Red Green's Beginner's Guide to Women

by Red Green

  You don’t want to be that guy. When you don’t have someone to interact with, you’re in a closed system. On a spreadsheet, it’s called a circular reference. It’s not valid because there is not enough outside information—the formula is just spinning its wheels. You don’t want to be spinning your wheels. You need outside input in your life. Food, water, air and alcohol are not enough. You need at least one person to talk to, or you’re going to have a completely skewed self-image—perhaps an inferiority complex, but probably not.

  And to be the most effective partner, that other person needs to have two things: freedom and dependence. I know those things sound like opposites, and they are, unless that person is your significant other. They’re the only ones who have the freedom to tell you their opinion, point-blank, right between the eyes (which is what you need), and yet have the dependence of having committed to spend their lives with you and therefore have a vested interest in your future.

  No friend will give you that. Squirrels won’t give you that. You can give it to yourself, but that doesn’t count.

  So take a deep breath and get back to the task at hand, which is finding ways to get along better with your wife. She’s the one who’ll give you a home. Throw the cardboard box into the recycling bin.

  EQUAL BUT NOT INTERCHANGEABLE

  There has been a constant pressure to make men and women equal, and by now we all agree that it’s the only fair and just way to be. Some think it started in the ’60s, or maybe when the women got the vote, but I think it started around the beginning of time.

  You can’t have two partners in a relationship, mutually dependent, without having that equality reflected in all parts of society. But I think where we go too far is when we equate equality with interchangeability. That’s wrong. There are situations where one sex is clearly preferred over the other. The restroom attendant at a gentleman’s club needs to be a man. The mammogram technician needs to be a woman.

  But the proof of my argument lies in the phrases and sentences that people use on a regular basis. When you try to make them apply equally to both sexes, as I have below, you will see that it just doesn’t work:

  • (He/She) has great legs.

  • I think (he/she) is wearing too much eye shadow.

  • I find it unattractive when I can see (his/her) bra straps.

  • (He/She) was sweating like a pig.

  • (He/She) has an incredible amount of back hair.

  • (He/She) was relieving (himself/herself) against a tree.

  • (He/She) has a receding hairline and a full beard.

  • That skirt is way too tight on (him/her).

  • That (waiter/waitress) is showing way too much cleavage.

  • (He/She) can bench press four hundred pounds.

  • That outfit looks a little effeminate on (him/her).

  • (He/She) was sitting on the back porch having a beer and enjoying a big fat stogey when, for no reason, (he/she) leaned over in (his/her) chair and broke wind.

  • (He/She) is a perfect 38-24-36.

  • (He/She) delivered a nine-pound baby.

  • As a result, (he/she) is having a vasectomy.

  TO KNOW HER IS TO LOVE HER

  The biggest enemy to a successful marriage in the long term is not anger or even mild dislike. It’s apathy. You get to the point where you don’t even care enough to try to make things better. You just get quiet and live your own life inside of your married life. This is not good. And one day, probably right after your doctor’s appointment, you will suddenly realize that this is your life and it sucks and you’ll do something radical that will be bad for you and your family and all of the other customers at Hooters.

  Don’t let it get that far. Work at keeping your relationship alive and vibrant. The first step in doing that is to check your current status vis à vis how much time and energy you are putting into making your wife happy. The first step in doing that is for you to realize that you may no longer know your wife nearly as well as you used to.

  Here’s a little quiz that will help you identify how little you know about your wife. You have to do the test by yourself. You can’t look at your wife or her picture or ask her masseuse. You’re on your own.

  1) What colour are your wife’s eyes?

  2) What colour is your wife’s favourite dress?

  3) What colour is your wife’s hair?

  4) What colour is your wife?

  5) What is her favourite song? (Hint: Probably not an anthem.)

  6) Could you pick your wife out of a crowd?

  7) If so, how big a crowd? (Three people, no matter how big they are, is not a crowd.)

  8) Do you really know what she looks like, or would you just be hoping to recognize her coat?

  9) If she were kidnapped, would your description of her cause the police to stop looking and arrest you for homicide?

  10) How many times have the two of you gone out together in the last five years, not counting house fires?

  11) Would you take a bullet for her?

  12) Would you take a phone message for her?

  13) Does your wife often say a short phrase to you that ends with the word off?

  14) Would your wife marry you again if you asked her?

  15) Would you ask her?

  16) What is your favourite thing about your wife? (Ten-minute time limit.)

  17) If marriage is a competition, in your opinion, which of you won? (A tie doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no loser. It could be quite the opposite.)

  LEAVE ME ALONE

  Once you’re twenty years or more into this thing, your wife will probably start focusing on your personal health. She’ll start reading articles about what happens to men’s bodies after years of neglect. She may encourage you to join a fitness club, and by “encourage” I mean order.

