The Journal of Best Practices

by David Finch

  Kristen’s girl world didn’t intimidate me until I fell in love with her. I had no insight into that aspect of her life, and suddenly, my ignorance felt like a huge liability. Yes, I had fallen in love with someone who wouldn’t think twice about burping in a crowded movie theater, but I had also fallen in love with someone who loved shopping. Someone who knew why certain clothes could and couldn’t be worn together. Someone who had sorority sisters; a purse with absurd, almost infinite capacity; and sticky bottles of lotion in the cup holders of her car. Someone who watched MTV reality shows, who applied the word cute to everything from babies to belts, who understood what celebrities were talking about during televised red-carpet events. I had no clue what was going on inside her girl world, but I had fallen in love with her and I wanted her to love me back, so I felt an urgency—a motivated desire—to understand it.

  My approach to understanding new things has always been to study them exhaustively from a safe, academic distance. If told to book a hotel room, I’ll spend hours on the hotel’s website and reservation hotline trying to understand the dimensions of the rooms, what the reception area looks like, and the texture of the ceiling (“It’s not stucco, is it?”). To others, this seems like a lot of unnecessary work, but to me it pays off in spades when I finally arrive and everything is basically as I’d pictured it: No surprises, I can relax.

  In an effort to acquaint myself with Kristen’s girl world, I began studying Cosmopolitan magazine. I had several publications to choose from—Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmo—but I knew that Kristen had a subscription to Cosmo, so I figured I’d start there.

  I skimmed it cover to cover to get a general overview of the subject matter and then started over from the beginning, absorbing each tiny little article, banner, and Dove soap advertisement like a physicist poring over Einstein’s notebooks.

  Every glossy, frantic page took me deeper into the world of a Cosmo girl—that mythical size-zero goddess from a land of orange and pink in which creative sex positions are explored nightly, who is forever finding courage to confront hostile coworkers and toxic friends. While it wasn’t exactly a road map to the mind and heart of a real-life young woman, the magazine did provide me with talking points. Nighttime skin-care tips, caring for split ends, how not to hurt a guy’s feelings when you hate his cologne. Extensive data that I could use to understand the hemisphere of Kristen’s world that I’d been ignoring for so long as a friend.

  At first, I took the content at face value. Gee, what does Kristen’s part say about her? Hmm. Right-sided . . . see Gwyneth Paltrow. Okay, Gwyneth Paltrow. Here we go: Kristen comes across as outgoing, flirtatious, and artistic. Holy cow. They’re right! What about me? Let’s see, left-sided . . . see Hilary Swank. Okay, I’m a leader, I’m smart, assertive, and powerful. Nice. That’ll do, Cosmo. That’ll do.

  I also made the mistake of trying to understand what women love and hate about men. This little exercise almost drove me mental: So, women hate to love what they hate about men. In fact, I found that many of the heavier-hitting articles, the ones with titles like “Should You Try to Hurry Love?” and “The Wild and Wacky Way He Wooed Me,” were more diverting than they were helpful. I couldn’t picture Kristen writing in to one of these columns, given the types of things that I had been reading: the girl who met her beau—and it’s always “beau” in Cosmo land—in a drunken fistfight at a party, the girl who fell for her beau after he fished her bracelet out of a public trash can. What would Kristen write about me in Cosmo? “I agreed to go to an insect exhibit at the museum with my new beau. Before the big day, he snuck into my closet and glued spiders to my shoes. When I told him it was creepy, he started crying. I guess I like the sensitive ones.” I didn’t think I was getting an all-access pass into Kristen’s point of view with articles like those. Maybe Cosmo doesn’t speak for all of its subscribers . . .

  I wanted to know more about the day-to-day things: the fabulous exercises, the health benefits of keeping a box of wheatgrass near your bed, and at what time of day a woman’s sense of taste is most acute (six P.M., according to “The Body Clock Guide to Better Health,” as reported in Cosmo). I was starting to piece together mental pictures of Kristen throughout her day. There she was at the gym, adding sizzle to her crunches. There she was in her bedroom, spritzing her wheatgrass with water and shoving it back under her bed. There she was at six P.M., ordering her food carefully, mindful of her heightened sense of taste. It was all starting to click for me.

