DUTY AND THE BEAST
David Lovibond describes his continuing
mid-life crisis, and the Professional Woman who now rules his roost
LAST Saturday afternoon in Bath I understood that I had become the sort of man who gets his hair straightened in public. This was shortly after being hissed at to keep up during a 20-minute blitzkrieg of every shoe and frock shop in the city. The looks of withering pity bestowed on me by passers-by will haunt me until I die.
But how did this happen? A year ago, when I embarked on my mid-life crisis, the women harvested from the Lonely Hearts columns as distractions from the painful business of leaving home were gratifyingly Polonius-like in their anxiety to please. They would lie about their age, shape, profession and, of course, looks, just for the chance of a meeting, and then contort their opinions and pleasures to mirror my own imaginatively contrived prejudices. And why wouldn't they? I was advised that in the world of the middle-aged all a man needed to succeed with women was a pulse.
It seems that a demographic anomaly during King George VI's last years has resulted in a surfeit of 45to 54-year-old women: 'We don't take women over 42,' says Mary Balfour of leading introduction agency Drawing Down the Moon, 'we just can't find men for them.' In a sea so abundant in fish, a shark could hunt and feast without possibility of harm.
It was so absurdly easy. In a hackneyed reprise of the oldest game that men and women play — the tactical withdrawal of affection and availability to the strategic end of power and ascendancy — I was a sure practitioner of 'treat 'em mean'. Perhaps it is something inherent in the life of a freelance — the romance of uncertainty, the irresponsibility, the panic, the not being quite proper — which breeds such infantilism. Subscribers to the theory of natural justice can be reassured that it also led ineluctably to my come-uppance: nemesis in the form of the Professional Woman.
According to the Office for National Statistics, there are hundreds of thousands of divorced, middle-aged women working as senior managers, whose careers and social attitudes were forged during the high days of radical feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, 'These are women who had to adopt a certain domineering posture to get into management positions. The Thatcher syndrome, I suppose,' says Dr Sam Cameron, reader in economics at Bradford University and consultant to the Introduction Services Federation. 'From an economic perspective, they will have difficulties finding suitable partners. This sort of successful woman may want a man who is supportive, and there is nothing in society to create that back-up role for men.'
These are women used to getting their own way, and to whom the artifice of allowing a man to think he's in charge is unfamiliar. Adept at office politics, subtle flatterers and deceivers, bold deployers of sexuality, arch-manipulators of egos, possessors of five-year plans, investment accounts and cottages in France, they are masters of their own lives. What chance does a mere man, even a talented opportunist, have of bending such women to his will?
It was after my second meeting with the Professional Woman that I knew I had landed not an angelfish but a pike. The police objected to her 100mph assault on the Salisbury road and, while I blustered, she charmed their indulgence. Her PA planned an ingenious cross-country route between our houses, cutting 15 minutes' travelling time from my unimaginative map-reading. Outings carelessly arranged by me were briskly re-ordered, my politics challenged and dissected, a better psychology for the Lovibond children urged, my friends beguiled, my spendthrift habits harrumphed at, and my elderly collection of Y-fronts ridiculed. I was losing the emotional power game, too. She was immune to my clever tricks: calculated indifference was met with silence; teasing words of passion previously guaranteed to draw in the victim elicited an old-fashioned look; hints at alternative amourettes or musings on
the certainty of our breaking up merited a raised eyebrow, a shrug.
A reasonable observer of my constant concessions and retreats might fairly conclude that here was a man being effectively managed, bullied even. I have always headed for the hills when the shadow of female bossiness or triumph has fallen over me. No one was going to threaten a man's antediluvian right to make a fool of himself. My Professional Woman clearly believed that she could carry the competence and surefootedness that she displayed in her public life into her relationship with me. Ridiculous.
And yet behind the affront to my manliness, beyond the good sex and the miraculous accident of attraction, I recognised a worthiness that made my Grub Street life seem indulgent, my attitude to work lazy, and my thinking flaccid. I was clearly undeserving, and for the first time since adolescence I wished myself taller, quicker and made less in Caliban's image. The vicissitudes of a jobbing hack's income, which had failed to perturb me through marriage, children and failed partnerships, suddenly brought on hot flushes and a yearning for staff jobs, a salary, expenses, red braces. I wanted to be equally valuable, but found that all I could really hope to be was occasionally useful. It is small consolation that my predicament is probably becoming commonplace; simply another circumstance of middle-age. After all, faced with someone whose decisions and instincts are invariably proved correct where one's own are unerringly wrong, it might seem pigheaded to bother with an opinion at all. And once the habit of deferring to the Professional Woman is established, it is an easy thing to give up the vanity of equal expectations.
Perhaps the final consequence of women's liberation will be the emergence of the Surrendered Man, whose vocation it is to make the successful woman possible. This is a different order of compromise from helping with the hoovering or cleaning the loo. It means accepting a place in her hierarchy of priorities somewhere below work, house and family. It means not being consulted on changes of job, house moves, holidays or money — and not minding. There will be a willingness to avoid actions or issues likely to cause disharmony (only the other week I pulled from a Sunday paper an article that might have led to a little local awkwardness). Hobbies or enthusiasms that are not shared will be quietly forgotten. The Surrendered Man will listen and know when to tut-tut; he will get used to being frowned at and accepting blame. He will sit in the car passenger seat and he admonished for the weather. He will be advised on his clothes, be quiet during Sex and the City, and be grateful for the choices that may be entrusted to him: which film to see, which table to sit at in the restaurant. Should the Surrendered Man find any of this sexually eviscerating, the senior partner will not be blamed for the odd peccadillo.
And all of this will be offered up in the name of love, and because the Professional Woman always knows best.
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