The Taming of the Bachelor
By: Bill Dubay Jr.
Tags: Self, Marriage, Humor, Personal Essay, Memoir

Essanay Studios [Public domain] Source

The Taming of the Bachelor

The Metamorphosis of a Forty-Year-Long Bachelor

Some days I pull my car into the garage after a hard day at work, put my key into the door and half-expect to open it to a living room with nothing but a couch and a TV, clutter strewn across the house and a stench that might be labeled “Bachelorhood” if it were sold as an incense or candle. On those days, the stark changes that have permeated my life since my long forty years of bachelorhood hit me like an ocean wave, and I’m momentarily taken aback by just how different the scene I walk into has become. First off, I’m always greeted with a kiss from my wife and our dog.

The dog is always beyond overjoyed to see me.

Carpets are vacuumed, the kitchen is clean. There’s furniture in the house. A pleasant aroma with a fruity undertone drifts into my nose and makes it feel all sparkly inside.

I’m always hit with the reminder of how fortunate I am to have such a wonderful place to come home to, with a beautiful wife, lovely step-daughter, and an awesome brother who’s growing up to a good young man.

Um, that’s all well and good, but are we gonna ignore the fact that you used the word “sparkly”?

I did say “sparkly”, didn’t I? That’s a word that I would have never used before marriage. Maybe that change came about from stumbling across little notes like this around my house.

Photo taken by author

Back when I was a bachelor, there wouldn’t have been such a list laying around the house. In fact, there wouldn’t have been any shopping or to-do lists. To sum up my bachelor shopping habits, I’m always reminded of a friend of mine who was also perpetually single who once asked me before I dropped him off at his apartment, “Dude, can you drop me off at the convenience store? I need to pick up a roll of toilet paper.”

The clean, well-furnished, pleasant-smelling house that we live in now is the result of much encouragement, teaching, and pleading from my now-wife. I’m reminded of a time my wife sat me down in my old one-and-a-half bedroom condo back in my bachelor days and pleaded with me to please clean my refrigerator out. She said something like, “There’s gnats everywhere in your kitchen and it’s because of all the old food you have in your fridge. Whenever I open it, the whole place reeks of rotting food.” This intervention happened after I, stupidly, asked my gorgeous now-wife and beautiful now-step-daughter to come over and help me redecorate my place. I figured, “I don’t want to present a false face so I’ll just be honest and leave it as is in all its bachelor glory.”

Maybe, some might say, this was my inner bachelor crying out for help, making me confess my ways so that I’d be taken by the hand and lead out of the wild kingdom of my primitive life to civilization. It was the very beginning of my new apprenticeship where I would learn to unlearn all of the barbarous, uncivilized habits I picked up out in the savage, untamed, wasteland of my undomesticated single life.

In the two years we were engaged and living separately, my wife struggled with me likely in a perpetual state of disbelief at the the way I lived. I remember conversations like:

Her: “How often do you change your sheets.”

Me: “I refuse to answer on the grounds that I may incriminate myself.” Her: “You know you should use a sponge and cleaner to scrub that toilet.”

Me: “Paper towels work good for me.” Her: “Where do you keep your vacuum?”

Me: “One of these days, I’ll definitely need to get one of those.”

As you can imagine, there’s a deep well from which I might pull more examples of such dialog. At the time, I fought against my indoctrination into domesticated life. I resisted my training. I’m sure there were many moments where my wife told herself that she should give up trying to tame me, that she might never be able to comfortably live with someone who’s dug his heels so far into the ground. Back then, I always heard a voice whispering in the back of my mind:

“Dude, your balls are gonna end up in her purse.”

But now, those years have passed. My wife survived me, barely. And we’re all the stronger for it. I’m happy to have my balls in her purse.

Also, now that I’m married, I possess a secret that my wild bachelor self was never ready to comprehend. He may have felt the fingers of that secret probing at the darkest depths of his unconscious, but he did everything in his power to hide this wisdom from himself. Amidst all the thoughts about how he would have to give up the prospect of long nights drinking with the guys and the ability to plop on the couch and eat a whole jar of Nutella® in his boxer shorts while watching an action flick filled with bare breasts and chainsaw-wielding ninjas, his wild bachelor self was not ready to behold this simple truth:

Married life is good.

Wow, you really have been housebroken, dude. Do you really believe that?

I hate to break the news to you, my fellow kindred bachelor spirits. Everything about being married to the right person is wonderful, life altering, and good. A good friend said to me once:

“Men can never be at their best without a woman by their side.”

A scene from one of my favorite TV series True Blood comes to mind when I think about that quote. It was a scene where the young waitress, Sookie, knocked on the door of the stately gentleman vampire Bill and when he opened the door, she saw chaos ensuing behind him as other vampires engaged in fighting and debauchery. He said something to the effect of, when vampires live together they sink down to their basest level. I believe, it’s similar to what happens to a man who lives with a bunch of other men for a long time, or even when he lives by himself. I remember my college roommate and my apartment back in the day. It was always filthy with dishes piled high, and sometimes, one of us would come home to see it all gleaming and clean and we would know that the other was expecting a date to come over.

Things have changed for the better.

Now, my house is filled with love, not clutter and cheese powder fingerprints all over everything. My house gives me a sense of belonging to a loving family. I can look forward to being greeted with a kiss, a hug, and a dog enthusiastically licking my face. I have an actual desk in my office and not the makeshift “desk” I had in the corner of my bedroom for years shown here:

Photo taken by author

Am I a little more tame, a little more calm, a little more civilized? Well, I think my wife would say that’s debatable. But one thing is for sure, I’m a lot happier being married than I ever was being a bachelor for forty years. I’m better dressed, better smelling, have better practical tools at my disposal, and all-in-all, I’m a much better, healthier, and stable man.

Of course, sometimes when I look over at my wife as we sit on the couch, I see her looking back at me and shaking her head. No doubt, she’s still struck with utter disbelief about some of my remaining primitive ways. I imagine she’s thinking, “We have a long way to go yet,” while she pats her purse and tells herself, “At least I have these now, and my struggle might be a little easier.”