Domestic Bliss and Other Big, Fat Lies

(From IF IT WAS EASY THEY'D CALL THE WHOLE DAMN THING A HONEYMOON)

I promised when I started this substack, I would never put anything behind a paywall. I wanted (and still want and will always want) my words to reach as many eyeballs as possible. That said, as my paid subscriber base has grown, I decided I wanted to thank my generous patrons with… something. So I have been serializing, weekly, one of my earlier and favoritest [*I know it’s not a word] books. It’s a funny look at marriage and relationships and may give you a glimpse into who I was before I was a raging conspiracy theorist/Not For Everyone.

Yes, this is my sweatshirt. And fine, I was never for everyone.

I thought this week I would share a chapter with all of my readers, in case you’ve been thinking, “why would I buy the cow if I can get the milk for free?” (Because when you buy the cow, you help feed the cow and ensure that milk keeps flowing for everyone.) COVID/NWO/election/armageddon/conspiracy commentary will forever remain free and available to all.

PLEASE NOTE: This excerpt is taken verbatim from a previously published book and may (*does) contain profanity. I know some of my subscribers aren’t fans of expletives, so feel free to skip it if that sort of language offends you. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy. :)

“Marriage is not just spiritual communion;
it is also remembering to take out the trash.”

~Dr. Joyce Brothers

My husband has superhuman eyesight. It’s actually uncanny. We’ll be zipping down the highway at 85 miles per hour and he’ll casually remark, without even pulling his eyes from the road in front of him as he drives, “Wow, did you see that baby hawk on the roof of that barn?” Dude, I didn’t even see the barn. We’ll be hiking and he’ll suddenly freeze and put a finger to his lips, his other hand pointing to what turns out to be a tiny lizard sunning itself on a rock a dozen yards up the trail. (If you say so!) He can read road signs in their entirety before I can even make out the letters, spot a familiar face in a crowd of thousands, and as far as I know, has never walked through a spider web, even in the pitch dark.

            So you can imagine why it is infuriating to see him standing before the refrigerator, door swung wide, scratching his head and staring blankly into the Warhol-esque interior.

            “Do we have any milk?” he’ll ask innocently. It’s worth noting that he will ask this while he is staring directly at the milk.

            “Why don’t you try looking behind that massive gallon of white liquid on the top shelf,” I like to respond warmly. “Maybe it’s hiding there.”

Actual me and actual Joe acting out this scene in a book trailer we made for this book (and yes, I know my husband is a saint):      

The most frustrating aspect of living with a victim of Male Pattern Blindness is the disease’s unpredictable nature. For instance, while my poor husband apparently isn’t able to see the brown, festering lettuce in the crisper drawer or realize that the lemonade pitcher no longer contains a single molecule of liquid when he puts it back on the shelf, he has no problem finding the last slice of leftover pizza that I wrapped in tin foil, scrunched into a ball in an effort to camouflage the telltale triangular shape and hid in the far corner of the bottom shelf on the door, behind the maraschino cherries that may have actually come with the refrigerator.

            When it comes to food, the man I married throws nothing away. Expiration dates are meaningless, mold is but a slightly bothersome topping to be scraped away and that salad dressing nobody liked? Oh, that will make an excellent marinade.

            “Pasta doesn’t go bad,” he’ll insist, and “It’s just the crusty stuff around the mouth of the container that smells funny; the milk inside is fine.”

I legit did not know that you had to have one of each. Phew!

            Of course, I’m the exact opposite. I take that whole “best by” business seriously. I put those dates on my mental calendar and promptly toss the contents on the appointed day. I have learned to do this when Joe isn’t home, because frankly the sight of my husband digging through the trash to salvage some hardened heels of bread is something I’d prefer not to have etched in my memory for all of eternity.

            “Where’s the rest of the turkey we had the other night?” he’ll ask. He’s referring, of course, to that “other night” two months ago, also known as Thanksgiving.

            “Dunno, honey,” I say absentmindedly. “Maybe I ate it or something.”

