My life is good and I’m grateful for every minute of it and blah blah blah.
Yes, blah blah blah, because one of the truest, most mysterious things about us humans is that however much we have, however good things are, it’s the little, niggling, everyday things that threaten to bring down the big, good things.
It’s your sweetie’s inability to keep track of the car keys, or be on time to pick up the kids from soccer practice, or failure to move the clothes from the washing machine to the dryer when he sat there and looked you in the eye and promised he would do it during halftime, that somehow winds up eclipsing his good qualities.
It really is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the snow-flake that triggers the avalanche. There’s a great, goofy children’s book called Who Sank the Boat? that illustrates the dilemma perfectly. A donkey, sheep, cow, and pig all decide they want to go for a row. As each animal climbs aboard, the little boat rides lower and lower in the water. But who sinks the boat? The mouse who hops on at the last minute.
Whatever the particular issues are in our relationship, we’ve got to identify them and then attend to them even if they seem minor and ridiculous and petty. If something makes you clench your teeth or roll your eyes or call your girlfriends and complain like a woman unhinged, you’ve got to deal. You must. Otherwise, those issues will go viral and before you know it, the crumb-infested couch cushions or sopping-wet towel left on the bathroom floor has transformed into a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach when you hear his key in the lock.
THE POWER OF THE LIST
I’ve found that it’s essential to be clear about what you absolutely need in a partner, what would be sort of nice, and what doesn’t matter at all. Doing this is easy enough. All you have to do is make a list. It’s so short, you won’t even need a piece of paper: name five things that you absolutely must have in a partner. If you’re already married or in a relationship, list the five things you most cherish in your partner or spouse. This is really more about knowing yourself than about knowing Mr. Charming. What do you absolutely need?
I have one friend whose list reads like this: funny, reliable, smart enough, good in bed but not a maniac, able to appreciate art. This friend is an artist herself, so she doesn’t want a partner in a creative field, but she does want someone who’s interested in what she does. She’s got her demands dialed in.
Me? I need my partner to be honest, possess a level of strength that’s greater than my own, someone I can admire, and who’s competent and confident in a specific way, someone who says, on a daily basis: Is that broken? I can fix it. Does that need to be moved? I can move it. Is that tree in your way? I can cut it down.
So, what do you need? An excellent provider? Someone who’s prompt and on time even when the bridge is out or he’s stuck behind a snowplow? Do you need to be the one in charge? Does your partner need to be your spiritual leader, or a great outdoorsman?
I should also say that in addition to “the five,” there’s a silent sixth thing that must appear on the List: physical attraction. If you don’t have the urge to jump his bones, if you don’t find him hot-ta-ta, you’re looking at someone who can be a friend but not a partner. Don’t for a minute think it doesn’t matter. It’s the underpinning for everything else. If it’s not there, move on.
After you’ve got the List, tattoo it on the inside of your skull.
Then, understand that everything not on the list is open for discussion. If a guy who’s up to date on world events is on your list, then that’s what you have to have. If he stops reading the paper and starts logging in double-digit hours on Halo every week, you’ve got a problem. If, however, he lets the lawn get too long, but taking pride in the house isn’t on the list, then you’re obligated to find a way around it. Hire someone to do the lawn or mow it yourself or ignore it or make a deal with your husband: if he mows the lawn, you’ll make those baby back ribs he goes crazy for. My point is this: everything not on the list is negotiable.
It’s key in marriage never to feel as if you’re compromising too much, because after a while you start feeling as if you’re selling yourself out. If you have the List, you’ve got a little guide to what you’ll tolerate and what you won’t.
There are certain kinds of women who, you can tell by looking at them, see everything that’s going on in their household and they just seem unruffled by it all. Maybe you knew one of them when you were growing up—they were the mother of a friend or a cool aunt. They were usually older, and they’d seen some things in life. This woman was tender and womanly, but also superstrong. She behaved with a kind of subtlety and grace that had nothing to do with stuffing down her feelings or denying who she was. You could watch her having a discussion with her husband, and he’d be insisting the sky was pink, and you knew she knew it was blue, but she just let it pass. I like to think that this woman was operating based on her own List, made long ago.
And by the way, it’s not just us women who have to put up with less than desirable traits in our partners. It goes the other way, too.
An old friend named Robert is married to Lorrie, a woman who couldn’t be on time if she was being chased by a bear. Wherever they’re going, Lorrie will be late. She starts getting ready late, and then she takes too long, and then she dawdles around a bit. Instead of pacing around getting himself amped up, Robert tells Lorrie that he’ll just meet her at the restaurant, or wherever it is they’re headed. He goes and has a drink, or catches up on his email, or hangs with his buddies, and Lorrie shows up half an hour later and everyone is happy. She doesn’t feel pressured by him and he knows the minute the date is set that she’s going to be late and adjusts accordingly. Robert and Lorrie have been together for thirty-five years, and it seems to be working out just fine.
IN THE “MOOD”
The other night I was making dinner after I’d played all afternoon in a volleyball tournament. During the months we’re based in Kaua’i, I spend every Saturday playing pickup games with a bunch of the local guys, but on this day we signed up for a formal tournament.
