger. But then I realised that it was my mother’s rage, the lament of a previous generation that felt trapped in the home, that resented being expected to look after the working man. It has no place in my life, and hopefully in my generation.

We are all big enough to look after ourselves, after all.