Alice Wyllie: ‘One former partner thought nothing of cleaning the bath with the toilet brush’

MY PLUS One went for a facial the other day, for reasons I won’t bother going into. This is not a regular occurrence for him. Indeed his grooming routine extends to using whatever hair wax is left over on his hands, after styling, as moisturiser.

So naturally, I was curious as to how it all went. “It was interesting,” he told me. “It tickled.” I probed a little further. Did he close his eyes? “No. She did tell me to close them four times, but I wanted to see what was happening.” Did he talk? “Yes. And I got a bit fidgety.”

How fidgety, I enquired? He proceeded to give me a demonstration, lying down, stretching his legs out, raising his arms straight up in the air and circling his wrists, as if he’d been forced to adopt the same horizontal position for seven hours and not, as was the case, 45 minutes.

This didn’t surprise me. The average man’s approach to spa treatments tends to fall somewhere between bemusement and terror. I once went for a massage with an ex. At his request, I talked him through the whole process, start to finish, so he knew what to expect. When they handed him a paper thong however, a detail I’d failed to mention, he looked as terrified as if they’d asked him to dance around in it.

Another male friend once phoned me in a state of panic. His workplace had arranged for a masseuse to visit as a treat. What should he do? What should he wear? After talking him through it, I phoned him post-treatment for a debriefing.

He had opted for a hand and arm massage, he said, but kept his hands rigor-mortis stiff, thinking this helpful. The masseuse had to tell him three times to relax, stop talking and lie back with his eyes closed rather than sitting bolt upright staring at her while she worked.

His description of the event reminded me of how willing, and even keen, many men are to be seen as completely useless at anything deemed a bit girly lest they be mistaken for an actual girl.

While my Plus One happens to be a muffin-baking, toilet-scrubbing, flower-arranging, proud feminist-card-carrying tour de force (who, I should say, was delighted with his glowing visage, post-facial), many men do seem to take pride in being utterly incapable when it comes to tasks or pastimes deemed traditionally feminine.

One ex thought nothing of cleaning the bath with the toilet brush. A male friend once tried to make oven chips by simply placing the plastic bag full of chips directly into the oven, thus setting it alight.

A colleague takes a little pride, I believe, in the fact that the only dish he is capable of preparing is tuna pasta pesto. The same colleague was once sent to write a story about getting a makeover and describes it as “the most traumatic experience of my life”.

Why? I imagine it might have been boring, dull, not for him, but “traumatic”? Did the “makeover” incorporate castration? Not literally perhaps, but metaphorically apparently. He felt so emasculated by the damage wrought from having a few creams rubbed into his chops that he’s still recovering. Still, it was nothing that a few hours of chopping wood, chewing tobacco and exfoliating with iron filings couldn’t reverse.