If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (3 page)

This book was written to remind you of that, over and over, in glorious, honest, sidesplitting detail. I’ve sought input from women around the virtual world to detail the many maddening ways of the men we’d miss terribly should they be abducted by aliens.

You know how good it feels when you tell your best friend about a ghastly spat with your husband and she not only says just the right soothing, comforting thing but fires back with her own battle tale that’s thirteen times more fabulous than yours in its horror? This book is her—but you can curl up with it night after night and laugh until you cry and your husband won’t give you grief about yet another two-hour phone marathon with your best friend.

Joe always wonders why I frequently come home from my too-infrequent Girls’ Nights Out feeling particularly frisky. He probably assumes it’s the booze, but here’s the real reason: It takes only a few hours with some married friends, listening to them bitch about
their
dreadful husbands, to make me realize I dodged some nasty bullets when I landed mine.

So when my otherwise lovely life partner is relentlessly gnawing on my last frazzled nerve, I am going to conjure the best stories I’ve heard and try to be grateful anyway. To love him even if I’d much rather be folding laundry or enjoying a nice Pap smear.
To cherish him like I effing promised I would.
And when he leaves the empty lemonade pitcher in the refrigerator after he polishes off the last refreshing drop, or thoughtfully deposits his stinky basketball shorts directly
next to
the hamper, I am going to beg myself to remember that it could be much, much worse. To wit: Peppered throughout this book—plus in a final glorious roundup chapter at the end—are true tales from the marital trenches, here to remind us all just how good we have it. (Relatively, at least.) Just look for the handy “At Least You’re Not Married to Him” icon. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll count your connubial blessings like you haven’t since your honeymoon. You’ll come to appreciate tiny gestures—your husband’s putting on deodorant or actually replacing the toilet tissue roll after he’s used the last square—that you may never have even noticed before.

On that note, a little heads-up to the dude who
never, ever brushes his teeth
and his wife loves him anyway: You might want to step it up in every other marital area possible. That gal’s a keeper.

Can We Talk?
Obviously Not

If love means never having to say you’re sorry,
marriage means always having to say everything twice.

• ESTELLE GETTY •

 

 

Just last week, a newsletter I read regularly arrived in my inbox with a headline heralding this terrifying bit of news: COMMUNICATION KEY TO GOOD MARRIAGE. Heart racing, I clicked through to the story, vastly relieved to discover that it was referring to a recent study conducted by the National Association of Advertisers looking at the “marriage” between client and agency. I mean, can you
imagine
if they’d been talking about men and women and the actual holy sacrament of matrimony? (The study also pointed out the benefits of having an objective third party in the room, which would certainly come in handy in the domestic arena. “Why don’t you ask
her
if that’s what I said, asshole.”)

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe my relationship is truly unique in its never-ending struggle over the basic exchange of ideas and information. Remember that old
Far Side
cartoon, the one with the guy talking to his dog? Under the first picture is the caption
WHAT YOU SAY TO YOUR DOG
, and the speech bubble coming out of the guy’s mouth reads something like this: “Okay, Ginger! I’ve had it! You stay out of the garbage! Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage or else!” Under the next picture, which is identical to the first, there’s the caption
WHAT YOUR DOG HEARS
;
that
bubble has this inside it: “Blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .”

Now I’m not calling my husband a dog exactly, but seriously, we do seem to have a hell of a time relaying ideas to one another. For many, many years, I operated on the assumption that Joe simply has a smaller capacity for both using and processing words than I do. If you want indisputable proof that my theory was wrong, ask him for details about the collapse of the S&L industry or the history of the Raiders or the plight of the beautiful but endangered red-shouldered hawk or anything else he’s passionate and knowledgeable about, and he’ll chew your ear until it’s bloody. But if you want to know how he feels when we get denied the bank loan we desperately want, or what sort of legacy he hopes to leave behind when he’s gone, or how he thinks his parents’ divorce ultimately affected his ability to foster and maintain lasting, meaningful relationships, good luck getting a single intelligible nugget out of him. If someone came out with Conversational CliffsNotes for Relationships, I’m sure my husband would happily buy the entire series.

In addition to his aversion to verbalizing matters of the heart, Joe tends to be extremely stingy (he’d probably say “economical,” but the divide over semantics is another episode of
Dr. Phil
) with his syllables when it comes to basic, everyday chitchat. Whereas I am not merely fond of but one might say driven to lengthy discourse, my husband holds on to his words as if they were hundred-dollar bills and he’s hovering on the brink of bankruptcy. This verbal imbalance frequently results in exchanges in our home that sound a lot like this:

In my multitasking mind, this is not a yes/no question. Sure, maybe the bottom line is that
I haven’t ordered the goddamned supplies as of this particular moment in time
, but there are mitigating circumstances! Explanatory details! Titillating shades of expository gray! The shortest answer I could possibly give is that I haven’t (and I’d be happy to explain why) but I will (and allow me to tell you when). Alas, my listening-impaired husband doesn’t want a story; he wants an answer. A simple, clear-cut, one-word, yes-or-no answer. And while I understand this on a fundamental level, that tiny detail kicks my ass every single time.