  The sense of discovery was thrilling, and my research became something like a compulsion. I took the magazine to work and labored over it at my desk. Right there, in a section devoted to pleasure, was a four-step guide to giving an awesome head massage. It was intended as a pre-shampoo massage, but I tried it with Kristen once when she had a headache, and she melted in my hands, whispering, “Don’t stop. This is amazing.” That’ll do, Cosmo. That’ll do.

  The following week, I rearranged all the objects in my cubicle at work after a late-night discussion of feng shui that left us both convinced that I think best facing southwest. People were curious as to why my computer was sitting atop my lateral file. Had I hung any pictures of Kristen, I would have had something to point to, something that they could have understood. “See?” I might have said. “She’s beautiful, and she inspired me.” As it was, I was left with only “It’s a productivity thing. Now help me move this bookshelf.”

  While I found it difficult to shoehorn specific articles and subject matter into our conversations (“Oh, speaking of the cutest ways to cover up at the beach . . .”), I did develop a higher-level appreciation for unfamiliar topics. Things like eye makeup tips and tricks, the summer’s hottest nail polishes, the reasons a woman shouldn’t panic about post-sex bleeding. Hmm, so this is what makes her tick. I was now armed with knowledge; suddenly Kristen’s girl world wasn’t as intimidating. Her girliness wasn’t to be feared, it was to be appreciated, one more dimension with which to be enamored, and I hopelessly was.

  As we grew older, Kristen’s tastes changed. Cosmo and Elle were eventually replaced by Vogue and Shape. After we got engaged, I snuck copies of Modern Bride into the bathroom, and once married, I’d look forward to new issues of Lucky magazine. What might she be wearing this fall? She became pregnant, and money got tight. Lucky magazine was for women who could afford to buy clothes, and then wear them, not for expecting mothers, so Parenting magazine it was. Her retail catalogs followed the same trajectory. Victoria’s Secret stopped coming around, leaving room in the mailbox for Mimi Maternity and Macy’s. Pottery Barn catalogs featuring “Madeline lamps” and “Tyler apothecary tables” matured into Williams-Sonoma catalogs featuring copper cookware and gingham table linens.

  What would ultimately prove relevant in our lives were the Kmart circulars and the nameless catalogs promoting educational toys for children, both of which sent a mixed message: you are parents now, which is a blessing, but since you can no longer afford to have nice things, you might as well skim the pages of this play sand catalog. But I had stopped paying attention long before those arrived. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped paying such close attention to Kristen and her world. Because of that, our mutual world vanished. That’s the egocentricity that comes with Asperger’s. That’s the imperceptible tide that carries people away from each other, the waters that so easily erode common ground.

  Kristen and I had been working for about three months to improve communication when I decided it was time to shore up our mutual world. We needed to build a foundation from which we could reclaim our friendship, and I was determined to make it happen. It seemed like something that I had to do quietly, behind the scenes. As Kristen had explained to me dozens of times for various reasons, no sane person would ever respond favorably if told “We need to become friends, and it has to happen immediately, so let’s get to work.” I needed an entry point, and Cosmo wasn’t going to cut it this time. Fortunately, we still had television.

  About once a year, Kristen and
I become rabidly addicted to one TV show or another. This has always been our thing. Even during the darkest period in our marriage, certain television shows reminded us that at one time we had been friends with common interests. Sometimes we wouldn’t talk for days, but then Scrubs would come on and we’d settle onto the couch, laughing in all the same places, commenting on all the same scenes. Connecting, if only for a moment.

  Some couples work out together, others read books or prepare delicious meals together. Not us. Given the opportunity, we will forever be the amorphous figures on the couch watching a fitness reality show, napping through a documentary about books, or fast-forwarding through some cooking competition on the Food Network. It’s passive and mind dulling, but because we both enjoy it, television has always served as a unifying medium in our relationship.

