My Husband Just Retired and Has Given Up Far More Than His Job. I’m Disgusted.

Dear Prudence This is not what I signed up for. Advice by Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Scaachi Koul? July 30, 20266:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by LittleBee80/Getty Images Plus and Neliakott/iStock/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. For this edition, Scacchi Kohl, Slate senior culture writer, will be filling in as Prudie. Submit questions here. (It’s anonymous!) Dear Prudence, My husband “Martin” retired five months ago and now refuses to shower more than once a week. He’s never been very enthusiastic about bathing; the only reason he kept it up was that he wouldn’t have been able to remain employed had he not. On weekends and vacations, Martin would avoid the shower like the plague. The only time I can get him to clean up now is when he wants to get laid; only then will he bathe. It’s gotten so bad I’ve banished him to the guest room. What can I do to make him understand that others with functioning noses have to be in his vicinity? —Spouse of a Slob My friend, the Slob Spouse, Much hay has been made lately about Gen Z women having to parent their adult boyfriends into basic tasks like getting a job and washing their faces, but here you are, proving that even in retirement age, women are tasked with being Mommy to their grown-ass husbands. I know it’s unpopular for advice columnists to suggest divorce to those who write in; it’s not always available to someone, and frankly, once you suggest divorce to one woman, it’s real easy to make that your panacea to all problems. (Though, to be clear, you should absolutely divorce any man for any reason. Try it! What’s the worst that could happen: You have the TIME of your fucking LIFE???) But it’s a unique tragedy when a man in a marriage decides he has no one to maintain pretenses for after his working life is over, as if you’re not a living, breathing being in his life who also needs a little bit of those pretenses. There are plenty of things we do for other people, to maintain the peace with those we live with or around. We wear clothes so our genitals aren’t flapping around at work. We put headphones on when we ride the train so everyone isn’t subjected to our music (though this is a norm increasingly lost to the whims of the rude). This is all to say there are things we do for one another, because we want one another to be comfortable and feel safe with us. Your husband is opting not to do something that would make you feel comfortable and safe. Bathing is a basic part of human hygiene, but it’s also a condition of being with you! His refusal to be washed is nothing more than an indication of how little respect he has for you. While I think it’s a nice start that you’re withholding sex until he showers, this is the bare minimum of what you should refuse him. Do you make dinner for you both? Do you manage your social calendar? Book his doctor’s appointments, stock the pantry with the snacks he likes, do his laundry? You don’t have to mommy this adult man into rejoining the mores of society. You’ve already kicked him out of your bedroom, so maybe it is time to kick him off your priority list. You can bring a man to water, but you can’t make him get in the water and wash his ass. And if this doesn’t work, well, I’ll just keep tapping the sign. (The sign says, “divorce.”) Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Prudence, I’m a (mostly) happily married, grown-ass woman with a great career and a gorgeous family. The problem? I can’t stop thinking about my first love. I’m not sure if I just miss the way I felt about him (18-year-old pure, innocent love!) or if it’s that I’m haunted by our breakup (blindsiding and still unexplained to me). I do not miss the relationship or actual person, so it is annoying and embarrassing that this still takes up so much of my precious mental real estate. How do I get over the unanswered questions and make peace with the past? —Elsa Said to Let It Go Dear Elsa, May I suggest something possibly absurd? Run it out. Go get some answers to the nagging questions rattling around in your head. A crush is simply an absence of information, and I bet if you got some more information, it would help quell the crush. Do some creative Googling and find out what kind of life he leads, how he looks, where he lives, what his day-to-day might look like. Look up his Instagram and his LinkedIn Don’t obsess over his choices—and, maybe, don’t reach out just yet—but instead consider your decisions and where they’ve landed you. Does he seem kind and interesting, the sort of person you’d want to be stuck in an airport with when your flight is delayed by nine hours? Does he share your taste in movies, in books, in restaurants? And, saliently, do you want to fuck this person? The “(mostly)” part of your “happily married” self-assessment suggests that