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*Warning: adult language ahead!
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Here’s a fairly reliable way to make your wife stop wanting to fuck you.
Turn her into your mother.
Not overnight, obviously.
That would be weird.
Do it slowly.
Ask her where everything is. Forget the things she remembers. Wait to be told what needs doing. Ask how to do jobs you’ve watched her do for 15 fucking years.
Then, when she finally loses her shit, look genuinely bewildered and say: “You only had to ask.”
Beautiful.
Another relationship quietly fucked to death by a man who can operate a chainsaw but apparently needs adult supervision to change the fucking bed sheets.
Because there’s a strange kind of male incompetence that appears the moment we cross our own front door.
Outside the house, we somehow manage.
We earn a living. Drive cars. Pay taxes. Operate power tools with a confidence wildly disproportionate to our actual qualifications. We can spend six hours fixing something that would have cost 40 quid to replace, purely because another man suggested we couldn’t.
Then our wife says, “Can you put a load of washing on?”
And suddenly we’re fucking Amish.
We need instructions, diagrams, and possibly a responsible adult.
“What setting do I use?”
Maaate…you’re 53.
It’s a washing machine, not the fucking Hadron Collider.
I know this one because I’ve been there.
Years ago, my partner asked me, quite reasonably, why I could remember the torque settings on a car I hadn’t owned since my 20s but couldn’t remember the name of our son’s teacher.
I laughed. Not because it was funny. Because laughing is what men sometimes do when the alternative is admitting someone has just caught us being a bit of a dick.
Then I realised I didn’t have an answer.
I hadn’t forgotten because my memory was shit.
I’d remembered what interested me.
And left her to remember the rest.
That was the part I didn’t particularly enjoy discovering about myself.
Because most of us aren’t actually incompetent.
We’re selectively competent.
We learn the things we consider important. We remember meetings. We know when the football starts. We can find a pub in a foreign city with four percent battery and no fucking Wi-Fi.
But somehow we don’t know where the kids’ uniforms are, when the dentist appointment is, what needs buying for dinner, or why she’s pissed off after asking us to do the same fucking thing six times.
Then we say: “You should have reminded me.” There it is…the mating call of the adult toddler.
Now she doesn’t just have to do the thing.
She has to notice the thing. Remember the thing.
Ask you to do the thing. Explain the thing.
Remind you about the thing.
Then check whether you actually did the fucking thing.
And somehow, after all that, we still think we’re “helping.”
Helping? It’s your fucking house too.
The interweb terminology is “weaponised incompetence.” Which makes it sound rather more sophisticated than it usually is.
Sometimes it’s deliberate.
Sometimes it’s just years of getting away with being fucking useless because somebody else eventually gets tired of waiting and does it for you.
I don’t think most men are standing in the kitchen plotting this shit. There’s no evil mastermind stroking a cat and thinking, If I fuck up the laundry twice, she’ll never ask me again.
Mostly, we just discover that incompetence has benefits.
Do something badly enough and, sooner or later, somebody more exhausted than you takes over.
I don’t think most men are standing in the kitchen plotting how to get out of cleaning the toilet like some domestic fucking Moriarty.
Most of us aren’t plotting anything. We’ve just become accustomed to somebody else noticing everything.
She notices the washing. The shopping. The appointments. The school stuff. The empty fridge. The toilet roll hanging there with one sheet left on it.
And because she notices, we stop noticing. Because she remembers, we forget. Because, eventually she gets sick of waiting and does it herself, and we learn that if we leave something long enough, somehow it gets done.
That’s where the joke stops being funny. Because what looks like incompetence from our side starts to feel like indifference from hers.
Because after a few years, it isn’t about the dishwasher anymore.
We think it is. She knows it isn’t.
The dishwasher has simply become a ceramic monument to something much bigger: I cannot rely on you unless I manage you.
That’s the problem.
Because eventually she stops feeling like your partner and starts feeling like your mother.
And most women, strangely enough, do not become wildly sexually attracted to men they have to fucking parent.
Who knew?
Then something changes. She stops asking.
And here’s this bit to sit up for chaps, the really dangerous bit…because men often mistake that for things getting better.
“She hasn’t nagged me for weeks.”
Well done, mate. You won. She gave up.
She stopped reminding you because, frankly, what was the fucking point? If you hadn’t remembered after the sixth conversation, a seventh probably wasn’t going to produce a miracle.
The arguments went next. Not because everything was suddenly fine, but because arguing with you had become another item on the list of shit she had to do.
And eventually she stopped asking you to notice.
Because there’s something fucking lonely about having to tap the person who supposedly loves you on the shoulder and say, “Could you please notice that I’m drowning?”
By then, being noticed because she’d asked for it wasn’t really being noticed at all.
Then one day she tells you she’s done. And out comes perhaps the saddest sentence in the heterosexual male vocabulary:
“I had no idea she was this unhappy.”
Of course you didn’t.
Fuckwit.
Knowing would have required paying attention.
I wish I’d understood this sooner. Because it isn’t really about chores. It’s about what happens when one person slowly becomes responsible for the functioning of two adults.
That does something to love. It does something to respect.
And eventually it does something to desire.
Not because you folded the towels incorrectly. Or bought the wrong fucking yoghurt.
Because repeated often enough, your helplessness starts saying something you probably never intended to say:
My time matters more than yours. My comfort matters more than your exhaustion. If I leave it long enough, you’ll do it.
That’s the fucked up bit that hurts.
So if you genuinely don’t know how to cook, clean, make an appointment, organise the kids, or operate whatever piece of domestic machinery currently has you staring at it like a Labradoodle watching television…fucking learn.
Ask someone. Read the instructions. Press a button and see what happens. You’ve somehow managed to keep yourself alive this long.
There are 12-year-olds on the internet rebuilding engines in their parents’ garages. You can probably work out which fucking compartment the detergent goes in.
And when you do, don’t stand there waiting for applause.
You haven’t “helped your wife.” There’s no fucking medal.
You’ve participated in your own fucking life.
“I don’t know how” sounds innocent enough.
Sometimes it genuinely is. Nobody knows how to do everything.
But when the same person keeps saying it while someone they supposedly love keeps picking up the slack, eventually what she hears is:
“I know this is exhausting you… I just don’t care enough to learn.”
And there are only so many times someone can hear that before they start believing you.
~ Zen Prem
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