  I like to think of Kristen and myself as relatively bright people, but certain mainstays in our nightly show lineups throughout the years may prove otherwise. When we were dating, spirited conversations about Friends and America’s Funniest Home Videos served my courtship well (what girl doesn’t love sixty minutes of dogs on skateboards?), and our mutual love affair with American Idol kept us both comfortably numb amid the stress of planning our wedding. For a while, we were hooked on Deadliest Catch, a documentary show about crab fishermen, narrated by this absurdly dramatic voice. We liked to follow Deadliest Catch with a recorded episode of The Apprentice—the reality show starring real-estate mogul Donald Trump, which made for one fine chaser to men emptying crab pots in the rain. Before that, we were riveted by American Chopper, a reality show about an explosive-tempered family who all look the same and build choppers, though neither of us has any interest in motorcycles.

  In the thick of a phase, the time lost on these programs wasn’t measured in hours or afternoons. It was on the order of days. Especially for shows on cable networks, which tend to run weekend-long marathons. Before the kids came along, dishes would pile up in the sink—if they ever made it that far from the couch. The mailbox would become crowded with letters and magazines. The grass would grow tall and our pajamas would give in to the notion of a forty-eight-hour shift. It was awesome.

  With kids in the picture now, we try not to watch so much television. When they’re awake, that is. The weekend-long marathons have been supplanted by trips to the park or to the farmer’s market. We let them watch one cartoon in the afternoon when we need a break, and we usually huddle together for an hour before bed to watch a family movie—Emily and Parker’s reward for good behavior. But once the kids are asleep, Kristen and I convene on the couch, put our feet up, and get down to business.

  Our latest obsession was a beast of a reality show called America’s Next Top Model. Hosted by supermodel Tyra Banks, it was to Kristen and me what a warehouse of opium might be to a heroin addict. We couldn’t stop watching when it was on, and we had a plan for when it wasn’t. Both DVRs in the house were set to record it, and on each one we had about five hours of episodes waiting to be played, in the event that we were watching TV and it wasn’t on one of the channels (which, thanks to the Oxygen network, was almost never the case). We analyzed it, asked each other questions about it, offered opinions on the fates of the contestants. I imagined other people watched news programs or police dramas that way, exchanging insightful commentary, except that we enjoyed the advantage of not having to think.

  An all-girl modeling competition, the show was the couture equivalent of American Idol, except that one might once in a while recognize the name of an American Idol winner. Each week, a girl was eliminated for one reason or another: she blinked in her photographs; she displayed a poor attitude toward others; she lumbered down the runway like a yeti, one with fairer skin and high heels. I laughed and stuffed popcorn into my mouth during the teary eliminations. After a girl was chosen to go home, the screen usually flashed to a dozen clearly hotter women celebrating their successful week by running around their shared apartment in their underpants. What’s not to love?

  We found ourselves rooting wildly for the contestants—often for the same ones, though occasionally we didn’t agree. I was incensed one week when my front-runner—a showy brunette—was eliminated. “How do you dismiss a body like that?” I protested. Kristen sided with the judges: “High fashion isn’t about big boobs, Dave. These girls need an ‘it’ factor, which she didn’t have.” Did you just say, an “it” factor? It annoyed me that my expert opinion on who’s hot was being challenged. When it comes to religion, politics, or finance, a ham sandwich would make a better panelist than the likes of me; I don’t pay attention. But if the topic is the relative appearances of beautiful women, I suddenly have a lot to say. I become a regular James Carville. But I didn’t want to argue in front of the television, and so I let it go.

  In terms of entertainment value, I could have done without photo shoots and female drama. I was not interested in go-sees, and I usually couldn’t discriminate between a good pose and a bad pose. What made the show so enjoyable was that I got to sit next to Kristen while we watched it. This was not at all by accident or through some proclivity to watch shows geared toward women. It was by design.

