Treat Your Husband Like a Cat: The One Simple Change to Enchant Your Home

The Argument: All the things that you would make sure to do for your cat, you should do for your husband.

“My Wife’s Lovers” (1891) by Carl Kahler

Imagine your home is a cozy haven, much like a refuge for a beloved house cat. It is orderly yet alive with small delights. The cat is basking in the warm glow of the afternoon sun. Pink peonies grace the kitchen table. A cedar candle flickers on the mantle.

I know you are already doing more than enough for your husband, but hear me out.

I was sitting with my friend, at SnackHaven, in a booth, and we were watching people walk around, collecting snacks, wearing t-shirts, going to where they were going, exchanging energy, making parlance. It was as if we were in an outdoor Parisian cafe, discussing philosophy, observing the passers-by, except nobody was speaking French and we were not in a café and were in a cozy indoor workplace and cafeteria.

Soon enough the conversation turned to the items in the room that were changing and not changing. The people were moving; the snacks, for the large part, were not. There was a coziness in the consistency. The chips and nut bars and chocolates and protein bars and vitamins were all there, just as they were yesterday, skillfully arranged and refilled in a punctual manner before anything ran out.

But there were small changes every so often that I did notice. On one day, out of nowhere, extremely perfectly ripe avocados appeared. The avocados were quickly eaten over a few days. Then some unripe bananas appeared. Then some perfectly ripe bananas. Some chocolate truffles were replaced by dark chocolate squares.

It was only in an environment of such cozy consistently that I was spending enough time there to notice these small changes, and noticed them in a way that felt like a gentle game I was enjoying.

I felt like a cat on a perch.

I was luxuriating, enjoying the intellectual stimulation in my cozy environment. My colleague and I felt joy being melancholy together, languishing over our writing tasks, taking turns sighing, drinking our teas, describing our environment.

Then it hit me; I was enjoying this sensation so much, I must write about it and incorporate it into every aspect of my life.

The One Simple Change

Imagine that you have a house cat. You can imagine a prized Norwegian Forest cat, or a Ragdoll. Maybe you are imagining Garfield. Or maybe you are imagining a lanky little street cat that followed you around years ago.

For this exercise it is better to imagine a few different cats that you like. Perhaps one that is not exceptional, but is a good strong friendly cat and you happen to like cats. Perhaps one cat you are imagining is a beloved princess cat.

When you think about leaving this cat alone in your house, you might think about a variety of values you care about bringing to the cat: enrichment, stimulation, an ability to practice differential equations with moving objects that are floating around on little mobiles, the ability to practice depth perception on objects of variable distances.

I have a suggestion that your husband would be enchanted and have more positive moods if you treated him no worse than a cat you were leaving alone in the house.

First, you start off with a relatively tidy place you are living. We don’t have to get Martha Stewart up in here. Just as you can keep a cat in any sized apartment, you can do these tips in any sized space. The space does not have to be minimalist, or any specific ideal aesthetic. It doesn’t even have to be completely clean. The important thing is for the space to be legible. You have to know what is meant to be there (things that are not trash, but are a choice) versus trash (shouldn’t be there, not a real part of the environment). You can browse the aesthetic wiki to get ideas for aesthetics that are not minimalist but are still legible.

Once you have an environment like this with a legible level of cleanliness, and perhaps a legible aesthetic (though this is optional), change something in this legible environment between every one and three days. Perhaps get a new kind of fruit and put it out, or get flowers, or rearrange some vases before putting the flowers in. Maybe get some new chocolates. The changes do not have to be big. The point is for them to be semi-frequent to create feelings of stimulation.

What is the point of this?

You may want to try this because it is not too much work, and probably will have some nice effects that are hard to describe.

Would you want to deprive your husband of small colored balls, baskets of yarn, aerial objects in motion, light patterns coming in through half-transparent lace curtains in the windows, and a variety of textures and stimulation for his eyes and mind to think about? Everything you would have in your environment for a cat, you should have for your husband.

And there are benefits for you as well. You will get to play with new kinds of romance as a way of being. You will get to explore different kinds of beauty very gently and legibly to another human you like, showing your taste and your playfulness with taste, and show what kinds of things you are thinking throughout the day. You will be making visible choices you can share with your partner and talk about. You will make small insignificant mistakes and recover from them, develop an ethos, learn about what you like and what your partner likes, and have more romance together. Disenchantment is a myth, and this is a way to interact with enchantment.

You think you might have already created the perfect environment and the perfect apartment, but even if you’ve got something picture perfect, beauty in motion creates a whole motion picture.

You wouldn’t just be hanging out in your kitchen with your husband. With this one simple change you would be hanging out in a whole adventure kitchen that keeps changing.