AT LEAST YOU’RE NOT MARRIED TO HIM

“My husband won’t throw anything away, ever. I live with old ripped sneakers ("I'll use them for gardening"; we have a lawn guy), socks with holes ("I can sew them"; he doesn’t know how to sew), ancient photography equipment ("Digital is a fad"), magazines dating back to '79, sleeveless frat t-shirts, and a few cables the puppy chewed through. The worst part is that he works from home and if he sees me carting anything to the trash, he follows me out and brings it right back into the house.”

~Leah

            Sometimes I actually feel bad for him, like when he asks where we keep the vinegar or the vacuum bags, as if he lives inside some funhouse Costco where every night the sadistic manager rearranges every single item so that he can never find what he’s looking for.

The other night, it was ear drops. Our daughter woke up complaining that her ear hurt and for the first time in possibly ever she serendipitously made this announcement while standing slightly closer to Joe’s side of the bed. The unwritten but also unconditional rule in our house is that if one of the children chooses you to do her midnight bidding, you get up and deal without complaint. To Joe’s credit, he did precisely that, murmuring sweetly to her that it would all be okay, daddy would just get her some of the nice ear medicine and it would feel better in no time.

            Rumble, crash, fumble.  

            “Medicine drawer,” I mumbled, trying not to fully emerge into consciousness.

            Clang, clatter, bang.

            “White box with blue lettering, right side, toward the front,” I called, a bit louder this time.

            Thump, thud, boom.

            “Size of a deck of cards only fatter, next to the children’s Motrin!” I shouted, totally awake and furious at myself for not having ESP so I could have left the damned ear drops out on the counter before I went to bed. I endured another several minutes of this maddening ruckus before throwing back the covers angrily and marching into the bathroom, where Joe stood peering into the open medicine drawer. I tenderly shoved him out of the way to have a look myself and—lo and behold—the white, card-deck size box with the blue lettering sat like a snake coiled and ready to strike, right there in the front, right-hand side of the medicine drawer. Next to the children’s Motrin.

            When I ask Joe to unpack the kids’ backpacks, he’ll stack the respective contents on the nearest counter, because he has absolutely no idea where anything “goes.” (Hint: 90 percent of it “goes” into the trash.) He is not even peripherally aware that I buy Christmas and birthday gifts all year long, no less where I stash them. Sometimes I’ll be lying in bed and suddenly I’ll think to myself, “My god, I am the only person in this house who knows where the spare sheets are! What would they do if something happened to me?” I’ve even asked Joe this question, and his response is usually something like “I’d throw away three-quarters of the shit you hoard in this house so I could actually find something when I needed it.” Because obviously, it’s my fault for recklessly putting the medicine in the medicine drawer.

            I am not blaming my husband, really. I am sure that a social anthropologist would be able to explain why evolutionarily, it made no sense whatsoever for a man to be able to locate anything specific within the cave. “Back in the wooly mammoth days,” the wise scholar would tell me in the gravest of tones, “if the hunter went into the den to retrieve his bow and arrow, he would be endangering his family by alerting the enemy as to their whereabouts. Therefore, he learned to stray several protective paces from the entrance to the cave, where he would throw his voice onto a faraway boulder as he bellowed, ‘Hey honey! Where’d you put my goddamned bow and arrow?’”

            If gatherer-girl got pissed when this happened—and I’m going to bet that she did—her hulking hunter-husband would launch into his lecture about the dangers of his job and how lucky she had it being able to stroll through the fields, chatting with her bitches and picking berries while he was out risking life and limb and slaying big, burly bison all day. And sadly, without the benefit of Wi-Fi or Wikipedia, she couldn’t even shut him up by informing him that eighty percent of all of their food was gathered, not hunted, thank you very fucking much.

AT LEAST YOU’RE NOT MARRIED TO HIM

“Although I’ve been happily married for 17 tears, it drives me nuts that my wonderful, giving husband continually leaves his skivvies on the bathroom floor.  It is especially gross after he’s come back from a 50 mile bike ride during the brutally hot summer. Does he think his undies will magically walk themselves to the laundry basket? The funny part is we’ve talked about it and he truly believes most of the time he puts them in the hamper.”

