‘It was 5am, there’s a loud thud and crash in the hallway,’ a close friend tells me, reliving her weekend shenanigans. ‘I tiptoe downstairs trying not to wake the kids and there he is completely out of it. Face down on the carpet. I just threw the dog blanket on him and went back to bed.’
You might think she was telling me a crazy tale of her 20-year-old son, staggering home after a night out with uni pals. But no… it’s her husband, and he’s 55.
A recent chat with another female friend – this time on WhatsApp at 11.30pm.
‘I can see from his phone that he’s somewhere in east London, near Brick Lane,’ she types. ‘He was supposed to come home straight from work. I’m praying he’s not gone out clubbing again.’
The last time her husband went to a club with workmates, he didn’t come home for 24 hours.
When he finally showed up he spent what remained of the weekend in bed.
‘I can’t keep up with them,’ he moaned when he’d finally got over his hangover, referring to colleagues in their late 20s.
Have you, like me, noticed this new epidemic? The men hitting their late 40s and early 50s hard. Obsessed with re-living their youth. Or at least trying to.
‘I can’t keep up with them,’ he moaned when he’d finally got over his hangover, referring to colleagues in their late 20s (Models pictured)
My husband is not immune either. He doesn’t go out as regularly as some of my friends’ husbands, but when he does he tends to go hard, too – like he’s time-travelled back to the 1990s.
Except now he’s sporting an Autograph hoodie, and has plantar fasciitis shoe supports in his Adidas Sambas.
These men do not have the powers of recovery that their younger counterparts do.
So, if you’re parenting with a man who likes to party… well you’ll be picking up all the childcare the next day while they lie in a dark bedroom, feeling sorry for themselves and wailing that they’ll never go out again, mainly because they left their work laptop in a pub.
One long-suffering friend is married to a man who still loves a rave. Off he goes most Saturday nights – not returning until she’s settling down for Antiques Roadshow.
He thinks nothing of ‘livening things up’ by taking MDMA (the chemical name for ecstasy) and sometimes ketamine.
Last time I saw him, his skin was grey and he had huge bags under his eyes.
I’ve known him since we were teens and he’s still wearing the black shorts and hoodie he had aged 19, despite the fact that he’s now a 55-year-old chartered surveyor with two teenage children.
Another local man insists on skateboarding around the neighbourhood while smoking a giant ‘jazz cigarette’. Cool, perhaps, if you’re twenty-something, tragic at 65.
And that’s without the smell of Deep Heat for the muscle he pulled trying to keep up with a mammoth Drum’n’Bass session the night before.
In fact, catching up with friends on a Monday morning often feels like a competition in terms of whose husband has behaved the worst over the weekend.
There’s the one who woke up in an alley behind a dive bar in Camden. Or the one who scoffed a space cake – so called as it’s made with cannabis resin – on the sofa (sometimes the hedonism doesn’t involve going out) and was found in the garden talking to the wall. And the one who trumped all the other idiots by finishing the weekend in hospital with an irregular heart beat, after doing too much cocaine at a 50th.
One long-suffering friend is married to a man who still loves a rave. Off he goes most Saturday nights – not returning until she’s settling down for Antiques Roadshow (Model pictured)
Cocaine is very popular with these would-be Peter Pans. I heard of one party where some wife-swapping went on after a particularly decadent coke-fuelled session. The fallout was appalling, with one couple splitting up not long afterwards. There were children involved and a sizeable joint mortgage – the chaos these irresponsible men leave behind can be devastating.
I’m no prude. I did plenty of hell-raising in my youth. Then in my early 40s I wisely passed on the party baton to the next generation. I knew my limitations (parenthood, career), so left it to the millennials and Gen Z to do silly things and regret it all the morning after.
To be honest, at my age (51) there’s a high chance things can go seriously awry health-wise, and a hedonistic hobby just encourages more risk-taking behaviours.
One husband was mugged in central London because he’d passed out at an alfresco bar table, only to come round to find his bag and phone had been swiped. He dimly remembered a stranger reaching down and taking his bag but he’d been too drunk to react.
We all wish for more wholesome things for our partners – such as bike riding, or marathon running or pottering about on an allotment – but no, for many dads in my affluent west London neighbourhood, where houses start above the £1million mark, it’s invariably another secret rave in a forest somewhere off the M25.
Understandably, quite a few of my friends track their husbands more than they keep digital tabs on their teenage children. After all, most self-respecting teens are far less hedonistic and far more clued up about their devices. They don’t peer groggily at their iPhone at 3am on a dark lonely street trying to find the Uber app.
Another tell-tale sign of this refusal to grow up? Stupid hair!
Hair, as Fleabag told us, is everything. Only my husband and his friends are trapped in their time-warp of excess and have failed miserably to update their hairstyles to match their ageing faces. While Liam Gallagher can still (just about) carry off a feather cut, it’s mortifying on a sixty-something on his way to Lidl.
The women I know are always at the salon and more likely to be in a spin class than spinning out in a field with a bunch of coke-snorting strangers.
‘I worry I’d have a heart attack,’ a friend said, after revealing her other half was booking a male ayahuasca ceremony in Peru, an expensive effort to ‘find’ himself again.
Of course, there are plenty of us who love a drink, and most probably a sneaky smoke every now and then, but in my experience this usually means a Saturday night kitchen disco involving an M&S gin tin and a quick boogie to Murder On The Dancefloor with a friend or three.
Most women, myself included, invest in comfortable and stylish pyjamas, lavender sleep sprays and LED masks, and relish being tucked up in bed by 9.30pm, reading the latest romantasy novel.
The women I know are always at the salon and more likely to be in a spin class than spinning out in a field with a bunch of coke-snorting strangers (Models pictured)
It’s true that many of my generation were wildly hedonistic with the famous Second Summer of Love in the late 1980s. So it makes sense that some men find it hard to finally put those party pants to bed.
Meanwhile, my best friend is worrying because her husband is on a ‘second marriage stag’ in Ibiza. Second-time stags can be particularly dangerous as the mature groom (usually marrying someone half their age) feels they have to prove their virility.
‘They’ll be acting like extras from The Hangover film,’ she tells me miserably, over a cup of turmeric tea. ‘Apparently, it’s two nights of clubbing and strip clubs. You can bet he’ll be out of action for days afterwards when he’s back home.’
I think about The Hangover whenever I hear these tales of drunken, drug-fuelled dads on benders.
There’s a classic morning-after scene (after a stag has gone wrong) where one character wakes up in Vegas with a missing tooth and a tiger in the bathroom. Nobody remembers how it got there. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t quite so close to the truth.
Samantha Moyles is a pseudonym. All identifying details have been changed.
