Free Advice

This is an open letter to husbands everywhere.

Dear husbands:

I’m curious. Do you get upset that your wife talks to her friends about your marriage? Does it bother you that she confides in her girlfriends or that they know so much about your relationship? Do you perhaps feel threatened by how close she is to her friends? After all, you don’t tell your friends shit, and you are still as close as bros can be without going all Brokeback, right? You never understood why women went to the bathroom in groups or told the same story twenty times to twenty of their closest friends, and you still don’t understand that constant need for contact and conversation. You wish it would all just stop, and your wife could just be your wife. Am I right?

Well, guess what? Get over yourself.

First of all, when you got married, your wife didn’t become your property. Just because she is your wife doesn’t make her under your control. She can talk to anyone she damn well pleases, about whatever the hell she wants to. You don’t get to decide who her friends are any more than you can dictate the topics of conversation. It isn’t all about you, no matter how much you want it to be.

You need to chill the fuck out.

Or maybe it is all about you. Do you really want to hear what she thinks about your snoring or how you destroy a toilet or how she laments that you are physically unable to put a dish in the dishwasher? If all the Hallmark cards for men are about how you fart and fall asleep in front of the television or play golf all weekend, then maybe you need to stop. Possibly it’s time for you to be a little more considerate. You are a man now, after all. So enough sniffing the armpits of your t-shirts and put them in the laundry hamper already. And while you’re at it, throw a load in the wash. Take a moment to hang up her bras before you put that load in the dryer. Stop giving her a reason to complain about you. Just a thought.

Here’s something else you might not have thought about. Maybe, just maybe, your wife likes to talk about her problems. Maybe she finds discussion about what you consider to be unpleasant topics helpful and positive. Just because you don’t do that doesn’t make it wrong. Guess what’s cheaper than therapy? A bottle of wine at girl’s night out.  Give her a break from you, Jonathon Livingston Seagull.

And if you are the unpleasant topic she wants to discuss, let her have at it. Talking to friends is a great way to get advice or just vent. Despite what you may think, we wives aren’t all sitting around trying to decide how to make your life miserable. Trust me, you don’t need our help for that. What we are doing is something you might not be very good at. We are listening. We take turns saying how we feel, and we listen. We might validate. We might say wait a minute, you need to look at it this way. We might say hey, friend, you are way off base. What we do know is the very act of listening is what helps. We like to be heard, and talking to friends is a great way for us to get that need met.

If your wife didn’t have friends to talk to, do you know who would have to listen to her? That’s right. You. Do you really want to listen to your wife go on and on about what’s bothering her, especially if you are the bother?  She might criticize, and chances are you would counter with some choice words about the constant nagging, and there you go, giving her more reason to need to vent. All that time she is talking on the phone, or texting, or instant messaging, that could all be aimed at you instead of sent to someone else. Seriously, you should be buying roses and chocolate and shit for all of her friends, thanking them for giving you some fucking peace. They are making your marriage better and you don’t even realize it, you dumb schmuck.

Remember when you were a little boy and you were told to buck up and stop crying and be a man? Well, your wife wasn’t. She was allowed to have emotions. Now that she is grown up, she still does. You do too, by the way. Having emotions is compatible with having a penis. Expressing those emotions is also allowed for you. If you choose not to, well, so be it. That doesn’t mean your wife doesn’t get to.

It’s time for you to stop feeling so threatened by your wife’s friends. She isn’t plotting your murder with them. She is expressing how she feels with them. She might be complaining about you, but so what?  What if her friends complain about their husbands too and you turn out looking pretty good? She might even come home and show her appreciation that you weren’t as horrible as she thought you were.

The next time you feel vulnerable because of your wife's oversharing, take a deep breath and go back to whatever the hell you were doing. Go watch a football game. Go drive your car too fast. Go eat four double cheeseburgers and drink too many beers and put extra salt on your fries. Go Dutch oven your bed. You are going to do all those things anyway. Just give your wife a break when she bitches about it to someone else. Because that is the thing she is going to do, and you can’t make her change that behavior any more than she can change yours.

