The Society of Useless Husbands

My husband joined the Society of Useless Husbands after weeks of resistance. Even in the following few months, he didn’t truly internalize his role as part of the Society. He was too driven. Ambitious. Head full of lofty, unattainable goals he’d bend to his well. He continued to work on his Counter-Strike auto-gameplay recording app, the side gig he projected would make an extra seven thousand a month through Github donations. He still slept in our bedroom even though the baby would wake every three hours and I’d rustle the duvet each time I rose to calm the gremlin with my weaponized boob. He’d attempt to soothe the baby whose cries could shake our slate tile roof, lest he need to call me away from a Webex meeting. He scheduled 1:1s with his boss even while on paternity leave to assuage his worries about AI weakening the premium of his career and salary. 

The Society of Useless Husbands met every Tuesday at two pm, coinciding with my meeting on why-certain-data-doesn’t-make-sense, a weekly reminder that my coworkers and I wasted ninety percent of our time questioning and debugging statistical validity as opposed to using data to identify true policy-defining, groundbreaking issues. And so, I was never able to join my husband in his gatherings like some of the other wives—most of whom held memberships with the Society of Useful Wives and/or the Society of Traditional Housewives. Those societies required a five-hundred-dollar annual fee while the Society of Useless Husbands required nothing but attendance to at least one meeting a year, and even then, you could get out of it if you were sick or had a child under three years old. The benefits of my husband joining drastically outweighed the cons: a social circle outside of his virtual gamer interactions, connections with executives across industries, one free monthly Papa John’s large pizza, free childcare during meetings. Tuesday two pm on the dot: a nanny would roll up to our house in a Tesla, sweep the baby out of my arms, shepherd our dog into the backyard, and usher a peaceful quiet broken only by the occasional unmute of my microphone to softly correct a coworker’s assumption—not necessarily true that a customer may actively land themselves in this error scenario, especially when you consider behaviors associated with such edge cases…

It took about six months for my husband to acclimate as a member of the Society. That was around when he resolved his dramatics with his parents—years of gaslighting, a decade of tension, and implicit sacrifice demanded in exchange for his existence—finally straightened out by blocking his parents’ numbers and disposing of those childhood trauma years at the Society’s dumpster grounds. 

He later quit his job in favor of pursuing his Counter-Strike start up full time. He picked up reading, all nonfiction, books by disgraced economists and celebrity mathematicians and exiled politicians. He learned piano, a longtime dream created by deprivation from his mother who insisted he learn erhu as a child, a unique instrument worthy of her son’s time, nothing basic like piano. He learned to bake soufflé and milk bread but quickly stopped when the Society declared such acts in violation of its rules. 

After another six months of my husband disappearing for the day and returning at eight pm when I put the baby to sleep, with his one box of Korean fried chicken dripping oil onto the carpet, I joined my husband for a Society meeting that got rescheduled to Saturday afternoon. The Society of Useless Husbands encouraged wives to attend, but I never realized how seriously these other wives took the recommendation until I saw them all in attendance, dressed from head to toe in proper garb, smooth and neat, every fold and pattern tidied down to the stitch. Had I forced my husband to show up to these alone while everyone else received the support of their other halves? Had I inadvertently created an isolating environment for him despite my intent for him to socialize, gain a community, and break out of his shell? 

I shuffled to sit with the other wives who seemed to self-segregate into one side of the room’s periphery where the men’s circle of chairs remained entirely visible. My husband sat at the far end of the circle relative to my seat which actually placed him in a spot easiest for me to follow his expressions. And yet, for some reason, I could not see clearly.

“Is it always so hard to see?” I asked the wife next to me. A pretty woman with chin length hair and narrow shoulders that even a crow would find unpleasant to perch on.

She chuckled, “That’s perfectly normal. They all look the same in their sessions. After a few more, you won’t be able to tell the difference.”

“Why watch then?” I asked. 

“Oh, most of us aren’t watching. Look.” She shifted her gaze to our surroundings: every adjacent woman occupied with books, laptops, phones, glass containers of baby carrots and hummus, or sleep. “It’s the nanny service. When you fully vacate the house, the nanny does more—cleans the master bedroom, cooks dinner for when you return. And there’s no need to leave a tip. Because you’re not there to be guilt-tripped into it.”

“I didn’t know the nanny did so much,” I gaped. 

She looked at me knowingly. “You’ll see when you return home.”

I nodded, tempering my anticipation of a clean house and calmed baby, and turned my attention to the husbands. They were still sitting in their circle. Were they saying something? Or eating a snack? Scratching their hair? Picking their ears? Bobbing their legs? Their images blurred into a donut-shaped mass, too difficult to pick apart yet still in possession of certain human features—ears, eyes, fingers—if not for listening, seeing, doing, at least for maintaining marriages, I guessed.