  She’ll present you with meals that are made entirely of organic vegetables. She’ll pull you away from the buffet table by clenching your love handles. She’ll shred all your cigarettes and sell your ashtrays on eBay. And you know what she’s really up to. She’s not just trying to insult you or abuse you; she’s trying to save you from yourself. She wants your life to be as long and healthy as possible. And you know that’s a huge compliment because it means she enjoys having you around and would miss you terribly if you weren’t there.

  And yet you still find it incredibly annoying. You’ll come up with plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t bother changing to a healthier lifestyle. You’ll mention George Burns smoking cigars at a hundred or Colonel Sanders, who was lickin’ his fingers well into his eighties. You may even point out random old fat people to support your case, but be careful, because fat people are usually a lot younger than they look.

  You can play the fate card—saying your genetics, not your lifestyle, are the key factor in longevity. But then she’ll mention that you don’t have a male relative who lived past the age of fifty, and most of them died holding a large draft and a handful of cheese curds. Her argument is that you inherit more from your fridge than from your family.

  So let’s get real here. All of your excuses are just a smokescreen. The truth is, you don’t want to change. You’re happy being overweight and out of shape. You don’t need to be in shape; you’re not a professional athlete. And you don’t need to look good; you’re married. You’re not going to make the kinds of changes she wants because you’re not motivated.

  The reason you’re not motivated is because you don’t think you’re going to have a heart attack. Not right now, anyway. Maybe ten years from now you should revisit the subject. But for now, why fix something that feels good? The problem here is with the actual nature of heart attacks. If they were more like facial hair, life would be so much simpler. With facial hair, you start with none, and then you gradually notice soft blond hairs growing on your chin, and then, eventually, there are enough of them that you do a little trimming, and then they start growing in thick and black, and at that point, you start shaving. The whole proce
ss can take a year or two. Heart attacks are instantaneous.

  I’m sure lots of out-of-shape, overweight men have said, “I never had a heart problem in my life, and now here I am, dead.” Or they would have said that. So until you are convinced that you are absolutely on the path to a heart attack, you’re not going to make any serious changes. That will prompt your wife to get you more information. And her way of doing that is to book you a doctor’s appointment.

  Women often ask me why men hate to go to the doctor. I’ll tell you why: men don’t like reality; we like fantasy. We use our imaginations to make our lives better. That’s how we survive ho-hum jobs or ho-hum marriages or ho-hum lives. Women like reality. Men avoid it. And there’s no worse reality than a doctor’s examination. It’s like a mechanic looking at your car. If he doesn’t find something wrong, he’s out of business.

  There is no upside when a man goes to the doctor. The best he can hope for is that the doctor will tell him he’s as healthy as he thought he was. That’s called the status quo. That’s not good news. That’s how he felt going in there. So really, from a man’s perspective, the only reason to see a doctor is to get bad news.

  I’m not saying that’s right, I’m just saying that’s true.

  Of course, a rational person would argue that for many diseases, early detection is key and you won’t get that without a doctor’s exam. But men are warped and many of them would prefer to think they’re healthy longer than to know they’re sick sooner. That’s why we need to marry women who are prepared to keep annoying us to the point where the path of least resistance* becomes a healthier lifestyle and regular checkups.

  YOU TELL ME

  From Buster’s diary:

  Dear Diary,

  I thought after eighteen years of marriage I would have figured this out. I know I’m not completely stupid—I’ve been able to hold down a seasonal job year after year, and I tie my own shoelaces on a regular basis. I’m pretty good with computers and there’s not an internal combustion engine on the planet that I can’t rebuild. So why, after all this time, does my wife continue to not make any sense to me? Yesterday was her birthday, as you know from my entries every other year around this time. And as you’ll recall, it has never been a good day for me. I don’t ever seem to get it right—one year I bought her socket wrenches, another time I was on a business trip and didn’t call (they don’t allow cellphones in strip clubs), one year I enrolled her in Weight Watchers—nothing pleases her. So this year I took a whole different approach. I thought it would be fun to play a little trick on her by just pretending I’d forgotten it was her birthday. It wasn’t hard. I just remembered the year I really did forget her birthday and then just acted like that. It was pretty funny, but she didn’t actually get the joke at first. Or ever. Instead of giggling about it like a normal person would do, she got real chippy. She ate her breakfast in the bathroom and made me pour my own coffee. I was concerned that she was okay, so I yelled, “What’s your problem?” through the bathroom door. I’m gonna leave her response out of this diary because my grandchildren may be reading this one day. I asked her to open the door so we can discuss this like adults. She opened the door and then hit me in the face with a wet towel, so at least we were communicating again. She started yelling at me with a barrage of uncomplimentary names. You’d think she’d loaded a thesaurus of obscene insults into an AK-47 and then aimed it at me and squeezed the trigger until all the ammo was gone. I remember thinking to myself, “This is not going well.” She didn’t believe me when I told her I hadn’t forgotten her birthday and that this was all a joke. She said something like, “It’s not a joke! Jokes are funny!” So I showed her the proof. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a birthday card that I presented to her, with a big smile. “See? It was a joke.” And I laughed. All by myself. In hindsight, the whole joke thing may have been an error in judgment. And maybe I should have gotten her a gift or flowers or something. And it was probably wrong to say, “I figured you didn’t want to be reminded of how old you are.” But I did get her a really nice, romantic card, which she would have noticed if she’d read it. Or opened it. Or not thrown it into the woodstove. Instead, she put on her ski jacket and headed off to Walmart to get herself “something special.” And her parting shot as she went out the door was to tell me that getting her a card, rather than an actual gift, was way worse than me forgetting it was her birthday. So there is some good news—next year I won’t bother with the card.

  THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

  As time goes by in your marriage, you may start to notice that your wife’s appearance is changing. I’m not talking about weight gain or hairstyles. I mean a few lines and wrinkles here and there, some sagging, some dragging, some full-out saddle-bagging. You might even be tempted to point out these changes. That would be very foolish. Instead, get out your wedding pictures and prop them up beside the bathroom mirror so you can compare how you look now with how you looked then. You will come to one of three conclusions:

  1) You are aging faster than your wife. This is the one to strive for. It will make your wife happy to be mistaken for your daughter. It will make you proud to be with such a vibrant young woman. And it will make strangers think you must be a millionaire or a Don Juan—or a millionaire Don Juan—to have such a young wife.

  2) You and your wife are aging at the same rate. This is fine. It leads to compatibility and companionship. In the race to the grave, you and your wife are running neck and neck. Not a bad way to go.

  3) Your wife is aging faster than you are. This one is trouble. She’s not going to take it as a compliment when strangers think she’s your mother. You have to do something about this situation. You might be able to get by for a while by hiring a makeup artist and lighting director for her. You could even look into cosmetic surgery. If she’s not willing to have procedures done that will make her look younger, you’ll need to have some done that will make you look older. That’ll work for a few years.

  However, if you’re looking for a permanent solution, that’ll be trickier. There are several factors that affect the rate of aging in a person. Certainly, diet, exercise and genetics are important, but the crucial component is the treatment a person gets from their partner. A person who does not feel appreciated, respected or loved will age faster. You’re okay because you provide all of those things to yourself. But how do you treat your wife? A self-centred, demanding person can actually suck the life out of their partner.

  If your wife is aging faster than you are, you could be the cause of that. Start by doing something that makes her happy. No, wait. Start with finding out what makes her happy and then do that. Even Methuselah looks younger when he’s smiling. Especially when he cleans his tooth. Mainly, you have to adjust your attitude. You’re both in this for the long haul and it’s way healthier to make the best of the life changes you’re gonna face, not to mention the face changes life’s gonna make.

  INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

  I know there are skeptics out there who don’t believe anything, and I’m not an easy person to convince, either, but I think when you’re faced with overwhelming evidence, you have to accept the only logical explanation. At least until something better comes along.

  Pay close attention—this could happen to you. Let’s say you’re married to a woman who is over the age of forty and you start to notice radical behavioural changes. She’s irritable; she’s weepy; she sleeps a lot; she has strange cravings; when she’s with people, she wants to be alone; when she’s alone, she doesn’t want to be left alone.

  Now, doctors and psychologists will tell you this is something called “menopause.” Don’t believe it. There is no way the woman that you fell in love with and married could change this suddenly or severely. Menopause is a Greek word for “cover-up.” What’s actually happened is that your wife’s body has been taken over by aliens. They are from another planet and know nothing about earth or married life or you. They can’t even figure out our climate as they try to man
age your wife’s heating and cooling systems.

  And the cute little things that you do that your wife used to find amusing, they find annoying. They find loud noises are much too loud and silence is way too quiet. They sometimes look at you like they don’t know you and they look like if they did know you, they would kill you. This can’t possibly be your wife. Oh sure, she’s still in there somewhere, but these aliens are clearly in control. Why else would she be refusing to do housework? Refusing to be civil? Refusing to be herself?

  Only aliens would ask you questions like “Did you know life would be this miserable when you married me? Come on, yes or no?” Only aliens would watch Mary Poppins and start sobbing uncontrollably. It wasn’t that bad.

  And when you wake up in the middle of the night and see there’s a light on in the kitchen and you go down there to find your wife eating ice cream out of the container with a fork and she yells at you to go back to bed, that’s not her—that’s a creature from Mars protecting a discovery. They don’t have ice cream on Mars, let alone forks.

  So just ignore what the medical community tells you about so-called menopause. This isn’t hormone imbalance. It’s cosmic imbalance. You just need to be supportive and keep your distance for the next ten years or so. Your wife is still in there. She’ll take over again once the aliens leave. And they will eventually leave because being a married woman is too tough for any other species or genetic mutation from any other planet. Slowly but surely they’ll abandon their mission, and as each one goes, your wife will become more and more like the person she was before it all began.