I’d had a great day and felt pumped from being in the sun and competing and just having a lot of pointless fun. I was looking forward to coming home and being with Laird and my girls. Some days I can’t wait to bust out of the house and then not ten minutes down the road I start missing them.
When I got home Laird was outside on the patio, standing in front of the grill in his swim trunks and flip-flops—his normal workday ensemble—staring at the tongs and grumbling. I could tell right away that he was in one of his moods. The very same ones I used to tiptoe around.
I asked him what the matter was and he muttered that the tongs were too short or too long, too something with the length. I didn’t catch it. Inside, Reece was watching TV, playing with the remote, turning the volume up louder and louder and louder. When I came in the house, Brody had been in the kitchen, asking for something to eat. I could hear the cupboard doors opening and closing, and I could tell she was warming up for one of her world-class fits. And now here was Laird, complaining about the tongs. It wasn’t quite dark yet; the sky was a rosy purple. A few big Kaua’i roosters with emerald green and bronze feathers strutted over the deep green grass. I looked past the lawn to the ocean. I could just make out the white frill of breaking waves in the growing dark. Kaua’i is one of the most beautiful places on earth, and our little corner of it, on the north shore near the town of Hanalei, is one of the most beautiful spots on the island.
I felt immensely grateful. And yet . . . and yet . . .
Why was he going on about the damn tongs? This is the dilemma and the mystery (and, okay, the opportunity) of marriage. I could hardly be luckier. I know this. I know this every day, and yet, at this very moment I could feel the pressing urge to inflict physical damage on someone. I inhaled deeply, slowly, and asked, “What’s wrong with the tongs?”
“I guess I want to be as far away from the fire as possible, don’t I?”
I cut him with on
e of my laser looks. Your run-of-the-mill stink eye has nothing on this look. I can easily cause a second-degree burn with this look.
I’m not interested in swatting the hornet’s nest, but as I mentioned I made a vow to myself, back when Laird and I were on the verge of breaking up, that I would always call him on his BS. I wouldn’t swallow it, wouldn’t pretend whatever it was hadn’t happened in order to keep the peace.
We’ve been together for seventeen years, and it’s taken me about that long to figure out how to cope with his moods. Yup, it pretty much is rocket science. At any stage of the interaction something can go wrong.
If he’s in a mood, I don’t dance around it. I’ve come to learn that he resents it. So I come out pretty hard, give him one sharp poke, which is meant to say, “Hey, you can have your bad mood, and I’ll even let you take it out on me a little, but there is a line.”
But bad things happen fast. This is true in combat, rodeo events, and marriage. The line between a retort meant to call your guy out and a full-on scream-fest is a fine one. So I turned around and walked (I did not stomp) back into the kitchen. A few minutes later I was standing at the sink and he came up behind me and gave me a hug. That was his way of apologizing, and I let it go.
Some would argue that a hug is not technically an apology. That an apology should look something like this:
He: I’m sorry I was being a jerk just then.
She: Yes, you were.
He: I’m really sorry. It was just one of my moods.
She: That’s okay. You’re forgiven.
He: So, we can go have sex now?
THE SHINY EYES
Laird and I couldn’t be more different, personalitywise. He’s an open book, the most present person I know. If he thinks something, he says it. If he starts something, he wants to finish it, hopefully by the end of the day. I’m intense, interior. I mull things over. I ponder.
Oh, and by the way, I have my moods, too. I have half a mind to drag Laird in here right now as I’m writing this and have him sit down and tell about the time he came into the kitchen at the end of the day, put his arms around me, and said, “Hey, baby, how was your day?”
What he could not have known was that it was one of those days. It started bright and early with the two beloved children hair-pulling, biting, and losing important extracurricular items, and then a weird little persistent knock in the car engine and running late, always late, for everything, and several bouts of sobbing, and one of the beloved children was coming down with something, and spending hundreds of dollars at the grocery store, and then, trundling out to the car with the now alarmingly loud engine knock, and missing the curb and the cart tipping forward and the apples and oranges rolling right off the top and into oncoming traffic.
So, how was my day?
I dropped that look on him, the laser look, slightly recalibrated to say, “I blame you, even though you were out providing for us and in all ways minding your own business.”
Then he jutted his chin out and gave me the look that a bull usually reserves for the cowboy he has cornered in his pen and said, “Sorry I asked.”
And I, eager to tussle, said, “Where in the hell is that coming from?”
And then we were DONE. The fight was on.
But I like to think that now that I have the List, and the image of the tender, superstrong woman who knows when to let things go, I’m better about reining in my inner bitch. The reasoning is simple. I don’t like it when he takes his moods out on me, so why should he be expected to suffer my wrath for things he had nothing to do with?
I’ve spent most of my adult life around men. All kinds of men. During my professional sports career I was a woman among men playing mixed doubles on the beach, and a woman among male basketball players, track stars, and business executives and creatives during the years I had my sponsorship deal at Nike. Now, my husband is an athlete and all his bros are athletes, too. I’m like their sister. I hang with them, work out with them, and have learned, over the years, to see their points of view. My main observation after all this exposure is that testosterone is not just real, it’s huge.
