I pride myself on being a miserable-middle aged man

Telegraph

28-02-2025

Men often take a bashing when it comes to emotions, and feelings. We are grumpy, irritable and emotionally repressed, apparently. The latest pseudo-diagnosis being offered for this is ' miserable man syndrome ', typified by the male propensity to pessimism.
According to some, this can be a slow growing cancer in relationships, a corrosive drip-drip that eventually gives out. Everything is seemingly fine until one day you forget to put the bins out and an emotional sinkhole appears. Hell ensues.
'But it was only the bins,' you bleat weakly through the yells, knowing full well it wasn't just the bins, it was the pent-up response to all those years of the eye-rolling and huffing you did each time you were asked to do the bins.
But is it really so bad to get narked at each other's foibles in a relationship? Of course not. It's okay to lose your composure occasionally when the dishwasher isn't loaded properly, because honestly, how hard can it be?
Embrace gentle melancholy
Miserable man syndrome should really be middle-aged man syndrome, and in some cases, simply man, because it's not a syndrome at all, it's who we are, particularly as we age. Some outliers might remain jauntily optimistic and emotionally intelligent in the face of hair loss and erectile dysfunction, but in my experience most men of a certain age delight in gentle melancholy.
I certainly do and have learnt to embrace this facet of my personality and celebrate it. In many ways I'm proud of it. I feed it and nurture it. When my wife is away on work trips, for example, I sneak to the theatre alone to watch tragedies. This week it was Elektra, a plodding production about parental murder and bitter vengeance. I enjoyed telling anyone who would listen the next morning how bad it was. Last summer on holiday I skipped the latest Lee Child and read Cormac McCarthy's gruelling The Road instead, followed by the grimly bleak Prophet Song. They ensured a cloud hung over me, despite sitting under a clear blue Corsican sky.
Generation X gloom
Perhaps it's a generational thing. I am 55 and Generation X. I became culturally aware in the early Eighties under the shadow of the threat of nuclear annihilation and listened to the gloomy shoegazing music of The Cure, The Smiths and New Order. The following decade Victor Meldrew seeped into my subconsciousness.
My wife tells me that while I'm not necessarily grumpy, I do tend to focus on 'the pessimistic side', which I correct as being 'the realistic side'. She, on the other hand, is the opposite and wildly optimistic. She even runs a company called Laughology. On paper we shouldn't work, but we do because we complement each other. She is the bright yang to my black yin. She acts as a brake to my gloom and surprisingly we laugh a lot, because we share the same warped sense of humour. Mine is just a little more fatalistic.
'It's your detailed and slow brain. You think things through too much and get stuck in what you can't do rather than what you can do,' she counsels when I moan about one of the regular gripes, like not having enough money, or time. Or not understanding some of the house rules, which make me miserable.
Observe the towel protocol
My slow brain doesn't compute the towel, bedding or crockery protocols, for example. As far as I can ascertain there are three levels, and each level depends on who is using them. There are ones for everyday use, then a guest level and finally the mystical level three, or Defcon 1 as I call it, which is, as far as I can gather, reserved for visiting heads of state and minor deities. When I'm pulled up for some minor infraction of the rules, or for not folding the bedding properly, or storing it in the right drawer, I sulk, then pettily get my own back by telling guests what level they have achieved, and that they are not deemed worthy of the top level.
In truth, the towel thing is not a biggie. But that's not the point. I look for things like this to wind me up. Men do; it's our hobby. I enjoy getting angry at other road users, hurling abuse when I'm safely out of eyeline and earshot. It helps me let off steam. And maybe I am a tad too obsessional about the parking in the access road behind my house, often sitting at the desk in my home office, monitoring both the Ring doorbells I've set up to police the area, drunk on omniscience. Often, you can hear me over the Ring equipped with a loudspeaker.
'You can't park there. It's a private road,' I yell at people, who look around confused, trying to find the source of the disembodied voice, before they clamber back inside their vehicles and pootle off to find some other place to obstruct. Delightful.
Revel in the misery
You could argue that now, more than ever, the grumpy man is in ascendance, because the world is currently a dark place. What a time to be alive! I often revel in the misery of it all, doom scrolling at regular intervals through the day, chasing a fix of misery. My best friend is even more miserable than me and we meet monthly to drink beer and dissect the world and all its gloom. Our glasses are neither metaphorically half-full nor half-empty. They're all empty. And chipped.
It is in our nature, so cut us some slack. Celebrate it with us. Gives us a little sympathy. Midlife generally is tough enough for all of us. While men don't go through anything like the profound changes that women have to cope with in the menopause, we do naturally weaken and slow. Hair spouts from our nostrils and ears. It takes a monumental effort to stay fit and healthy so many don't bother. We develop expanding midriffs that spread no matter how many miles we pedal on our expensive bikes, tucked into Lycra that mocks our silhouettes, collecting injuries like trophies.
Happy ever after
Indeed, one of the worst things you can do to feed the male mindset of misery is to pathologise it and label it a syndrome. Because we love to bang on about our ailments and injuries, even though we never go to the doctor. Walk into any gym changing room and I guarantee the first thing you'll hear from any of the older gentlemen will be a moan about a niggle. We wear ripped ligaments and tennis elbows with pride. Meanwhile we have David Beckham in his budgie smugglers and Hugh Jackman's ripped torso as impossible role models to measure up to.
And as for relationships? In mine, we accept each other and our failings. We laugh at ourselves. This, I think, is the key.
And while I'm not a psychologist, if you find yourself stuck with a grumpy man, know that relationships like yours generally follow an arc similar to the Kübler-Ross model of grief. Stage one is denial. 'He can't be that miserable for no reason. Is it something I'm doing?' Then comes anger: 'Why is he so bloody miserable all the time?' Next, bargaining: 'If we watch the Hungarian Grand Prix, will you cheer up?' Then depression: 'This is making me miserable.' Finally, acceptance: 'I tolerate his misery.' Get to that stage and you've got a decent chance of living happily ever after.