~Sue

            I should interrupt myself here by saying that while Joe may not have an intimate working knowledge of our home’s interior or a majority of the contents, compared to most men he does do a lot around the place. Especially considering—as he is quick to point out—he really couldn’t care less if the beds ever got made or the laundry got put away. If you died tomorrow, I’d never make the bed or put a single article of clothing away ever again, he tells me. (Well not with actual words or anything, but believe me—he tells me.) He could live happily ever after pulling clean clothes from a mound on top of the dryer, so the fact that he will go so far as to transfer a stack of folded items into their respective drawers is, in his mind, an act of loving selflessness. Or more specifically, foreplay.

            This is not a quantum leap. Just last year, a fascinating study found that the more household chores people do the more sex they have. (Go ahead, put the book down and go tell your husband that. I’ll wait.) Now, had the study focused exclusively on how housework pays off for otherwise reluctant-to-clean guys, of course the findings would have made perfect sense. I am pretty sure I’d be willing to give it up on the spot if I saw Joe wielding a Swiffer or emptying the dishwasher of his own accord. But here’s the part that stumped me: The study found that for both men and women, more housework equals more sex.

            As a compulsive type-A neat freak who has been known to make the bed around her snoring husband in the morning, I find this hard to believe. According to this theory, considering the staggering number of hours I already log sorting socks and chasing crumbs and plumping pillows each week, I should be having more sex than a billionaire in a brothel. Am I to believe here that I’d be getting significantly more action if I just added some more scrubbing, scouring, sweeping, sponging and straightening to my endless daily to-do list? Would a gleaming toilet bowl or streak-free windows—made that way through my own tireless efforts and an excess of elbow grease—make me feel ever-more-frisky? Even more discouraging to consider, is my housekeeper swinging from her ceiling fan at night in a pair of crotchless chaps while I am passed out wearing ear plugs and flannel Hello Kitty pajamas?

            The researchers (a man and a woman; no word on whether or not they were having sex with one another) admit that they were surprised by their own findings, ultimately chalking them up to something called the “multiple spheres” hypothesis, which suggests that people who work hard also play hard (ahem). Interestingly, the same study also found a positive correlation between time spent at the office and frequency of sex—and reportedly they mean sex with the regular old ball-and-chain at home and not a few quickies in the supply closet with a cute administrative assistant. The way the researchers explain it is that compared to “normal folks,” both workaholics and vacuum-addicts are better at prioritizing their time to make room for the things they enjoy. I have a slogan for them: Go-Getters: Making Life Miserable for the Rest of Us since the Seventh Grade Science Fair.

            I don’t know if I agree with their hypothesis, but I do know that I’m not easy to live with. I like everything done a certain way (mine) and I like everything to look a certain way (spotless). I hang my clothes according to color, constantly twist cans in the pantry so that the labels are facing outward and alphabetize things—like appliance manuals and the kids’ books—that have no business being alphabetized. When the Hold Everything catalog comes, I attack it with the lustful eagerness of a teenage boy diving into his dad’s latest forbidden issue of Playboy. I realize that it shouldn’t make me want to claw my husband’s eyeballs out when he loads the dishwasher haphazardly (when everyone knows you always load back to front and never place two spoons in the same cutlery compartment, seriously what is wrong with you?) or doesn’t close his sock drawer the last half-inch every single godforsaken time he opens it, but it does. It really, truly does.

            “It must suck to be you,” Joe will say, not even meanly. And sometimes I do wish I was one of those easy-going, roll-with-it types, but I’m just not. Occasionally I’ll try to force my square self into a round hole by making a public declaration such as “Tonight I am going to leave the dishes in the sink until morning!” Most of the time, my resolve lasts less than eight minutes.

