The Accidental House Husband

—

Five years ago I quit my job and started a business working from home. In the beginning, spending all day in my apartment was glorious. Leaving the corporate world is an incredibly liberating act. It made me feel like I had somehow beat the system. I no longer needed to battle the daily frustrations that commuters and colleagues typically experience.

However as the years passed, and working from home became its own job instead of a response to a previous experience, it gradually started to wear on me. I really noticed it when my girlfriend changed jobs and went back to school at the same time.

I knew it meant our time together would be shortened but her new responsibilities plus the continued downward spiral of the New York City subway into near complete ineptitude meant our time together at home was shorter than expected.

She’s usually out the door by 7:15 am and home around 7 pm. On a school night, it is even later. It leaves us just enough time to catch up on our day over dinner and then it’s practically time for bed. Her arrival at home is some of the only stillness her day allows. As a teacher her day is one of constant motion, be it at her actual job, or on the trains to and from. Mine is very much the opposite.

Day after day, my schedule involves sitting in front of my computer. Nearly all of my work involves email or the internet. My girlfriend is always in motion, I rarely am.

My girlfriend deals with colleagues, tantruming children, and the demanding parents of those children.

My life is a triangular path between our apartment, my gym, and the grocery store. It is a daily walk I have started to resent since it involves so little social interaction. I wander around the grocery store like Kerouac riding the rails, looking for inspiration, for adventure… and settling for Hummus with Pine Nuts.

I make small talk with the array of uninterested teenagers swiping my produce whose only question to me is;

Do you have a store card?

I don’t have colleagues or kids or parents. I have plants and a stuffed pug (fake, not taxidermied) both of which I talk to throughout the day.

Probably too much.

I workout, I buy food, I sit at the computer. My girlfriend texts me when she’s halfway home so I know when to start dinner.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Her arrival is usually the highlight of my day. Not only is it exciting to have my partner come home, but she is often the only person I have a conversation with that lasts more than three sentences. She’s exhausted and full of stories of her active and nuanced schedule. My answer to “how was your day?” often means a rote recap of uninteresting tasks, foods I ate, and disconnected thoughts running through my head.

I use the word “fine” to describe most of my days. I feel both uninteresting and socially incompetent. We settled into our routine. Working from home means I am able to handle many of the household duties throughout my day. The dishes that quickly fill our tiny sink, our laundry basket which seems always on the edge of barfing socks onto the floor. The regular trips to the post office or the pharmacy.

And while some of those tasks have a certain quaintness, I find myself hyper-aware of them. Maintaining the household requires more time than I thought it would considering the 650 square feet we live in. I am constantly bewildered by how much time I spend on mundane tasks.

The idea of working from home has so much appeal before you do it. And even now, five years in, the knowledge I can wake up and work in my pajamas without engaging in the Musical Chair Thunderdome that is rush hour on the subway, makes me very grateful.

But the isolation that becomes challenging. I don’t want to shirk my responsibilities around the apartment, I just hate what a large portion of my day they are. The monotony of household tasks has turned me into a cranky housekeeper of my own creation, puttering around the house making sarcastic comments to myself.

I say things out loud like:

Hunny if the ice tray is less than half full can we PLEASE make sure to refill it?

Can we PLEASE remember to put the empty toilet paper roll in the recycle?

I use “we” to make it seem less accusatory. I’m not fooling anybody. I complain about always washing dishes and then complain when she does and I can’t find where she put the big spatula.

Ya know, important stuff.

However, while she might not be available for the daily tasks, she is still heavily involved in the maintenance of our home. Saturday mornings often find her bouncing around the apartment like a human Roomba, organizing, tidying, and otherwise cleaning all the things I didn’t see or get to.

And as grateful, thoughtful and supportive as she is, my self-imposed mini martyrdom of being the house boyfriend wears on me. I’m not mad at my girlfriend. I’m not ungrateful for the life we live. I am just extremely frustrated my whole day has become the apartment. I have arrived at a place which is not inherently bad, just extremely different from the kind of daily agenda I once imagined I would have, unrealistic as it may have been.

Even though I understand my responsibilities I feel a bit like a stereotypical 1950s housewife.

I make awkward small talk in the laundry room with the pregnant woman who lives below us. I compare notes on dinner recipes with my next door neighbor, a guy in a similar scenario who seems to resent it much less.

I am also extremely aware of how trivial all of this is as to seem ridiculous. There are a million things in this world worse than the experience I have. Trust me, I get it. This is more about how strange it is to inhabit a role I didn’t anticipate.

While I dread certain household chores I am also aware of how small efforts on my behalf bring about big results. I know my girlfriend will recognize when the rug in the entry hall was vacuumed before she comes home. I know putting the magazines away and lighting a candle before she walks in the door will make her say “Oooo hunny it’s so clean.”

She is both observant and appreciative. It is easy to make her happy by doing the things I don’t necessarily want to do. And that makes it much easier to do those things.

We also both agree that I need a club, a social experience, more friends, or all of the above. I need more human interaction. I need more locations. It’s time to get out of the house. And we are working on that.

But for now, here I am. Apartment Boyfriend. Aware of my role though not always able to maintain a positive attitude. My girlfriend understands. We are on the same page if not always the same section. But that is OK. It is an ebb and a flow. The workload will never be perfectly equal.

But our relationship and our household continue to function.

Even if it means I’m the one who ends up refilling the ice tray.

—