This is the tale of two, stupidly intelligent, men.
Not did well in school intelligent. The annoying kind where you can throw almost anything into a conversation and they have something interesting to say about it. My brain loves these people. Mental juices flowing. 10 on 10.
Unfortunately, both of these particular brains were apparently acquired by Corporate.
And I have been trying to understand this ever since.
Because I understand having a career. I understand ambition. I really understand wanting to be successful.
What I cannot understand is giving a job the kind of devotion I ordinarily reserve for people I love.
And these two men did it in completely different ways – Let’s call them Fuckboy One and Fuckboy Two. For research purposes, obviously.
And before I go any further, neither of these men was a bad person.
Both were interesting and fundamentally decent people. Upstanding citizens if I might. The sort of men you could genuinely enjoy having a friendship with.
There was just this completely different internal ranking of what “the meaning of life”, was to them.
To me, motivation was fairly binary. You work hard so you can build a good life. Work sustains the life. Work funds the life. Work hopefully makes parts of said life better.
With these men, that equation seemed blurrier.
Work wasn’t supporting the life.
Work had somehow become part of the definition of life itself.
And apparently I had never really considered that possibility?
Fuckboy One Wanted It All
Fuckboy One wanted a wife.
He liked the idea of marriage and family and everything that came with it. He also genuinely respected ambitious women. Smart women. Successful women. Women with careers and opinions and things happening.
In theory.
In practice, there was a slight logistical problem.
Because he also had a fairly traditional idea of what his wife would actually do.
She would be the central figure at home. She’d manage the household. She’d take care of things. She’d take care of his parents. She’d be there when he eventually returned from work.
And he worked.
My God, did this man work.
There were periods where I believe he was doing two full-time jobs and consulting on the side. He’d wake up and work, go to work, come home and work, and sometimes continue working until 3 or 4 AM.
Which left me with a fairly obvious question.
When exactly is this ambitious wife supposed to have her ambition?
Because I think he genuinely wanted both things.
He wanted an impressive woman and a woman whose life had enough negative space in it to absorb his.
Sure, you can hire household help. You can outsource cleaning and childcare and a hundred other things. But he didn’t just want tasks completed.
He wanted a wife in that position.
A person around whom home organized itself while he went off and did the big important things.
And this is where I think some very ambitious men confuse themselves.
They like ambitious women because ambition is attractive.
They just don’t necessarily like what female ambition does to the job description of Wife.
Because an ambitious woman also has a meeting. She also has somewhere to be. She also occasionally needs someone waiting at home for her.
Annoying.
And to be fair, someone did marry him.
Presumably she looked at the same man, the same ambition, the same operating system and thought: yes, I can build a life with this.
Eventually it didn’t work out.
That doesn’t make him a monster or her foolish.
Sometimes two perfectly decent people build something and discover that the structure doesn’t actually hold.
But I do wonder whether part of the problem was always sitting there in plain sight.
He wanted partnership.
He just also wanted partnership to fit around a life that already had a primary relationship.
Work.
And Then There Was Fuckboy Two
Fuckboy Two, I have to say, is much more self-aware.
No wife.
No children.
No commitment.
Didn’t want them.
Okay, I actually respect this enormously.
If you know that you don’t want another human being’s needs structurally inserted into your life, please don’t marry one and then spend thirty years being irritated that she keeps requiring things.
But Fuckboy Two fascinates me even more because this man is committed!!
Just not to a person.
He took enormous pride in being at his desk by 8 AM
What time does work start?
9 AM.
Cool.
And when do you leave?
7 PM, 8 PM, sometimes 9.
Okay.
But then there are drinks.
Are the drinks mandatory?
No.
But you have to ‘show face’.
Right.
Of course.
The face.
I forgot about the face.
And this wasn’t some horrible job he was desperately grinding through for two years so he could achieve financial freedom. THIS WAS LIFE.
His friends were mostly people from work. His social life involved people from work. Drinks were with people from work. Stories were about people from work.
He also didn’t really do social media.
No Instagram. No posting his dinner. No stories. No apparent interest in watching what anyone else was doing.
Except LinkedIn.
My God, the LinkedIn.
Every time I opened it, there he was.
Fuckboy Two liked this.
Fuckboy Two commented on this.
Fuckboy Two congratulated someone.