Remember in the movie The Crying Game when the Forest Whitaker character recounts the poignant parable of the frog and the scorpion? (It’s the second most memorable scene in the movie, right after the part where Fergus finds out his girlfriend has a penis.) In the story, the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across the river because he can’t swim. The frog is afraid that the scorpion will sting him, but the scorpion reminds him that if he did, the frog would sink and they would both die. Finally the frog agrees to serve as the scorpion’s water taxi. Halfway across the river, wouldn’t you know? The goddamned scorpion stings him! Before the frog sinks to his death, he demands to know why the scorpion would do such a foolish thing. “I’m a scorpion,” the predator replies. “It’s in my nature.” It’s an admittedly depressing and obscure analogy, but I totally get what the scorpion is saying. It’s just hard not to be what you are.

AT LEAST YOU’RE NOT MARRIED TO HIM

“The thing that drives me the most nuts about my husband is that when he opens up a drawer or cabinet door to either retrieve something or put something away, he NEVER closes it. I'll come into the kitchen after he's put away dishes and it will look like that scene from Sixth Sense.

~Welmoed

            Joe and I used to have this one recurring fight that was so stupid I almost can’t bring myself to put it in writing, but I will because there’s a good lesson in it somewhere I think. Joe has a favorite sandwich that he likes to make, and he makes quite a mess doing it. Because he is not actually a Neanderthal, and because I’ve trained him well, he even wipes down the counters and puts all of the ingredients away when he’s finished making it. Then, after he polishes off the sandwich, he brushes the crumbs in the sink and puts his plate in the dishwasher. Hard to complain about that—right?

            Wrong. For approximately ten years, I would watch this ritual, waiting until the precisely perfect moment to say casually, “Don’t forget to rinse out the sink, please!”

            “Does it really matter?” he’d ask.

            “Yes, it does,” I’d reply. “If you do it right away, it takes three seconds. If you don’t do it right away, the crumbs harden and stick like little globs of glue and then I have to use a Brillo Pad to get them off.” Those stuck-on crumbs had become symbolic, an emblem of all of my unheard pleas and unmet needs.

            “Big deal,” he’d mutter.

            “Exactly!” I’d shout, because when you have the exact same fight 6,392 times you tend to pick up right where you left off the last time. “It shouldn’t be a big deal and it wouldn’t be a big deal if you’d just rinse the fucking sink when you were done! We’ve got the little sprayer and everything! How hard would that be, honestly?”

He’s not wrong.

            But time after infuriating time he’d forget, and I’d march into the kitchen in a huff and resentfully scour away the evidence of his passive-aggressive hatred for me.

            “You do it on purpose, don’t you, just to piss me off?” I accused him one day.

            “Do what?” he asked, a shoe-in for Best Actor in a Clueless Role.

            “Leave your crumbs in the sink!” I bellowed.

            “You really believe that, don’t you?” he asked, shaking his head and sounding genuinely hurt. “You actually think that I go through my day trying to think of hundreds of tiny little ways to irritate you. You give me way too much credit, Jenna. I’m not that conniving. Having a spotless sink just isn’t important to me, so I forget. I know it should be important to me because it’s important to you, but you have a lot of little ‘things’, you know? It’s hard to keep track of them all.”

            Can you imagine? Playing the wise-and-rational card on me? The nerve! But I had to admit, I did sort of sound like a paranoid, insecure, demanding nut-job when he put it that way. And I felt bad that I’d accused him of malice where there was none, but the important thing was that after that perfectly compelling little speech of his, he stopped leaving crumbs in the sink. I am not even making this up just so to make him look good. Even though he was right that I do have “a lot of little things” that bug me, and even though he had convinced me that he wasn’t borrowing extra crumbs from the neighbors so he could sprinkle them in the sink as part of an ongoing, evil plot to annoy me to death, and even though I essentially admitted that I was being difficult and the crumbs weren’t that big of a deal in the grand, overall scheme of the eternity that was our life together, in the end I got what I wanted: A stupid clean sink. I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly how, but I’m just going to keep my mouth shut and my head down and appreciate it while it lasts.

