Red Green's Beginner's Guide to Women

by Red Green

  And most important, years from now your wife will be sitting quietly and thinking about how lucky she is and what a great guy you are, when she’ll suddenly remember that time you tried to use the kids to pressure her into doing something dumb. So be a man and learn to live without the toy. They may call it amphibious, but once you buy it, you’re sunk.

  FIVE REASONS YOUR WIFE IS NOT TALKING TO YOU

  1) You made the bed.

  2) You walked the dog, and then came into the house with your shoes on.

  3) You didn’t wash your hands before lunch.

  4) Or before lifting the seat.

  5) You cleaned your SeaDoo Flame Arrestor on the kitchen table. Using her toothbrush.

  HOW GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH?

  As you continue to work on your relationship to make it more satisfactory for both of you, you will eventually realize that you and your wife have different standards for almost everything. Sometimes these standards are so far apart that there’s no overlap between you, which makes it impossible to find compatibility through seeking common ground. Do the following evaluation exercise with your wife. You circle your answers, and let her circle hers. This will give each of you a heads-up as to where change needs to occur for the two of you to find everlasting peace and eternal happiness.

  1) How do you dress for a night out?

  WOMAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) New clothes

  b) Designer outfit

  c) Clean dress

  d) Jogging suit

  MAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) New pants

  b) Clean and ironed pants

  c) Clean pants

  d) Pants

  2) Where do you like to sit at a restaurant?

  WOMAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) Away from the door

  b) Away from the bright lights

  c) Away from the kitchen

  d) Away from the restaurant

  MAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) Beside the peanut barrel

  b) At the bar

  c) Near the rear exit

  d) In my car

  3) What do you look for in a car?

  WOMAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) Clean and pretty

  b) Simple to drive

  c) Big mirrors

  d) Quiet

  MAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) Big engine

  b) Mean-looking

  c) Lean and low

  d) Loud exhaust

  4) What are the factors that make an enjoyable dinner at home?

  WOMAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) Balance of flavours and colours

  b) Continuity from appetizer through entrée and then dessert

  c) Leisurely pace of serving and eating

  d) Candlelight

  MAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) Delivered on time

  b) Extra cheesebread

  c) No tip expected

  d) Leftovers

  5) What mood do you need to be in to be interested in sex?

  WOMAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) Relaxed

  b) In love with my partner

  c) Confident in our relationship

  d) Having a sense of well-being

  MAN’S ANSWERS:

  a) Awake

  b) Sober

  c) Indoors

  d) Not alone

  NEVER BE EFFORTLESS

  Men are programmed to be results-oriented. It’s our historic duty to go out in the wilderness, track down a wild beast, kill it and bring it home for the family to eat. Nobody wants to hear “I gave it 110 per cent but it didn’t go well, so instead we’re all going to be vegetarians.” But the shocking truth is that results aren’t nearly as important to women as they are to men.

  Yes, women like good results and they’re very pleased when you actually do something, but their prime focus is on the amount of effort you put into the task. Particularly if it’s a task you’re doing for them. They equate your amount of effort with the amount of value you put on them and your relationship.

  So when you get your wife a really lame birthday gift, it’s not just the psychedelic, battery-operated, talking foot massager that upsets her, it’s the inference that you gave the whole process a minimum of thought and interest. And that feeling is in no way enhanced by the fact that you bought it from a guy at work who had previously purchased it as a gift for his wife.

  Same thing with household chores. When she asks you to make the bed, she’s not expecting you to just pile everything in the middle of the mattress and then throw a duvet over it. When she asks you to help scrub the pots and pans, she doesn’t want to see you fire up the gas power washer. Even if you do the work when she’s not there, your wife has an innate ability to look at the results and be able to judge within four ergs how much energy was required to do the job in question.

  She will notice that you cut the lawn, but she’ll be more aware of how you didn’t trim around any of the trees so that, looking down from the second story, they resemble Mitch Miller smoking a cigar. She’ll notice that you washed the car, but she’ll see the tires and windows aren’t done and the fast-food bags are still piled up on the dashboard.

  Now, I know you might say that she should appreciate the things you do rather than criticize the things you don’t do, but the problem is there are so few things in the first category and so many in the second. And the only way to make the two balance is through time and effort. More specifically, your time and effort. If you do a bad job on the lawn but it takes you all day, that’s a lot more acceptable to her than coming home, seeing the lawn and finding you lying on the couch, watching a football game that you recorded last year.

  The root of the problem is that women look for meaning in everything—the complete opposite of what men do. So when you make very little effort, to your wife that means her wants are of very little importance to you. That’s not good, because she will eventually reciprocate in a way that makes lawn mowing seem like a privilege.

