A while ago I was sitting with a woman friend in a restaurant with our children, having been abandoned by our husbands for “the rugby”. I don’t know what class of “the rugby” it was and anyway it’s not really relevant to this story. The plan had been for all of us to go for dinner after watching Wicked: For Good.
Somehow, on the way from the cinema, the plan changed and now it was just us women and teenage daughters eating noodles and gyoza on Capel Street while the menfolk were watching a screen in some nearby bar.
At first, we thought they might eventually join us at the restaurant but it soon became clear that they had gone off to do some relaxing. And that they weren’t coming back. To our loudly vocalised and righteous consternation they had moved on to Rugby: For Good.
I thought of our righteous consternation on a recent trip away with two men friends. At one point my travelling companions began talking about a certain tendency in the women they love most in the world to try to stop them relaxing. This tendency, they said, was first identified by writer Declan Lynch. He characterises it as an inclination some women have (yes, yes obviously #notallwomen) to exude Big Stop Relaxing Energy when the men in their lives are having much needed me-time.
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In one friend’s house, these precious man moments are known as Brian Time, in a tribute to Brian O’Driscoll. “Brian Time” was a vital part of O’Driscoll’s life while a rugby professional. “Brian Time” was, he once said in an interview, “a very important time for me, a time when I can be myself”.
I asked around about Big Stop Relaxing Energy. In one friend’s house, if his wife happens to catch him relaxing when there is other more important stuff he could be doing, like, say, putting up a shelf she will often be heard to mutter “it’s well for some” in his general direction, a classic relaxation-interrupter.
Another friend said his wife might decide, when he is watching his beloved Manchester United, that this is the exact moment when he needs to start running the vacuum cleaner under the sofa. A woman I know said her husband confessed that he originally moved out from his home office because of the constant sentences from her that began “could you just …?”
Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I am often guilty of exuding Big Stop Relaxing Energy. A few weeks ago, when my husband had sorted the Christmas tree, put up twinkly lights and mopped the floor and was now enjoying some well deserved Jonny Time, I stood in front of the screen and started going on about the list of things that still needed to be done in order for Christmas to happen, including several pictures waiting to be hung.
Of course, there is such a thing as too much relaxing and there are some men (#notallmen) who spend their lives in relaxation mode at home while the women in their orbit, especially at this time of year, are run ragged taking on the mental, physical and emotional load of a household.
As another man friend put it with searing accuracy: “The patriarchal scheme of things provides a vast permission structure for men to scratch their balls ad infinitum, for women less so.” To be clear, I am not talking about those men.
One of my most thoughtful and Zen men friends told me about a scene in action movie The Transporter when Jason Statham tells his female colleague as she fusses over breakfast, that he “likes it quiet in the morning”. He thinks of that scene most days because it’s the time when the domestic to-do list for the day is often presented by the woman he loves.
Meanwhile, my friend just wants to look out the window at the trees and the garden in silence, “happy to be just sitting there having a cup of coffee with my wife, alive and healthy”.
He says the world says it wants us to concentrate on being present, but that this is of course a lie and capitalism demands we treat ourselves as ongoing self-improvement projects that require ever more subservience to money and commerce to succeed. The reality, for a lot of men he knows, is that they are not aspirational in this way. “We know exactly how lucky we are, appreciate what we have and would like to enjoy it.”
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions as a general rule but I am making an exception this year. I can no longer in good conscience continue to exude Big Stop Relaxing Energy. There is no sweeter state for a human, be they man, woman, or child, than relaxing. I love a bit of random relaxation myself. I’m well known for it.
[ Christmas rituals assume women have endless free timeOpens in new window ]
On my recent trip away, as I berated myself for my Big Stop Relaxing Energy, my travelling companions were consoling and suggested it might even be biologically hardwired into some women’s DNA to make sure men don’t relax.
In hunter gatherer times the family would starve if women let men lounge around the cave scratching their nether regions. But Big Stop Relaxing Energy is, in many cases, no longer necessary in an era where many men more than pull their weight domestically speaking.
So my one resolution for 2026 is to give it up. For Good.