Fuckboy Two reshared something.
Fuckboy Two reacted to something.
Sir.
Do you live here?
Which, in retrospect, tells me almost everything I need to know.
And there was one story about his CEO that I heard several times.
Nothing extraordinary happened. They were out, he made a joke about the CEO’s nationality, the CEO laughed.
That’s it.
But he told me this story three or four times over several weeks.
And he wasn’t someone who generally repeated himself.
So eventually I became fascinated by the fact that this particular interaction mattered enough to him that he’d apparently lost track of who he’d already told.
The CEO laughed at my joke.
Achievement unlocked. I’m almost sure he’s tapping his toes wondering if he can post about it on LinkedIn.
And I don’t even mean that cruelly. That’s the thing.
I think it genuinely made him happy.
Even the Women Had a System
And his relationships with women seemed to follow the same logic.
He wasn’t out there pretending to offer more than he intended to give.
He could be warm. Thoughtful. Fun. Generous.
Saturday night could be fantastic.
Dinner. Drinks. Conversation. Sex. Stay over. Breakfast in the morning. Lovely.
But then Sunday arrives.
There are chores.
Monday arrives.
There is work.
And the whole thing returns neatly to its assigned compartment. He did pride himself to be able to “compartmentalize” very well.
It was all very ‘ethical’, as he liked to term it.
There is something refreshingly honest about saying: this is what I have available, this is what I want, and I’m not pretending that it’s secretly developing into something else.
He wasn’t necessarily incapable of care. He just seemed extremely deliberate about how much jurisdiction another person was allowed to have over his life.
There was also a point where he was passed over for a promotion.
He was furious.
He went to a workout class while furious and somehow managed to break his leg.
Now, I am not suggesting the corporation personally broke this man’s leg.
But there is something objectively funny about being so emotionally invested in a promotion that you leave work without one and return with fewer functioning limbs.
And this is where I started realizing that perhaps I’ve been looking at this completely backwards.
Money gives you security. It gives you choices. It lets you travel. It lets you eat well and live somewhere nice and take care of people and buy completely unnecessary things that make you disproportionately happy.
Work can also be interesting and fulfilling and important. Of course it can.
But ultimately, in my head, the job facilitates life.
Maybe that’s not how everyone sees it?
Maybe for Fuckboy Two, the job is life?
And suddenly a lot of things make more sense.
Maybe Fuckboys Aren’t Afraid of Commitment
This is the part I can’t stop thinking about.
Because we describe men like this as commitment-phobic.
But are they?
This man will arrive an hour early for a company that does not belong to him.
He’ll work twelve-hour days.
He’ll go to drinks he doesn’t technically have to attend because it might help three promotions from now.
That man understands commitment perfectly well.
He just doesn’t want to commit to anything that gets an equal vote.
And maybe that’s what autonomy actually means to some people?
A relationship means someone else’s career matters too.
And perhaps some people look at that bargain and genuinely think:
No, thank you.
I’ll take the job.
I’ll take the money.
I’ll take the women.
I’ll take the drinks.
I’ll take the freedom.
I’ll take the CEO laughing at my joke.
I Think This Is the Bit I Couldn’t Understand
For a long time I thought there had to be something missing from that equation.
Surely eventually you’d want to come home to someone?
Surely work can’t be enough?
Surely the networking drinks get old?
Surely one day you’re going to look around and realize you spent an astonishing percentage of your one finite life making a multimillion-dollar company slightly more multimillion-dollar?
But maybe that’s me imposing my own definition of a ‘good life’ onto somebody else’s.
I think of my people as the centre of my life.
Work matters enormously to me. Ambition matters. Money matters. Building things matters.
But all of it ultimately feeds back into the same place: my life.
Maybe achievement gives them what relationships give me.
Maybe professional recognition scratches an itch I don’t have. Somewhere, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts are positively glowing in their graves.
Cause autonomy is more valuable to them than intimacy.
Turns out I think in binaries. Work is work. Life is life.
Apparently, life is considerably greyer to a fuckboy. Work is life.
Do I understand it? Maybe a little more than before. Will I ever feel the way they do? Probably never.
But maybe fuckboys aren’t commitment-phobic after all.
Some of them are just in a very serious long-term relationship with LinkedIn.
– An Evening Person