I’ve come to realise that having a stay-at-home partner is the ultimate life hack. When we moved to Australia, I temporarily became the main breadwinner while my partner looked for a job. I went off to work every day while he assumed the running of the household. I never asked, we never discussed it, but somehow we fell into a pattern. I made the money, he made me lunches.
I work long and often irregular hours. The kind that induce you to construct entire dinners from train station vending machines because you can’t be bothered to cook and the shops are closed by the time you make your way home, and even if they were open, would you really be arsed dragging a sorry sack of veggies home to stir-fry? Yet I have a hot home-cooked dinner waiting on the table every night. The fridge is always full. I don’t have to make a meal from a dry spud, soy sauce and some antibiotics from last year. I don’t have to order Uber Eats for the sixth time that week and shuffle out to the same delivery person in my slippers who knows me so well we exchange Christmas cards. There are pre-cut carrot sticks and celery with little pots of hummus. If I finish the falsely advertised “family-pack” of chocolate (which is actually single-woman-sized) in one sitting, another one appears in the fridge again, like magic.
A lunch box replete with little individually packaged containers of cut-up strawberries and blueberries is placed into my work bag every day, alongside a hand-made tub of chocolate protein yoghurt with chia seeds and almond flakes to be eaten on the bus. It’s a food influencer’s dream. I don’t have to expend mental energy about what I’m going to have for lunch at work. I don’t have to leave the office to stand in line for a disappointing toastie that will have mayonnaise on it even though I asked nicely to leave it off, twice. I don’t have to waste time rushing around making a sad salad wrap in the morning, looking at it sweat in cling film only to give up the charade at 2pm and order myself McDonald’s. I am free from the pretence that I’ll eat last night’s soup this time.
Having a stay-at-home partner who shoulders the unpaid, underappreciated business of staying alive gives you an undeniable leg up in life
I have more time after work. The washing is always done, dried and put away when I get home. Gone are the days of suffering through wearing the left-over scratchy knickers that go so far up your anatomy you can nearly taste them because they were the only clean ones left. I can go to the wardrobe in the morning with confidence, knowing that all the shirts in my wardrobe are ironed. There are no acts of futile desperation of hanging the least creased one up while you shower or wearing a jumper on top despite the unforgiving hot weather and getting heat stroke lest anybody see the wrinkles that lurk beneath.
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I feel like I’ve hit the lottery with my partner: I make the money, he makes me lunches
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All I have to do is think about work, the people I care about and what I’m going to do on my days off. The browser tabs in my brain have been significantly reduced. I can concentrate better because someone else is taking care of the mental load. I’m not trying to answer emails while wondering when the window cleaner is coming, if the skirting boards are dusty, why the dishwasher has a weird smell and what to buy my nephew for his birthday. I am free.
Is this how it feels to have been a man for the best part of the 20th century? Because it’s been pretty great. I can understand how some of them didn’t want us to have our own bank accounts. Personally I wouldn’t oppress anyone’s civil liberties just to avoid having to clean my own toilet but that’s just me.
Having a stay-at-home partner who shoulders the unpaid, underappreciated business of staying alive – the washing, cooking, cleaning, banking – gives you an undeniable leg up in life. In the Wife Drought, Australian journalist Annabel Crabb argued that we all need “wives” to fulfil work and life balances.
“Why do women with a helpful spouse often feel like they’ve won the lottery, while men with a helpful spouse seem unremarkable?” she wrote. I do feel like I’ve hit the lottery with my partner. Even though I would do the same for him if the positions were reversed. If he wanted to stay home forever, I would break my back to earn enough money for us both to keep him in the style to which he is accustomed (a GAA Go subscription and a pair of O’Neills shorts in every colour of the rainbow). Sadly (for my ironing pile), he is returning to paid employment but now I know the undeniable advantages that having a “wife” gave me.