Sincerely,

Your wives and all her friends

Some Light Reading

I need to branch out in my reading material this winter. For some reason, I’ve been reading memoir after memoir, and I need a break from all that fuckedupitude. I remember once asking my father in law about his choice in movies, as he always went for the inane and eschewed all things deep and dramatic. “I go to the movies to be entertained,” he told me. “If I want to know about all the horrible things in the world, I could watch the news or read the paper. Why would I want to waste my leisure time depressing myself?” People read papers back when I asked him that. He had a good point though. The news is depressing as hell. Times are tough the world over, my friend.

So why spend my rare free time reading depressing memoirs one after another like so many burned potato chips? I love fiction, don’t get me wrong. Fiction is great stuff and offers us a wonderful escape or soporific, depending on what you want it to do. But lately, it isn’t doing either for me, so I find myself turning to memoir more and more in an effort to find something to hold my attention long enough to get sleepy. In fact, four of the last five books I’ve read were memoirs or creative nonfiction, and I’m worried my trend is a reflection of my watching too much reality television.

I just finished reading a memoir called The Burn Journals, which is about a fourteen year old boy who has a little thing about arson. He fucks up pretty good at school by intentionally lighting a pack of matches on fire, but then in a panic with the burning matchbook accidentally lighting a t-shirt and the locker it was in on fire as well. Fearing the very real possibility of expulsion, he goes home and attempts suicide by, you guessed it, setting himself on fire. This was not like a Tibetan monk self-immolating for his beliefs and religious freedom; this was an impulsive teenage boy in over his head. The book is mostly about the year of recovery after his suicide attempt, and much like burn scars, it ain’t pretty.

Before that book, I read a memoir by Alice Sebold. You might recall her name, as she is the author of The Lovely Bones, one of the most disturbing pieces of modern fiction ever written, about a girl who is raped and murdered, and the effect of her death on her family, all told from the victim’s point of view.  I remember reading it and thinking that she must have had some serious trauma in her life to create that kind of creepiness. Her memoir is entitled Lucky, and it is about her own rape and the aftermath on her family and her life, including the difficult court trial.  It seems I was right about her.

Prior to that one, I read a translated documentary novel called The Druggist of Auschwitz. I’m pretty sure you can guess what that was about. That’s right, three feel good stories in a row. No wonder I have trouble sleeping.

So I decided to try something different. Now I’m reading a book by Celia Rivenbark, a  columnist who is sort of a Southern Erma Bombeck. She writes humorous essays about nothing, only with more success and acclaim than, say, I do.

Anyway, here’s what I can’t get past. She writes a lot about her family, as do I, only she refers to her child as “The Princess” and her husband as “Duh-hubby.” Sometimes, she just calls him “Duh” but we get the point. She thinks he’s a bit of an idiot, and he is either too stupid to object or very secure and doesn’t mind.

I don’t write much about my husband, which he prefers. Once, back when I first started sharing my essays, I wrote one about him being startled by a snake in our backyard, and he was mad at me for days afterwards. So the understanding we have reached in an effort to remain friends (and also married) is that I don’t write about him without his permission or prior review (with the exception of right now).

Sometimes he is a main character in a story I need to tell, so I can’t leave him out entirely, although I am pretty sure he would prefer I do. He is not looking for his fifteen minutes of fame; he just wants to be left alone. This is an individual who is convinced Facebook is really Big Brother data farming us all, waiting to turn all of our pictures and thoughts and connections over for some sinister use.

The thing is, he’s probably right. The NSA has probably stored every email I’ve ever sent, every Facebook status I’ve updated, every meme I’ve texted. Yours too, by the way. All of ours. Somewhere in an underground bunker in Colorado is a team of extremely overworked government employees who can’t believe how dumb the rest of us have become.

But back to my point, before I went off on that conspiracy rant. I can’t imagine making a living out of smack-talking my spouse and still having one. Maybe my spouse is correct. Maybe we have become a culture of oversharing idiots who can’t take a crap or make a sandwich without wanting the whole world to know about it. If our moms didn’t cut the crusts off our sandwiches or our dads laughed at our sophomoric efforts in card making, we don’t need hours of therapy that result in a book deal. We need to maybe move on and get over ourselves.

It might be time to look at the New York Times Book Review and make a more appropriate reading selection, or maybe stop by the classics section of the library and expand my range. Hell, I could step into the other room and finish the copy of Jude the Obscure I never made it past the first fifty pages of in college. I’ll get right on that, after this TLC “Four Weddings” marathon is over.