Don’t Change Your Clothes Right When You Get Home

This article also could have been titled, “Dress For The Right People”. Let me explain…

Many people struggle with balancing their work life and their home life. The rise of telework helped us all feel like our work lives bled into our home lives in a way that felt very invasive. Even if some people returned to the office after the pandemic, their laptops were always with them in case they needed to sign on after regular work hours. This, understandably, meant that many people never really felt like they “left” work at the end of their days. All of this didn’t begin with the pandemic, but the pandemic certainly exacerbated it.

In response to this, many well-meaning writers on the internet suggested that people should change their clothes immediately when they get home as a way to literally “shed” that part of their day and to be able to more easily associate home with comfort, relaxation, and most critically, NOT work!

For many people, that’s great advice! Coming home and promptly taking off your work clothes and putting them away is a pretty strong mental trigger that your workday is indeed DONE and “put away” for the day. I imagine that doing that helps many people relax and be able to be fully present for their families.

But there’s one problem with changing out of your day clothes immediately upon arriving home. And when I say “day clothes” or “work clothes” I’m talking about the nice clothes that most of us wear to an office (not proper work clothes like work boots or coveralls that should definitely be removed upon arriving home).

The problem with changing out of your nice clothes immediately when you get home is that the most important people in your life don’t get to see you in them, namely, your wife and children!

There is hierarchy of the people we get dressed nicely for. Sure, a certain level of formality may be required of your profession or office but the person who should occupy the top spot of that hierarchy is your wife (followed closely by your children).

Yeah, yeah… “But I get dressed for me! I don’t get dressed for anyone else!”

No, you don’t.

You get dressed up because you want to present yourself a certain way to other people. Yes, part of that “conversation” is how you feel about yourself but dressing doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. Part of why dressing up feels so good to us is because we have an idea of how we are perceived by others.

So, your wife is the first person you should be getting dressed up for. But if you change your clothes immediately upon arriving home, you are robbing her of the chance to see her man looking his best. Why should the people at the office get the best-looking version of you?

Now, you might say, “Well, my wife loves me for me. She knows how I look and she doesn’t need me to be dressed up around her.”

You’re right! She doesn’t NEED it. But she sure LIKES it!

Think about it in reverse. If your wife came home in a beautiful dress and high heels with her hair and makeup done wouldn’t you want her to linger just a little bit before she changed into her pajamas? Of course you find her beautiful naturally, but there’s nothing wrong with appreciating someone’s effort to look nice.

You don’t have to stay in your nice clothes for very long… just enough to give your family a little mental reminder of the fact that you know how to respectfully present yourself to the world.

Pour a glass of wine and chat for a few minutes with your wife while you’re both fixing dinner. Hug the kids and ask them how school went. After a few minutes you can go get changed (before the messiness of dinner and bedtimes, of course), but those few moments after you come home while still in your suit/tie/sport coat/whatever will give your family visibility into how a man moves and lives in “nice” clothes. It will make classic menswear familiar to your children and it will make a positive impression on your wife.

Too often, we get distracted by work and social media and think that we dress well for them.

But dressing well isn’t supposed to be done for the “likes”. And many people work from home permanently and never need to go into an office. That makes it even clearer that the people we should be dressing for are our spouses and children.

Those are the people who give us true validation. The people at work don’t really care about you. The people on the internet forget about you as soon as they scroll past you. The people who are actually impressed with how you look and who actually feel a sense of pride and happiness in what you wear are the people in your house.

Don’t waste all your cool clothes and sartorial expertise on a bunch of people who don’t give a sh*t. Unleash it on the people who will truly benefit from it.