I didn’t squish myself on the train with other commuters to make the 07:18 to the city this morning. I don’t have a Skype meeting with my boss at nine o’clock so we can track this week’s KPIs. My email inbox isn’t bursting with messages that’ll take me two hours to clear.
I’m not unemployed, nor am I job seeking. I didn’t cash in big on the stock market and burn all my suits before settling into a life of perennial Mai Tais. I’m not sick, I’m not a telecommuter, I don’t take care of the kids – we don’t have them, nor do we have any plans to.
Like many a 1950s housewife, I stay at home all day long. I cook, I clean, I do laundry. Homemaking is my full-time job, but I’m not a housewife. I’m a married, childless, millennial man. I’m a 34-year-old full-time househusband without children. My spouse, who’s in the military, has a time-consuming, stressful job. Sometimes it’s literally life-or-death. So, when they arrive home physically and emotionally drained, there aren’t chores to labour over, or life admin to worry about. I’ve done it all, so we can spend as much meaningful time together as possible.
None of this was planned. I was a ladder-climbing journalist once. Intense daily deadlines, business-class around the world on press junkets. I even survived the global financial crisis, and 2009 was probably my most successful year. After we married five years ago, my spouse and I were both working arduous hours, completing master’s degrees on the side, doing ad-hoc renovations on our first home. There was never much “us” time at home: every night was a quick, late meal before we fell asleep on the couch watching Netflix while waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle.
Maintaining two high-pressure jobs in one household was exhausting. Not impossible, but it wasn’t our best life. We were tired and grumpy all the time. Something had to change, and because I was the lower earner of the two of us (by a long shot), I took it upon myself to make it happen. I handed in my notice at work and found a new passion. I cook, I clean, I do laundry. I paint walls, I mend uniforms, I chop wood. I fix the car, I manage the bills and I’ve Marie Kondo’d the closets.
A 2015 study of 1,100 millennials found 51% of men would be happy not working were their spouses to make enough money to support them both. I’m lucky to be a real-life manifestation of that hypothetical: the military affords us a remuneration package suitable for two adults (though it would be a struggle for a growing family).
Stay-at-home dads are in vogue these days. When I was a kid in the 1990s you couldn’t find a father who was home before 6pm. Now even the partner of the prime minister of New Zealand, my home country, is the primary caregiver and all-round stay-at-home fella.
Yet we don’t want kids. Female homemakers are judged harshly in society if they don’t have children to care for – it’s assumed they’re cookie-cutter housewives who only occupied themselves with a career until they got married and could be taken care of. A male homemaker with no kids? I can’t even imagine what the world would think of me. Lazy, unmotivated, unambitious, I suppose.
It does astound me that I get such fulfilment from househusbandry. Professionally, I once obsessed over reaching career highs, but after a decade in the game, the rat race thing became dull. I was sick of being stressed every day. I hated spending all weekend mowing the lawn and hanging six loads of laundry out to dry. I loathed how much of my brainpower went into petty office politicking.
In a 2013 Slate article, childless househusband Finn Boulding wrote: “Kids are a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to breaking stereotypical gender roles, but without them homemaking is not really seen as an ambitious life-calling or even particularly time-consuming.”
It’s true to some extent. I do have time to spend 90 minutes in the gym every morning and take the dog hiking several times a week. But I also spend several hours a day scrubbing on my knees, sweeping, mopping, and using superglue, sewing needles, and a hammer. I will admit I’m not busy in the usual sense of the word, though. I don’t rush from task to task. I can put my full attention into everything home life requires. Busy culture has led to an overworked, overweight, anxious, depressed society. I’m happy to have removed myself from it.
That’s not the main reason I love househusbandry. I was happy-ish working 50 hours a week, and didn’t have some kind of nervous breakdown where I decided office life just wasn’t for me. Instead, as my spouse rose up the military ranks over the years, it became increasingly obvious that full-time support at home was the best way forward for our happy future. We had the financial means to survive on one salary, so why not? I won’t sit on my death bed thinking, “I wish I’d spent more time in a cubical”.
They won’t say it, but my friends and family look down their noses at me staying home. They think I’m either a kept man or wasting my potential, or both. I hope it’s just their jealousy that my spouse and I have figured out a way to set us up financially so we don’t both need to work.
It’s a feminist ideal for couples to have the choice to have one spouse at home. The freedom to do this shouldn’t be contingent on children to care for. In an age where people are professional Call of Duty players and Instagram influencers, it makes little sense to have any biases about homemaking and who is “allowed” to do it. If you’ve found a way to survive and be happy in the 21st century, the reality is, you’re doing very well at life.
• Lee Suckling is a writer and military spouse living in Wellington, New Zealand