My husband starts all of his sentences with the word
no
. Even when he is agreeing with me, he will say “No . . .” It’s like a transition word for him between thoughts or sentences. It’s totally annoying.

CATHY

 

 

It’s taken me many frustrating years to accept the fact that my husband believes “Yes” is an acceptable answer to questions such as “Should we stay at your dad’s or in a hotel next month?” or “Do you want pork loin or chicken cacciatore tonight?” For the longest time I accused him of being passive-aggressive, but the reality is there’s nothing aggressive about his typical sort of reply at all. It’s 100 percent passive—and for the most part absent of malice—because he
truly doesn’t give a shit
where we stay or what we eat. And the thing is, for reasons unknown to me and probably most women who aren’t scientists studying the social-anthropological motivations behind universal female drives, I
want
him to give a shit.
If he loved me, he’ d understand I’m tired of making every mundane domestic decision and at least pretend to care
, I silently seethe. The thought bubble over
his
head, of course, would probably read,
What’s love got to do with it?

If he didn’t love me, would he have built me that kick-ass walk-in closet without even demanding a single square foot of real estate inside it where he might stash a handful of socks? Would he patrol our darkened street every other night making enthusiastic kissing noises in an effort to lure home the cat he doesn’t really care for because he knows I can’t sleep if she’s not in the house? Would he agree to spend Christmas Eve sleeping on scratchy, ill-fitting sheets draped over a saggy air mattress just so that I can spend the holiday with one or another of my wacky relatives? Of course not. He loves me, but the truth is he couldn’t care less where we stay or what we eat.
C’est la vie
. Or at least,
c’est
ma
vie
.

My husband is a major pessimist! No matter how positive things are going, he can find the negative in it. Instead of saying that something is going to go well, he talks about everything that could possibly go wrong.

DEB

 

 

Sadly, the mere fact of Joe’s devotion does not make conversations like this any less maddening:

Because I write about relationships a lot, I get a ton of press releases on the subject. The headline on a recent one, sent out to announce the results of a series of studies, boldly proclaimed, “Women write emotional e-mails while men prefer short, straightforward ones.” This is news? Did the “researchers” spend actual money to come to this shocking conclusion? Or did one of them merely extrapolate when she noticed that her own inbox was filled with spousal responses that contained nothing but the letter K (Think, “Want to go out for dinner tonight?” “K”), as if the sender might be suggesting he is far too busy and important to go to the laborious lengths of typing out the entire word
Okay
?

Communication experts point out that conversationally, in addition to their desire to share excruciatingly minute details, women tend to key in on similarities (“My kid/mom/dog/ housekeeper/ass fat does that, too!”), while men pretty much take everything they hear as a challenge (“Your kid/mom/dog/ housekeeper/ass fat does that? Big deal—listen to what
mine
does!”). These same professionals insist that the way to motivate and persuade people of either sex is to talk about things they care about in ways that matter to them. Far as I can tell, that would mean the preceding conversation would have worked out swimmingly for Joe had I just put it this way:

“Want to tell me all about basketball while I give you a blowjob?”

Here’s the irony of this ubiquitous situation: Advice on bridging the titanic communication gap between men and women has become its own billion-dollar industry. The category pioneer,
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
, is no longer just a book, it’s an empire, complete with online magazine, dating service, wellness retreats, seminars, CDs, DVDs, personal coaching, franchise opportunities, even a supplement line—because perhaps the sexes would finally get along if men would just get a little more choline bitartrate in their diets while women simultaneously upped their intake of ginger root and boron.

Call me cynical, but I’m thinking that if his-and-hers vitamins were the answer, we’d have read about it in
Shape
or seen an investigative Consumer Alert segment on
Dateline
. The gals at
The View
would be all over that, don’t you think? Your favorite bloggers would be blabbing about it, your hairdresser would already be hawking it right at her station, and Oprah would resurrect her beloved show for one glorious encore where she would interview happily supplementing couples and then bequeath cases of the stuff to her audiences, packaged generously in the trunks of their new Mercedes-Benz sport coupes, not that I’m bitter. Picture the news teasers: “Groundbreaking new supplement fosters satisfying communication between men and women!” Who among you wouldn’t tune in at six?

Alas, we don’t need fancy vitamins, because I think I have the answer. I have actually figured out how women—the doers in most relationships—can turn the conversational tide without their partner’s consent
or
cooperation. I know, we all want the guys to step up and “own” their part in our collective relational dysfunction. But life is short, and really, isn’t the final result more important than how you get there? Because I believe it is, I present to you my radically simple, three-step process for successful marital communication: