I think the whole thing reached a turning point when my wife posted on her Facebook page that I was a tit. A “tit of a husband”, I believe was the precise phrase.
Now, let me be plain. I don’t for a moment deny being a tit (although on the occasion my darling Rachael was accusing me of it I actually, and unusually, wasn’t being one, but that’s another story). The point is, my tittiness or otherwise, it seems to me should be a private matter, and not to be posted all over the World Wide Web.
It was after this took place that I began to wonder what effect the “advances” in social technology were having on relationships between men and women. We’ve all heard about men who lock themselves up in their rooms with their computer gaming and porn. Similarly, we are familiar with stories of teenagers getting hooked on Facebook and Twitter and texting. But less has been said about how electronic communication is beginning to leak into the world of husbands and wives.
Another moment of revelation came, for me, shortly after Titgate, when I was going to the theatre for my birthday treat, courtesy of Rachael. I was excited about us having a night out together and when we left the Tube to take the short walk to the theatre, I wanted to spend a few minutes in pleasant anticipation. But Rachael had her nose buried in her mobile phone. She texted all the way to the entrance, ignoring my complaints that she wasn’t really with me.
The more I thought about it, the more it began to dawn on me that I had yet another rival to my wife’s affections. I knew that I came a poor second to the children — that was a given. I never featured all that highly compared with her friends or her work, either. But now, I realised, I had an even more serious rival: a small, digital, silicon-enhanced seducer that was taking away what little facetime I had left with my wife.
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There was a time, not so long ago, when we used to spend the late evenings watching an episode of Mad Men after we’d put the kids to bed and were tuckered out. We would snuggle up together on the sofa and enjoy watching the failing relationships of Don Draper. Now we still sit on the sofa, and the television is still on, but Rachael is snuggled up to her phone, checking messages. I try to explain that this is irritating. Inasmuch as she hears me at all after all — I am not texting or e-mailing her, so how could she? — this falls on deaf ears. As a woman, she says, she can do two things at once easily.
Our life used to get even more exciting than watching TV together. We would on very special occasions play Scrabble. However this, too, has been combined to the Amstrad word processor of history. Now Rachael still plays Scrabble, but online against three virtual opponents at once, while I sit in the other room kicking my heels and inwardly fulminating at my blinking, beeping rival.
Then of course there’s Facebook. Already the cult of “the friend” is stronger among women than among men; they consider each other compensation for their useless husbands, I think. But Facebook has taken this commitment to a new level.
Research shows consistently that women use social networks more than men, and use it for different purposes: to chat to each other, to post photographs and so on, rather than for business. A study of Swedish SNS users found that women were more likely to display expressions of friendship, specifically in the areas of (a) publishing photos of their friends, (b) naming their best friends, and (c) writing poems to and about their friends. Writing poems about their friends! This just shows how far this misappropration of emotions has come. Men write love poems to their wives. Wives write love poems to their friends.
Rachael is compelled by computers. She has for some months been obsessed by filling in online survey forms, which pay 50p for everyone who completes them. Should a spare moment fall between us, instead of sitting down for a nice chat and a glass of wine, I will find her filling out one of these surveys, comparing whether she prefers Hartley’s Jam or Robinsons, Huggies nappies or Pampers. All for 50p. Is our time together worth so little, I wonder?
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Then there’s the whole texting business. I used to think texting was a safe space between having a conversation and an argument. However, it turns out, texting, at least between partners, is more trouble than it’s worth.
The trouble is that text messages brook no subtlety. What you send as a gentle joke can be received as a rank insult. If you say to your wife “don’t be such a tit” in real life, it can come across as a gentle chastening. If you text it — or God forbid, post it on the web — it can come across as quite offensive. In the end, the potential for misinterpretation is enormous.
I wish it stopped there. But technology has got everywhere. One of Rachael’s Christmas presents (not from me) was a portable energy monitor. Energy usage, for Rachael, is great bugbear. She is committed to green causes, the ecological movement, and above all, saving things, whether scraps of soap or the last atom of toothpaste in the tube. Thus energy usage, with its global warming implications, has always been an emotional issue, since matters such as having a shower instead of a bath for energy reasons, have always stuck me as taking the matter a little too far.
Now Rachael has the technology actually to follow me about waving her energy monitor, muttering phrases like “look how much the kettle uses — don’t fill it so much” and “wow, the toaster is really wasteful” and “I’m never using the spin dryer again”. With this at her disposal it is like living in the Big Brother house. I only have to switch on a lamp upstairs and a voice wafts up from downstairs demanding that I switch it off immediately.
Technology was wonderful when it was just about relieving men and women of the domestic burdens of households with washing machines, vacuum cleaners and electric drills. Now it is cybernetic, it is becoming more like a domestic burden.
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Of course, I’m not innocent either. How did I respond to Titgate? By sending Rachael a jokey text. Which she misinterpreted as an annoyed text, and responded with an indifferent text. Which offended me, so I sent her an angry text. To which she sent me a contemptuous text. And thus I became complicit in what I have always opposed — the replacement of real-life communication with the digital variety.
I’m going to e-mail my wife this article now, which saves me having to talk about it, and after she’s scrutinised it online, she will doubtless send me or text me back a few choice remarks. Once, we’d have had a conversation about it, but I think that those archaic days are gone forever. If we ever get divorced, and the lawyer asks if there was a third party involved I won’t hesitate to answer “yes”. But it wasn’t a man, or a woman that finished us off. It was a network.