  There were shows that we both enjoyed, but I tended to scoff at her while she watched certain ones—profiles of serial killers, Lifetime movies, and, at first, America’s Next Top Model. If it didn’t interest me, my reaction to it was always the same: “I can’t believe you watch this garbage.” She would usually get annoyed and move up to the bedroom to continue watching her show in peace, while I’d stay downstairs to find something that would suit me.

  In late spring I made it a goal to knock it off. Watch her shows and don’t make fun of them, I wrote on an envelope. There were plenty of programs to choose from, and I figured that a show about female models seemed as good a place to start as any.

  Joining Kristen one evening, I sat through my first episode of Top Model, determined to say nothing. About halfway through, I found myself getting pulled in. “Why is that one so angry all the time?” I asked, pointing to a sourpuss contestant. “Her? Oh, she’s not so bad,” Kristen said. “Just catty. But she takes awesome pictures.” I smiled, happy to be sharing in Kristen’s moment. By the end of the episode, I was full of questions about the show: “So, what do they get if they win?” “How are they judged?” “Which girls do you like?” A few minutes later, having decided it would be easier to explain the show while it was happening, Kristen pulled up the previous week’s episode. And then another. And then another. And just like that, the show became ours.

  Having successfully transformed Kristen’s favorite show into a portal to common ground, I began fleshing out new opportunities, more shows. Ideally, I would have created a new mutual context based on things that I enjoyed—science documentaries, Rush concert videos, anything by Monty Python or the Three Stooges. But I was enough of a realist to know that getting Kristen interested in those things was way outside the realm of possibility. I had no control over her choices, but I did have control over my own. I couldn’t force her to like South Park, but I could choose to set down my DVD copy of Tron to watch a documentary about teenage ghost hunters.

  Some of my friends do make fun of me for watching shows like America’s Next Top Model and (God help me) Project Runway. For them, this habit is on a par with my Nora Ephron phase, that little period of time I call “1992 to present.” (This has been an ongoing era for me, rich with inspiring romance, sweet comedy, and happy Hollywood endings. And yet, most of my friends would prefer to think that such a phase never existed.) They also question my enthusiasm for clothes shopping and for signing Kristen and myself up for couples’ facials—this after having expanded the Best Practice to Get inside her girl world and look around. “Dude, that stuff is so gay,” they say. Is it? I wonder. I cannot with any certainty give them the first and last name of any baseball player in the country, unless I’ve jotted it down on a flash card in an anticipatory measure taken before a big customer meeting. Kristen’s just not into base
ball. And yet, I have a favorite celebrity stylist—a girl named Rachel who has her own fabulous television show, which none of my gay friends seem to watch.

  Whether my friends are right remains a mystery. They are often too busy watching mixed martial arts or men’s professional wrestling to offer me any explanation as to why they think my interests are, as they put it, gay. For me, scantily clad female models it is. What can I say? Finding common ground in gay stuff with Kristen has led to plenty of phenomenal hetero sex for me. I guess I’d rather get some action watching Sex and the City than fall asleep alone on the couch with the game on.

  Not that I’d have to. As if in response to my efforts, Kristen started getting into my types of shows as well. Some of them, anyway. Televised cattle auctions were pushing it, but she would cheer with me while we watched professional bull riding. “Chris Shivers just rode for eight!” she’d say. “We like him, right?” She started spending more time watching Family Guy and stand-up comedy specials, while I learned to sit through syndicated episodes of Roseanne and Saved by the Bell.

  Our mutual world was beginning to take shape, and it felt great. Getting inside her girl world and looking around was proving to be one of my easiest Best Practices. Instead of saying, “Let’s foster companionship over an awkward dinner,” I was now saying, “Want to join me at the spa for my birthday?” Rather than suggesting, “Let’s work on communicating tonight!” it was so much easier and more human to say, “Let’s watch some TV.” We’d settle in together, knowing that there would always be a big, emotional discussion waiting for us, something with no commercial interruptions or laugh tracks, and for those few hours, we’d feel as tuned-in as ever.