Seán Moncrieff: Why are so many men content to be dressed by their partners?

By the time you read this, I’ll have been away and come back.

We travelled en masse with Daughter No 4, Herself’s sister, brother-in-law and their kids. And because it had been some years since any of us had had a proper holiday, the expectations, and preparations, were extensive.

Six weeks before blast-off, the sister was contacting Herself to say that she’d bought her husband a couple of pairs of shorts that weren’t “old man shorts” (whatever they are) and asked if she could pick up some for me too.

Rightly, Herself found this suggestion sweet but also comical. As a grown man, I tend to buy my own clothes. I always have. I might even have opinions on those clothes. I have met many men who don’t take this position, who are content to be dressed head to toe by their partners, even down to having their clothes laid out for them on a daily basis. I have also met many women who insist this be the case. I’m not here to judge this arrangement. But I will anyway. I think it’s infantilising and generally weird.

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It’s not the shorts so much as my body. I don’t have a backside. Instead, I have an area where my torso meets my legs. I’m a stick

I’m not saying couples shouldn’t buy each other clothes if the mood arises, but unless that recipient has zero opinions on their own appearance, then there’s always a risk. Clothes that might look good on a hanger can be ghastly when you try them on. I have bought Herself clothes, but she’s always been with me at the time to pick them and try them on. This usually happens after a couple of glasses of wine. Drunk shopping is one of our shared interests.

But on top of all that, the issue of shorts is a particularly fraught one for me.

It’s not the shorts so much as my body. I don’t have a backside. Instead, I have an area where my torso meets my legs. I’m a stick. With advancing years, a bit of a belly has developed, so now I’m like a stick with an elastic band wrapped around the middle. Now stop thinking about my body. You’re making me uncomfortable.

Pipe cleaners

My stickiness is most richly expressed in my legs which, I was once told, look like pipe cleaners. And this has made the choice of shorts a constant problem. The leg-to-shorts ratio is the thing I have to grapple with. Too baggy and it looks like a tent held up by two pins. Too tight and it seems to make people uncomfortable for reasons they never go into.

Don’t get me wrong: I see other men who live in shorts. I envy them. I’d like to be one of them. It’s just that the sight of me in shorts invariably prompts a look-at-the-state-of-him response; mostly from me.

When your partner walks into your bedroom and uses those words, the mind opens up to all manner of thrilling and mildly depraved possibilities

And at my stage in life, I shouldn’t care. I should be all wise and have moved on from such trivial concerns. I see young people all the time who are clearly more evolved than me. They wear skimpy clothes and belly tops and are clearly unconcerned whether or not they have the sort of body shapes the fashion industry prescribes. I want to stop them and ask how they got to be so grown-up.

On the shorts issue, I had been maintaining what I would define as a watching brief — pun intended — until Herself walked into our bedroom and uttered the intriguing phrase “I want you to have an open mind”.

Yes, I know: when your partner walks into your bedroom and uses those words, the mind opens up to all manner of thrilling and mildly depraved possibilities. But instead, she sheepishly produced a package containing two pairs of shorts. This was, you must understand, a completely unprecedented moment in our relationship. She knew this was a violation of my principles; of something I thought she had fully supported me on.

But I tried them on anyway. Annoyingly, they were just right.