perhaps there’s room for improvement. In my experience as a (mostly) happily married person who eventually got divorced, a crush this intense is usually about what you’re lacking in your life. A man could never be the answer to anything, even if you do end up pursuing him or any other man. This guy you went out with when you were just a pup is rattling around in your head because there’s something urgent in your life demanding your attention. More innocent, pure love maybe? A time in your life when you felt more innocent, or when everything felt easier? Something is lacking, something is missing. You now get to figure out what that is, outside of your husband or this crush. Something just for you! How exciting. Want more Prudie? Slate Plus members get an additional column each week. Sign up for Slate Plus now. Dear Prudence, I met my husband in college; we got married and moved back to his hometown, where we farm poultry and vegetables. Recently, my mother was visiting, and when she saw me in my working clothes (a pair of sweatpants and a zip-up hoodie over a t-shirt), she lavished praise on how much nicer I looked. I had a rough ponytail, which “finally controlled” my hair and made my face look “less square,” my muddy sweatpants were “much more slimming,” and so on. I was stunned and confused, and she walked away before I could think of something to say. I have very thick, dark, bushy hair, need glasses, and have always been short and stout. I share all these features with my mother and grandmother, except they didn’t get the bushy hair. I’m not a supermodel, but I still try to look nice when I’m not working. I wear colorful dresses and cardigans, and everything is clean and in good condition. But apparently when I looked my best was when I had been raking out the chicken coops and was sweaty and still had bits of poopy straw clinging to me! My mother has gone home now and still can’t get her comments out of my head. This is more said about my appearance than I think she’s said in 20 years. She was never directly critical about my looks growing up, but she did complain a lot about how we unfortunately all inherited her grandmother’s “coarse” features. I’m just flummoxed. Do I discuss it with her or just try to brush it off? It’s really bugging me. —Big Hair Hiya Big Hair, I see that on the surface, it sounds like your mother merely complimented you, and so how could you get so bent out of shape about a compliment? My mother does this all the time, like when I recently replaced my dangling nose hoop with a small stud, and she FaceTimed me to say, “Oh, that’s much better than that booger you keep walking around with.” Certainly she could have just said “nice jewelry,” but she is my mother so any kindness must be doled out at the same time that she sticks a manicured finger in my eye. I’m not sure if your mother is also an unyielding Indian immigrant, but I find that most moms of a certain generation were cut from the same cloth and that cloth was designed to make you feel bad about your hair, I guess. I have no idea if you did indeed look “better” in your chicken coop get-up, nor does it particularly matter. It sounds like you’re both tickled by the compliment and irked by the way it was presented: a rare case of her acknowledging your good looks, and seemingly ill-placed at a time when you had decided you looked objectively terrible. You can talk to your mom about it, but maybe first you need to zero in on what’s bugging you about this. Do you wish she had been kinder about your looks when you were younger? Do you crave more attention from her, a few more vocal compliments here and there? Or do you object to what she’s said because buried in it were, seemingly, several insults: about your hair, your size, your face. I can’t even really tell you to just enjoy the compliment, because it’s clearly couched in a thousand little cuts. If you want to open this can of worms, then ask your mother not why she told you that you looked nice with straw in your hair—maybe you did!—but about why she seems to hold resentment for the very physical features that you share with her. Nothing has been more detrimental to my sense of self-worth than watching and listening to my mother pick apart the physical features we both have: our round bellies, our thick thighs, our unruly hairlines. Maybe you want your mother to be nicer to you in order to be nicer to herself. Classic Prudie During the pandemic, I put a pool in. I love swimming and it became an oasis for me. Now it is a headache. I made the mistake of letting my sister have her daughter’s birthday pool party at my place. Now the floodgates have opened and everyone in my family wants to throw a pool party at my place. I have over a dozen nieces and nephews. Never miss new Slate Advice columns Get the latest from Prudie and our columnists in your inbox each weekday, plus special bonus letters on Saturdays. Advice Dear Prudence