MARY: Honey, could you please try not to leave your socks on the coffee table?
JOHN: Why of course, dear. I’m sorry.
Pretty pathetic, right, married couples? Mary has created the perfect opening for a good argument, and John has totally dropped the ball, by admitting he was wrong. Never admit you’re wrong, young married persons!
Now you’re saying, “But what if John’s socks are right there, on the coffee table? How can he argue about that?”
The answer is: He can’t. So what he has to do is, he has to somehow get the argument, or at least his end of it, focused on a completely different topic, ideally a strident accusation that he has dredged up out of his memory and that is totally unrelated to the issue at hand. This is very important, young married persons: You must always maintain a supply of retaliative, irrelevant accusations in your mind, so that you can dredge them up when you need them.
Let’s say, in this case, that John once thought Mary was flirting with her old flame Bill at a party. This is a good thing to accuse her of in the current argument, as it is totally unrelated to the coffee table. However, John must be careful how he brings it up; if he does it too abruptly, Mary could become confused, and the argument could end right there:
MARY: Honey, could you please try not to leave your socks on the coffee table?
JOHN: Oh yeah? Well what about your old flame, Bill?
MARY (confused): Huh?
So what John needs to do—this is the essential skill of marital arguing—is to come up with a smooth way to get from Mary’s topic to his topic. This technique is called a “segue,” (pronounced “segue”), and if you do it right, it will usually lead to a whole new series of mutant topics you can argue about. Let’s see how it works:
MARY: Honey, could you please try not to leave your socks on the coffee table?
JOHN: Why do you always do that?
MARY: Always do what?
JOHN: Always look for things to criticize.
MARY: I don’t always look for things to criticize. I just don’t like finding your damn ...
JOHN: Fine. Great. Curse at me. I didn’t see you cursing at Bill, at the Johnsons’ party.
MARY: What is that supposed to mean?
JOHN: Oh, come on. You were flirting with him.
MARY: I was flirting? And I suppose you weren’t all over Jennifer?
JOHN: I don’t see how you could have known what I was doing, after all you had to drink.
See how effectively this veteran married couple handled the situation? In just a few quick sentences, they have gone from a seemingly silly topic, socks, to a whole treasure trove of issues that they can debate and dredge up again for years to come. I’m not saying you young couples will get this kind of results your first time out of the gate, but with a little practice, you’ll get the hang of it, and it can lead to the discovery of a whole new facet of your relationship (see Chapter 11, “How to Put New Life into Your Marriage or Else Get a Divorce”).
Chapter 9. Children: Big Mistake, Or Bad Idea?
In this chapter, we’re going to talk about how children affect your marriage. We’re not going to talk about how you actually produce the children in the first place. We covered that topic thoroughly in an earlier book, Babies and Other Hazards of Sex, which explores the whole area of childbirth in great detail and reaches the following scientific breakthrough conclusions:
1. It is very painful. (If you’d like additional facts on this topic, you can read the book, although it doesn’t contain any.)
For now, however, we’re going to talk about how your married life will change after you have children, so that you’ll be able to carefully and rationally weigh the pros and cons of parenthood, then barge right ahead and have children without any understanding of what you’re really getting into, just like everybody else.
What It Really Means to Be a Parent
What it really means to be a parent—note this carefully, because it’s the essence of the whole thing—iS: YOU Will spend an enormous portion of your time lurking outside public-toilet stalls.
For reasons that modern medical science has been unable to explain, children almost never have to go to the bathroom when they are within eight or nine miles of their own home toilets. It does no good to try to make them. Tell a child to go to the bathroom before you leave home, and the child will insist that not only does he or she not have to go now, but he or she will probably never have to go to the bathroom ever again.
And of course when you get where you’re going, let’s say a restaurant, the child will wait until your entrees are about to emerge from the kitchen, then announce that he or she has to go. Children are incredibly sensitive to approaching entrees.
So you will take the child to the bathroom, and, if it is an especially loath some bathroom, a bathroom that has clearly not been cleaned since the fall of Rome, a bathroom where the floor is littered with the skeletons of Board of Health employees who died attempting to inspect it, if it is this kind of bathroom, the child will immediately announce that he or she has to do Number Two.
And of course you must stay there with the child. The child will want you to stand right outside the toilet stall, while the child goes in there, and ... and nobody really knows. It’s a real mystery, what young children do in public-toilet stalls. Whatever it is, it takes them longer than it took you, the parents, to produce them in the first place.
What I hate about this is that restaurant men’s rooms are often fairly small and intimate places, and while I’m standing there, waiting for my son, strangers are constantly coming in to pee, and there I am, inches away from them, lurking there with no apparent purpose, like some kind of sex pervert who likes being in disgusting men’s rooms. So, to show that this is not the case, I try to keep a conversation going with my son. Except the only thing I can think of to talk to him about is how the old Number Two is going. I mean, you’d feel like an idiot in that situation, talking about the Strategic Defense Initiative. So we have these ludicrous exchanges:
ME (brightly): So! Robert! How’s it going in there?!
ROBERT (irritated): You just asked me that.
ME (grinning like a madman at the peeing stranger so as to reassure him that everything is okay): Ha ha!
Eventually, the child will emerge from the stall, when he or she is absolutely sure that the entrees are stone frozen cold. The child doesn’t care about the food, because children don’t go to restaurants to eat. They go to restaurants to go to the bathroom and play loud shrieking games under the table, so that you, the parents, are constantly ducking your heads under and hissing, “Stop that!” like some deranged species of duck. The child never actually touches the food, which is why many modern restaurants are saving money by serving reusable children’s entrees made entirely out of plastic.