My husband wears a business suit every day. Grey – maybe charcoal grey. Sometimes grey with a pale blue stripe or faint pattern. An old-school suit, long pants and a matching suit jacket. Socks and black shoes. He looks like he's on his way to a summer wedding. But he's not.
Before Covid, he was the guy in his office who voted against casual Fridays. When the young associates wanted to dress down and wear khaki pants, or black leggings to work, my husband always voted no. Now, no one even comes into the office. But he still wears a suit.
If you’re working from home, you don’t have to wear a suit to sit at the computer. In fact, you don’t even have to get dressed. But if you opt for pajamas, do you want to be the person who never turns their camera on? Not my husband. Full suit every working day. He looks like he could go in front of the Supreme Court at a moment’s notice. But he’s not meeting Clarence Thomas. Some days he’s just going into the living room and sitting at his computer.
“No one will see your black shoes,” I yell at him. “You don’t have to wear wing-tips.” For some reason, his insistence on wearing a suit bugs the shit out of me. Maybe it’s a woman thing – we need to immediately pull off our Spanx and kick off our shoes when we get home.
I don’t work in an office now, but I can remember when I did. I’d come home at the end of the day and go right upstairs to change into comfy clothes. Sometimes pajamas. Then my kids would point out that it was 6:45 pm and I was in pajamas. “So?” I would answer. “I need to be comfortable. It’s fine.” Not my husband.
I used to suggest that he might want to change out of his suit when he gets home. We’ve had a terrible long pattern of 100 degree days here on the East Coast. It’s oppressively hot. My husband is not bothered. When he comes home and ambles over to the kitchen and starts lifting lids on the pots on the stove and aimlessly opening cabinets, looking for what, I don’t know, he’s still in his suit.
“I’ll load the dishwasher,” he volunteers, his silk tie hanging over the wire dish rack.
“OoooKaaay,” I say out loud, while internally I’m seething at the sight of his dry-clean-only suit jacket coming perilously close to a puddle of juice on the counter.
“Should I stir this?” he asks, unhelpfully lifting the lid on a pot of meatballs in red sauce.
“It doesn’t really need stirring,” I answer, picturing the volcano bubbles of red sauce popping to the surface right on his white dress shirt.
When we met in college, my husband didn’t wear a suit. He dressed like every other college kid in jeans and a tee-shirt. Like every student on a budget, he was skinny in those days from living on boxed mac and cheese. He only owned one “dress-up” item of clothing, if you could call a well-worn corduroy sport jacket dress-up. It was all he owned, so for every orchestra concert or faculty cocktail party, David depended on his corduroy jacket.
When we were younger – and our kids were younger - my husband didn’t wear a suit all the time. In fact, with little kids to chase and T-ball games to coach he wore cargo shorts and souvenir T-shirts. He held on to the well-worn “Ski Vail” or “Snug Harbor Jazz” tee shirts long after the vacation was just a memory. Now he considers himself an authority on men’s fashion. Maybe because he wears a suit every day.
I recently saw an email from an editor looking for articles about a partner’s “annoying habits.” I’m sure she was inundated. My husband has many quirks that would annoy a lesser person: Using the car’s turn signal when there is only one way to go on the road. Thank you for the warning, but if you don’t go left here you drive into a cornfield. When he’s finally done his morning routine, he leaves a bathroom-sized Dixie cup of water on the edge of the sink. You couldn’t drink that last 2 ounces and you’re saving it for later?
But wearing a suit every single day? Can I write a whole essay about my husband’s refusal to take off his suit? I guess I just did.
—Ellen Scolnic
Ellen Scolnic has been an award-winning writer for more than 20 years. Her features and personal essays appear in Parents Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Science Monitor, The Jerusalem Post, The Forward and more. Ellen and her writing partner, Joyce Eisenberg, are known as The Word Mavens. They dispense their advice and opinions on everything from dealing with new technology to sneaking out of a party early. Together, they are the authors of the best-selling "Dictionary of Jewish Words" and "The Whole Spiel: Funny essays about digital nudniks, seder selfies and chicken soup memories," a collection of some of their favorite essays. Connect with them at TheWordMavens.com.