  My advice is to always put in the time and effort. Even if you give your wife a four-carat diamond ring for her birthday, she will … okay, that’s a bad example. But even if you do something great for your wife, if it comes too easily for you, she will not appreciate it as much as when you make an effort.

  This is the scourge of the rich, that the husbands can always take the easy route of buying something expensive or having their staff send over a thousand roses or whatever. While their wives enjoy being showered with gifts in the short run, over the long haul they want to see a level of effort. The more you try, the more you care. And if you don’t care enough to try, she will eventually not try enough to care.

  GENDER TREND

  I’m going to ask you to try to go back in time to when you were about nine years old and had a list of heroes that included sports stars, television stars, movie stars and fast-food mascots. You wanted to be like them in every way possible. However, if you were four feet tall and white, being exactly like Shaquille O’Neal was a challenge, so instead you associated yourself through clothes and style.

  You got the Nike shoes and the Elvis haircut and the Elton John glasses and the Jerry Lee Lewis mood ring. This was your way of being one of the gang. Of being accepted. At the time, you thought it was the coolest thing ever to have the same jersey as Michael Jordan, but over the years you came to regard this behaviour as allowing yourself to be manipulated by the world’s craftiest marketers.

  It was at that point that you began to disconnect from trends and fads and generally whatever was popular. Instead, you found things you were generally comfortable with—shoes, clothes, hairstyles, attitudes, thoughts and words.

  Unfortunately, very few women go through this same transition. As young girls, they don’t see imitation as a fad or a trend; they see it as a sign of their commitment to renewing themselves continually throughout their lives, using any current changes as the catalyst for the process. You don’t have enough energy or interest to renew yourself. It’s all you can do to keep the old model of y
ourself running and roadworthy.

  A Justin Bieber haircut ain’t gonna help anybody. But if you’re married to a woman who wants to stay relatively current with fashion and lifestyle changes, you’ll be faced with three options.

  One: you can hold your ground and try to bring your wife down to your level. It won’t be easy, but if you stick with it, you may eventually get her to settle on old clothes she likes and a hairstyle and colour that are sustainable and to maintain unchanging opinions on everything despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The downside here is she will get as hard to look at as you are. And eventually, you will both stop looking.

  Two: you can hold your ground on your own personal appearance and demeanour, but allow her the budget and freedom to keep up with the times in any way she sees fit. For much of the time, the two of you will have separate lives. She’ll be a smart-looking, well-put-together modern woman drinking lattes and going to Pilates classes. And you’ll be Homer Simpson. It’s fine when you’re apart, but when you go out to a social event together, she’ll look perfect and you’ll look like you’re there to fix the fridge. Or maybe empty the fridge.

  Three: you go her way, keeping up with the latest styles and trends in everything. Dye your hair orange, get your ears pierced, shave your back and wear a thong. Wear Italian shoes and shiny suits, fake a French accent and drive a Benz. Even if it’s an ’81.

  But here’s your best option: plan your social calendar a year in advance and identify the dates where you will be going somewhere with your wife where it’s important for you to look like you’ve been out of the house in the last ten years. Circle those. A week before each, check the latest fashion trends and get yourself the absolute most conservative version of whatever is popular. That’s your zone, but you should go into it just long enough to survive the event, then return to your default mode with the too-small jeans and the “She’s with Stupid” T-shirt. That way your wife’s not embarrassed when she’s out with you and you’re not embarrassed when she’s not.

  MORE THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE STILL WAITING FOR YOUR WIFE

  • I fear no man, but most women scare the crap out of me.

  • My life seems to go better when I keep checking to make sure my wife is smiling.

  • It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a woman to go through a mall.

  • There are three ways of explaining to your wife why you didn’t call—none of them work.

  • Your wife will still have bad-hair days, even when you don’t even have hair days.

  • Just because women are cute and petite doesn’t mean they’re harmless. They’re sort of like pink hand grenades.

  • It’s okay to have lots of women in your life as long as you have them one at a time.

  • For a person with a tiny waist, she sure has a lot of guts.

  • A wife will sometimes want someone to tell her what to do, but it had better not be her husband.

  • A trashy woman is like the Tilt-A-Whirl. You don’t want to be on it for the rest of your life, but it’s a great, quick ride that makes your head spin and money fall out of your pants.

  • When you’ve been dating a woman for a while, you’ll be able to take her out any time you want, but after you’ve been married for a while, she’ll be able to take you out any time she wants.

  • I never completely understood the story of Adam and Eve, but it does explain why most men really like ribs.

  • On average, single men enjoy the sound of a woman’s voice more than married men do.

