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IF YOU’RE A grown-ass adult, putting your shoes on before leaving the house should be fairly quick and painless. After all, you’ve spent your whole life putting your shoes on and it’s not that difficult!

Unless you’re preparing to climb the Himalayas and need to don a pair of sturdy mountaineering boots, the whole process should take, oh, twenty seconds.

But for some men, it seems that putting shoes on is an ordeal that involves some of the following:

• Shoving your foot into a shoe that you forgot to untie from the night before. Removing said shoe after it becomes clear you’re going to need to untie it. Sitting down and starting over from scratch.
• Spending literal minutes tying your laces, fumbling around with double knots, realising that the shoes are now actually too tight for your poor little toesies, sighing deeply and starting again.
• Deciding what pair of shoes to wear as if they’re choosing a child to rescue. “Will it rain today? These will be okay in the rain, won’t they?” *ten minutes pass* “Would I get away with Converse?”

Yesterday, New York Magazine enlisted journalist Max Read to explain why men take so long putting on their shoes. 

Read attributed men’s inability to put their shoes on in a timely, efficient manner to a few things — laces being a pain in the arse to tie, lack of dexterity and good old-fashioned vanity.

He also presented this rather stark statistic.

If your dude takes an average of 30 extra seconds to put his shoes on, and the two of you leave your home together five times a week, you’re spending more than two hours every year waiting for your so-called “life partner.” The average American woman gets married at 27 and has a life expectancy of 81 years. That’s 117 hours — nearly five days — of her life spent waiting for her husband to pick out and tie his f**king shoes

Following the article’s publication, people took to Twitter to confirm that men do indeed take a needlessly long time to put their shoes on.

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So, does this phenomenon exist in Ireland?

We asked around TheJournal.ie and DailyEdge.ie to see whether or not the women of the office had noticed men taking a long time to put on their shoes.

Some admitted that they had never particularly noticed it in their partners, while others had stories to tell that rivaled Vietnam war tales. (“He can’t seem to stand on one foot while hoisting on his shoe on the other one – he always hops around like a demented flamingo.”)

A categoric yes.

I would say that I often see men tying their laces at a glacial pace – almost as if they are using it as break time. Strange little creatures they are.

How many laces must a man tie before you can call him a man?

Depends on the man and the shoe.

He doesn’t just not untie his laces when he comes in, meaning he has to faff around with them in the morning before he can put his feet in and tie them up. He FIRST tries to shove his feet into the runners for at least 10 seconds and when they don’t go, only then does he go through the faff of untying and retying.

One of the men in the office acknowledged that the process can take a long time, but only because they leave it to the very last minute.

I think part of it definitely lies in guys waiting until the very last minute. People need to be bustling out the door before I’d even dream of reaching for the shoes

So, reader, we ask you…

Do Irish men take ages putting their shoes on?

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