AT LEAST YOU’RE NOT MARRIED TO HIM

“For 10 years my husband has not picked up a wet towel, washed ketchup off of a dish, changed a light bulb or remembered trash day without a friendly, ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’”

~Jenny

             I have a male friend who told me—in confidence and under threat of a lawsuit if I identified him by name or distinguishing characteristics, so for these purposes I’ll call him Sally—that men have figured out a foolproof way to get out of doing any dreaded housework:

            “We suck on purpose,” Sal told me, speaking without permission for his entire gender. “We know that if we do a really bad job at something you won’t ask us to do it again. Once I actually pretended that I couldn’t fold a simple hand towel in quarters. I just sort of scrunched it up in a wad and set it on the towel pile with a flourish and a triumphant ‘there!’ My wife hasn’t asked me to fold the laundry once since then.” 

            Joe is no Sally (and that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d need to write). He is an adept towel-folder and knows the secret to streak-free windows (newspaper, not paper towels). He doesn’t “suck on purpose” just to get out of doing the job. He doesn’t have to, because he tells me to my face that since there’s no way he could ever do any task to my unreasonable standards, he’s just not going to do it at all. And since he’s more or less right, it’s really hard to argue the point.

When I was in college, I preferred male roommates to female ones for several reasons: They had sex with strangers more often, which meant they were more likely to stay out all night and therefore not be at home eating my food. (And when they were home, they’d never touch my fat-free cottage cheese or homemade negative-calorie cabbage soup anyhow.) They didn’t care about décor, so I could hang whatever I wanted on the walls. They rarely borrowed, ruined or lost my favorite skinny-skirt. I am not sure if I was just a lot more blasé back then or it’s simply because I was drunk for the majority of that four-year stretch, but I don’t recall constantly being bothered by my guy roommate’s little domestic insults. You know, the never-made beds, the pile of dishes in the sink, the stinky socks on top of the washing machine (because lifting the lid or locating and then actually using a hamper would require herculean effort), the offhand admissions of oh-yeah-actually-I-did-drink-the-last-bit-of-your-fat-free-milk-sorry. Now that I think about it, it must have been the booze, because that shit makes me mental on a daily basis.

Passive aggressive roommate notes might be one of my guilty pleasures.

            Apparently I have a thing that drives Joe crazy, too: I like to use the lights in the house. I know, it’s selfish and indulgent but it’s a little luxury I sometimes afford myself. Because of this, my husband has nicknamed me the “light leaver-onner” and has made it his personal mission in life to circle the house whenever he is home, turning off every light in his path.

The criteria Joe uses to determine whether a certain light should be switched off is simple: If it’s off, we’re good. If it’s on, it should be off. Regardless of the time of day, whether or not the light in question is serving any sort of purpose or who might be using it at the time.

            “I’m in here!” I shout from my perch on the throne, fumbling for the toilet paper I can almost make out in the shadows.

            “I’m in here!” I yell, head in the dryer, my voice echoing in my ears like I’m trapped in a cartoon cave with a yodeler. 

            “I’m in here!” I roar from the bathtub, searching for somewhere to place my razor before I sever a critical artery in the now pitch darkness.

            I should probably thank him for reducing our electric bill and being concerned about the environment and helping to preserve our natural resources so that our daughters will have lights someday. He’s probably thinking that without those lights, their husbands will have nothing to go around turning off. It’s sweet the way he wants to preserve the tradition, don’t you think?

YOU KNOW I HAVE A POINT.

###

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed! Up next week (for paid subscribers): Gee, Honey. Are You Sick? I Never Would Have Guessed

P.S. A million actual years ago, there was a site called xtranormal that enabled user-generated and created animation. You got to pick and dress your avatars (from a modest, mostly awful field of choices) and then you could add “gestures” that sort of lined up with the audio—which was choppy and mechanical and also hilarious because of it. Here’s one I made when I used to have “free time” that was inspired by this chapter. My husband and kids know it by heart. I hope they will recite it at my far, far-off funeral. [ALSO I literally just looked it up and extranormal has been rebranded but it still exists. I had no idea. You’re welcome.]