Joan was demanding that I be grown-up.
I was prepared to try if it helped Susan; but I still regarded adulthood with some horror.
First, I wasn’t sure that it was attainable.
Secondly, even if attainable, I wasn’t sure it was desirable.
Thirdly, even if desirable, then only by comparison with childhood and adolescence.
What did I dislike and distrust about adulthood?
Well, to put it briefly: the sense of entitlement, the sense of superiority, the assumption of knowing better if not best, the vast banality of adult opinions, the way women took out compacts and powdered their noses, the way men sat in armchairs with their legs apart and their privates heavily outlined against their trousers, the way they talked about gardens and gardening, the spectacles they wore and the spectacles they made of themselves, the drinking and the smoking, the terrible phlegmy racket when they coughed, the artificial smells they applied to conceal their animal smells, the way men went bald and women shaped their hair with aerosols of glue, the noxious thought that they might still be having sex, their docile obedience to social norms, their snarky disapproval of anything satirical or questioning, their assumption that their children’s success would be measured by how well they imitated their parents, the suffocating noise they made when agreeing with one another, their comments about the food they cooked and the food they ate, their love of stuff I found disgusting (especially olives, pickled onions, chutneys, piccalilli, horseradish sauce, spring onions, sandwich spread, stinky cheese and Marmite), their emotional complacency, their sense of racial superiority, the way they counted their pennies, the way they hunted for food trapped between their teeth, the way they weren’t interested enough in me, and the way they were too interested in me when I didn’t want them to be.
This was just a short list, from which Susan was naturally and entirely exempt.
Oh, and another thing. The way, doubtless through some atavistic terror of admitting to real feelings, they ironised the emotional life, turning the relationship between the sexes into a silly running joke. The way men implied that women ran everything really; the way women implied that men didn’t really understand what was going on. The way men pretended they were the strong, and women had to be petted and indulged and taken care of; the way women pretended that, regardless of the accumulated sexual folklore, they were the ones who had the common sense and practicality. The way each sex blubbingly admitted that, for all the other’s faults, they still needed one another. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. And they lived with ’em in marriage, which, as one wit put it, was an institution in the sense of mental institution. Who first said that, a man or a woman?
— The Only Story (Julian Barnes), Loc. 1020–40