  THE BAG OF TRICKS

  When you’ve been dating a girl for a while, you get some sense of what you’re dealing with, but only after you get married—or at least live together—do you begin to experience how complex life becomes when one of the partners is carrying most of the equipment for that life in her purse.

  At its best, a purse is a blessing—an attractive accessory that enhances the look and style of the wearer, while simultaneously providing quick, systematic access to a vast assortment of essentials. Sadly, the purse I’ve just described is a myth. The purses that are being used here on earth, by earth women, are not a blessing, they are a curse. They don’t mean to be, and they’re certainly not designed to be. It just happens.

  It happens because of compromise—the wrong compromise. Let me explain. It starts with women not liking bulgy things. They want to have a sleek, smooth look. They don’t want to see things bulging out anywhere. I have some male friends who think women enjoy seeing a bulge in a man’s pants, but I say if that’s true, they’re looking for his wallet. So because they don’t like bulges, if their clothes had pockets they wouldn’t put anything in them anyway. Most of them find even empty pockets too bulgy.

  So the first condition is that, unlike men, women don’t like to carry things inside their clothing. That is, unfortunately, in direct conflict with the second condition, which is that you absolutely have to carry things—credit cards, cash, driver’s licence, car keys, hand gun, etc. So right away a purse becomes a necessity.

  And it happens early in life. You’ll see nine- and ten-year-old girls carrying a purse. This is actually the source of the real problems, because at that age they don’t need to carry much, so they can focus on the style. They will pick out some great-looking purse that will look fashionable because it goes so well with their hairstyle and their braces. It will become their favourite purse. They will remember it their entire lives. Even through high school, the purse can remain predominantly a fashion accessory because it’s mainly carrying money and makeup. The problems start when they graduate and get a job and then a husband and then a family.

  Fishermen have different equipment for fly-fishing, lake fishing, drift fishing and deep-sea fishing. They don’t do it all out of the same tackle box. Women soon realize they can’t do it all out of the same purse. They can’t carry the papers for work and the shopping lists and the coupons and the handi-wipes and the pens and the makeup and the retainer and the shoehorn and the paperback and the receipts from everything they’ve bought in the last five years all inside that one little, attractive purse.

  So now we add the third condition, which is the decision to buy a purse that is better suited to the application. I’m talking about a big purse. I’m talking about a big, ugly purse. This is like a backpack without the metal frame. It has compartments and dividers and layers and four or five entrances. Once a woman has that purse and organizes it properly, she is ready for World War III. And everyone is happy. For a few days.

  But then she’ll catch a glimpse of that purse in the mirror as it hangs on her shoulder or she’ll see it lying on the counter and spilling over into a chair. Someone will take her picture while she’s holding that purse and it will make her look fat. Then one day she will line up her purses, from the smallest, most chic to the hugest, most grotesque and she will realize that she has to make a compromise.

  One choice, the first compromise, is to discount style and just carry on with the big, ugly thing ’cause it’s working. This is a tough one because she’s already doing it with her marriage.

  The second compromise is to carry a medium-sized, somewhat stylish purse and carry the bare minimum of essentials in it. To her, this is the worst solution because it acknowledges that the big one is too ugly to use, but it subliminally suggests that she’s not worthy of the small, stylish purse she really wants. In her mind, she’d be pretending to be royalty when, in fact, she is staff.

  The third compromise is to carry that elegant little purse she loves and just live with the fact that you can’t put anything in it. Not the wisest choice, but certainly understandable.

  However, that’s not the one she chooses. She opts for the worst compromise, which is to have the smallest purse and then ignore all of the laws of physics by packing it to the gills, like a cheap suitcase—sit on it, step on it, whatever you gotta do. As long as it looks good.

  If this sounds like your wife, just let it go. Smile and give
her a kiss on the cheek. Just don’t rub up against her purse. It might explode and somebody could lose an eye.

  THE SILENT TRUCE

  For the first ten years of your marriage, you will each be on a mission to change the other person in a way that will make them more like you. The women are very direct about it because they feel, and rightfully so, that they have more work to do and also have the upper hand. They will express their wishes verbally at sufficient volume or higher, and on a fairly regular basis. They will also not shrug it off, or leave it for another day, or get over it.

  Men tend to be more casual. In this context, casual means “cowardly.” A man will rarely confront his wife about anything. He’s seen the resultant cyclone before and is not sure his personal aircraft has enough fuel or structural integrity to fly through it. So he mainly mumbles to himself and secretly wishes that she would magically morph into the woman he fantasized she was when he bought the ring.

  If he feels like he has a legitimate criticism, he doesn’t have the nerve to confront her directly, but will use it as grist for his snide comments in front of her in the company of friends at a social function. This rarely brings him the desired results. In this context, rarely means “never.”