How to be a Husband by Tim Dowling Read Free Book Online

of nerves for weeks before each visit. Some people are afraid to fly; I am afraid to land.
    On my arrival on March 24, 1992, I am held at immigration for over an hour, left on a bench next to a guy who has no passport at all and refuses to tell anyone what country he’s come from. It does not feel like a lucky bench. The immigration officer who finally deals with me is professionally unpleasant, like a disappointed geometry teacher. He treats me to a long and disheartening lecture about my unsuitability for admission, before suddenly relenting and letting me through; it’s eerilyreminiscent of the day I got my driver’s license. The stamp in my passport is extra large and contains specific restrictions and the official’s handwritten ID number. I’m pretty certain I have exhausted the forbearance of the United Kingdom.
    This episode overshadows our reunion. I am delighted to have slipped through, but aware it may well be the last time I’ll get away with it. It seems quite possible that after two years our relationship has finally run out of road.
    There hardly seems enough time for my girlfriend and me to decide what should happen next. To start with, we do nothing. April and May drift by. Finally, in mid-June, we sit down together, me at the little drop-leaf table in the kitchen, her on the worktop, to discuss the future.
    So daunting is the prospect of a wedding, much less a marriage, that the first option my girlfriend puts on the table is that we split up and live out the remainder of our lives on separate continents. As unpalatable as this idea is, I have to admit it sounds marginally less horrible than the prospect of having engagement photos taken. After an hour of circular debate, we arrive at what seems a dead end.
    â€œSo that’s it,” she says. “We’re getting married.”
    â€œI suppose,” I say.
    â€œNever mind,” she says, crossing the kitchen to light a fag on the stove. “We can always get divorced.”
    Given our deep mutual reluctance to take the plunge, it would be insane for me to make any grand claims favoring marriage over simply living together for a very long time. They are very different arrangements legally—at present cohabitation comes with no rights or advantages at all—and of course theyare slightly different constructs emotionally. With one a shared sense of commitment agglomerates over a long period of time, as two lives become increasingly intertwined; with the other you get all the commitment squared away on a specific day, generally before you’ve had lunch. But for the sake of argument I’ll presume that in the long term the result is much the same. If you resisted the pressure to have a wedding, good for you. You probably saved a lot of money. I, on the other hand, have four salad bowls.
    I will say only this about the trauma of actually getting married: it may be something you never thought you’d be interested in, and something you imagine to be painfully embarrassing while you are doing it (you imagine right), but afterward you will consider it a life-changing ordeal from which you emerged stronger, an ordeal that, for all its hideousness, created a special, unshakable bond between you and your partner. In this sense getting married is, I imagine, a lot like agreeing to do
Dancing on Ice
: you’ll end up being pleased with yourself for enduring something terrifying, difficult, and unutterably naff.
    When she finishes telling her mother the news on the phone, we go to see her father. I ask him for his daughter’s hand while he is showing me the progress of the work on his new loft extension. We are alone, standing on joists, looking down into the room below us. I consider the likelihood of him pushing me through.
    â€œHow are you going to keep my daughter in the style to which she has become accustomed?” he asks, looking stern. I don’t know that he’s been tipped off by my future