September 23rd, 2009 by 
I recently leaned over my partner’s side of the bed looking for something, when I got a slow-burning shock. It wasn’t the mess that horrified me, no. It was his night-time reading material.
I know for a fact that fiction isn’t his ‘thing’ but what I discovered was FIVE half-opened copies of different ‘self-help’ books. I think I would have been less alarmed if I’d come across an alphabetised selection of top-shelf magazines!
The discovery shouldn’t have perplexed me as, in my uptight way of trying to organise our home, I‘d just put his veritable library of self-help literature into two dedicated squares of our newly erected flat-pack, modernistic (lacquered no less!) box shelving unit.
I stood thought-provoking tomes like Robert Winston’s The Human Mind next to the hopeful If It’s Going To Be, It’s Up To Me, but what I hadn’t expected from his under-bed stash was the likes of ‘How To Be Free’ by Tom Hodgkinson. Yikes! My knee-jerk reaction was “flipping heck, he’s leaving me!”
My partner’s a primary school teacher, so I was prepared for the book on Dyslexia he raced through during the summer but Affluenza, Change Your Life with NLP and Eat That Frog (nothing to do with French cuisine – a lot to do with procrastination!) had my mind racing. Has he simply got an over-active enquiring mind or is he having a mid-life crisis? And if he is, what does that say about me…us?
I admit as a former actress I am prone to thinking about “Me”. It goes with the territory and may explain my partner’s nocturnal choices. Am I being too needy, too flighty, too single-minded, too frugal, too annoying (that’s a given!).
I challenged him on all of the above and he didn’t say “NO!” as quickly as I’d have liked. Instead he pointed out that he was trying to find the right life-work balance. Teaching demands at minimum a 60-hour week of hard slog and he explained that he was searching for a starting point. Wow. That shut me up. I was impressed. Humbled. Hugely.
Altruism isn’t at the core of my current bedtime reading, chick lit regularly leads me on a senseless sojourn into sleep. Zzzzz.
So, I asked a few of my friends what their partners/husbands were reading – all of us in our early 40s with youngish kids.
One believes she’s perceived as an ‘an old war relic’ because her husband reads nothing but World War One books. Another’s reading War and Peace… I’ve only ever seen joy in their home, so maybe there’s something they’re not telling me! And then there’s my darling friend Sas’s hubby’s current tome, Into Thin Air, which is about climbing Everest. Well, we knew he wanted to escape to the country, we thought he meant deepest Surrey, not another one altogether!
Her sister told me her husband “reads any Lee Child book he can get his hands on – apparently ‘men want to be him, women want to be with him!’ that’s Lee Child – not my husband!” She said! I think I’m going to stick one of those in front of my man and see what happens to our balance!
