Polly Vernon

HAVE YOU HEARD OF WIFE GUY? You really should have, he’s terribly current, an internet confection that recently bled into real life during early rounds of the campaign to find the US Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential candidate, when no less than five of the 24 hopefuls responded to the question: who is your hero? by saying: ‘My wife,’ because, hey! Quadruple-whammy of humble, relatable, monogamous and feminist-lite-with-a-highly-electable-topnote-of-traditional-values, right there!

Outside of the political arena, back in the realm of more general public consciousness: Wife Guy is the guy who adores his wife above all else – or at least, he says he does. He predicates his entire public profile on how incredibly great he thinks she is, how unworthy of her he believes himself to be. He posts Instagram tributes so gushing, they border on creepy; he fondly picks lint off her frock whenever the two of them attend parties together (which they always do. Go out alone? He’d miss her!). He thinks she’s the most beautiful woman in the room – even when she clearly is not.

Wife Guy has been criticised for overshadowing the woman he seeks to praise with the oppressive extent of that praise – though that’s not my problem with him. My problem with him is I can’t imagine why anyone wants to sleep with a man that sicky-nice about them. But it takes all sorts, and anyway, this is not the point I seek to make right now. The PISTMRN is: if that’s Wife Guy, what does it take to make Husband Lady, and am I one?

Equivalent levels of breathless devotion would be the obvious answer – a cultural descendant of a girl I knew at college whom my friends and I called ‘Jemima Boyfriend’ behind her back, because every time she spoke, she’d work in a doting mention of My Boyfriend – in which case: no.

I am definitely not Husband Lady.

I’m probably the reverse. Far from speaking about my romantic accoutrement breathlessly, devotedly, or often, I tend to speak about him not at all, because I like to seem sexually available, even though I’m not (although if anyone asks, it’s because I take a dim view of the journalistic tradition that demands women writers eternally frame themselves in terms of their personal relationships). If this makes me sound like a terrible person: I probably am. I’d never go out with me. I am domestically uncouth, determined to watch Love Island every night irrespective of how he hates it, utterly dependent on him for DIY, boilerand internet router-maintenance, yet simultaneously ‘psychotically emotionally self-reliant’ (™ a past therapist), and I have too many clothes for one small person/flat.

On the plus side: I’m honest.