And this realization has led to a belief that makes us chicks a little uncomfortable: men don’t much like living in captivity. They allow it, they submit to it. I’m sure they don’t mind having someone to scramble them up an egg and toss their laundry into the machine. But if they get to feeling too controlled, it can turn into a frog-in-boiling-water situation. And it’s like, what happened? They ogled some cute girl at a party or tested the waters at match.com, and suddenly they’re driving a minivan to a coed baby shower in the suburbs.
I’m no sociologist, but I do think that on some basic caveman level, this makes them feel rebellious. The demands of modern domesticity are not in sync with the basic hardwiring of the human male.
There they are, wearing shirts with buttons on them, getting their hair cut by an expensive stylist, and they have to be somewhere. They always have to be somewhere because their woman told them they have to be somewhere.
No wonder they love to go to strip clubs and throw their hard-earned money at chicks and get into general trouble. There’s a lot of misogyny in the air these days. From the serious threat to women’s reproductive rights, an issue most people thought had been settled decades ago, to the naming of women as a “special interest group” by certain politicians, to the somewhat silly Newsweek story claiming that high-powered businesswomen dig being spanked, and men love to spank them because women basically stole their jobs. Dissing women has become culturally acceptable. I wonder if part of it isn’t because men are chaffing against the demands of domesticity.
The easiest way I can think of to help combat this is to remind our men that we’re with them for who they are, and not because, now that they’re home for the day, they can take the baby so we can finally take a shower.
To this end, I’ve perfected a demeanor I think of as the Shiny Eyes. When Laird wanders in at the end of the day, no matter what’s going on, I put a smile on my lips and summon some shine into my eyes and say, “Hey honey.” Brody and Reece might be bickering and the phone might be ringing and the toilet might be clogged, but I conjure up my Shiny Eyes. And I smile.
A lot of times, I’m acting.
Shocking, I know.
I don’t believe in being dishonest. If you want to fight, then have at it, but if your desire is to have peace, then it doesn’t hurt to let Mr. Charming know that you’re actually happy to see him rather than letting loose your inner bitch-on-her-last-raw-nerve the moment he walks into the house. Switching gears from crazy mom to his chick gets me the response I want from him. When I become the girl with the Shiny Eyes, my thoughts get shinier, too, and he becomes the guy I want him to be.
BETTY DRAPER DOESN’T LIVE HERE
A friend of mine, who has seen her share of marriages that worked and those that didn’t, doesn’t go for the Shiny Eyes. She believes the shiny eyes routine is too close for comfort to Betty Draper, the beautiful, woman-child of Mad Men fame, the classic fifties housewife who was expected to pose sweetly in front of the stove, dutifully tending her spaghetti sauce in her shirtwaist with her apron on, putting on a happy face for the Mister.
My friend misses the point that I’m not doing all this because I have to, or because that’s what women are supposed to do. I don’t do it because it’s behavior that defines femininity. I do it out of pure, modern-day, self-interest.
Laird knows that if I didn’t want to be with him, I would leave. He knows I’m not against divorce—I’ve already filed for it once—and that if the day came when we no longer respected each other, could no longer find a way to stay connected, I’d pack my bags and go. I can easily make my own money, and since we live in two places, we wouldn’t even have to divide anything up. He could stay in Kaua’i—aloha—and I could go back to California.
Every time I don the Shiny Eyes, every time I set aside the domestic lunacy that I deal with daily, it’s me communicating to
Laird that I’m in this. When I suppress my grumpiness, I’m saying: this is me doing my part to make this work. By choosing to behave this way, I’m choosing you, and choosing to be in this with you, and holding up my end. I’m saying, by doing my part, I hope that will encourage you to do your part.
GIVING THE PRINCE AN ASSIST
The sum total of my own List? Good, old-fashioned masculinity, which is more complex than we sometimes give it credit for. He’s independent, competent, and brave, but he’s also got a tender, nurturing, providing side—that’s the side that brings home the mammoth.
Once, Mr. Charming was surfing the epic swells, out on his Jet Ski with one of his crew. They were run down by a hundred-foot wave, then dragged underwater for a third of a mile or more. Laird came up for air and saw that his friend had cut open his leg, a huge bloody gash. The friend would have bled out had Laird not stripped off his own wet suit and used it for a tourniquet, then swam a quarter of a mile in the rough surf to get the Jet Ski, dragged his friend aboard, got him to the beach—he’s buck naked during all of this, by the way—and delivered his friend to the EMT. When Laird was done, he went back out there and caught a few more waves.
Cowboys (or their big-wave equivalents) really are my weakness.
I want to do what I can to help Laird be the kind of man I want to be with, which means creating an environment where he’s free to pursue his passion and to be truly great at what he does. (Which sometimes does include being competent enough and brave enough to save someone’s life.) Frankly, I don’t want him to be worried about whether or not Brody’s monthly fees for her gymnastics classes are paid, or whether we’re out of dryer sheets. I don’t want him to go to baby showers with me.
My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life Page 4