Marriage: Evel Knievel-level difficulty.
Marriage is an insanely difficult undertaking.
Think about it - it has a pretty high mortality rate. What a daredevil you must be if you think you can pull it off!
EVEL KNIEVEL wouldn't have tried this stuff. Okay, not exactly true. He did. He liked it so much he did it twice. Actually, he also divorced twice, which kinda makes my point.
It gets harder around dinnertime. A casual observer at our house might hear me asking, come around evenin', "What should we do for dinner?"
The casual observer might assume that I am a domineering husband that expects his wife to cater to his whim, squeeking like a baby bird in expectation of my next meal.
Nothing could be further from the truth. What the observer would NOT have seen are the countless times I have suggested "let's go to Jimmie Mac's Burger joint", or even "I could cook [this food that everyone in the world enjoys]". Sometimes my wife even asks me "Where do you want to go tonight", and invariably my first 2 - non-fast food, mind you - suggestions are met with "meh, let's go here instead."
Since I don't care where we eat(not a picky eater), we go where she wants. I'm happy with that, she gets to go where she really wants to, win-win.
So what to the untrained eye appears as sloth or arrogance on my part is really years of evolution, from "hey let's go to this place!" and even "I'll help cook" to "Okay, then, what do YOU want to do?" to my current meek answering method.
Of course, this is of questionable marriage effectiveness. As every married woman knows, what a man is SUPPOSED to do is to understand his wife well enough to know where to suggest, make a perfect recommendation based on her mood and tastes of the moment, sweeping her off her culinary feet with exactly the right meal.
As every married man knows, this is about as likely as a cat being able to calculate the slope of a parabola. I am not a mind-reader.
It's not that I don't care about you honey, it's that I know the odds of my actually making the right call on what we're doing for dinner are the same as the odds of being struck by lightning while holding a winning lottery ticket. Whilst jumping over the space needle and dunking on Lebron James.
So we cope. We defer a bit more. We insist a whole heck of a lot less. And we hope in our mumbling acquiescence to stumble upon, if not the right words for the situation, at least words that aren't totally wrong. Like these words in the dangerous column of the Hormone Guide:
Think about it - it has a pretty high mortality rate. What a daredevil you must be if you think you can pull it off!
EVEL KNIEVEL wouldn't have tried this stuff. Okay, not exactly true. He did. He liked it so much he did it twice. Actually, he also divorced twice, which kinda makes my point.
It gets harder around dinnertime. A casual observer at our house might hear me asking, come around evenin', "What should we do for dinner?"
The casual observer might assume that I am a domineering husband that expects his wife to cater to his whim, squeeking like a baby bird in expectation of my next meal.
Nothing could be further from the truth. What the observer would NOT have seen are the countless times I have suggested "let's go to Jimmie Mac's Burger joint", or even "I could cook [this food that everyone in the world enjoys]". Sometimes my wife even asks me "Where do you want to go tonight", and invariably my first 2 - non-fast food, mind you - suggestions are met with "meh, let's go here instead."
Since I don't care where we eat(not a picky eater), we go where she wants. I'm happy with that, she gets to go where she really wants to, win-win.
So what to the untrained eye appears as sloth or arrogance on my part is really years of evolution, from "hey let's go to this place!" and even "I'll help cook" to "Okay, then, what do YOU want to do?" to my current meek answering method.
Of course, this is of questionable marriage effectiveness. As every married woman knows, what a man is SUPPOSED to do is to understand his wife well enough to know where to suggest, make a perfect recommendation based on her mood and tastes of the moment, sweeping her off her culinary feet with exactly the right meal.
As every married man knows, this is about as likely as a cat being able to calculate the slope of a parabola. I am not a mind-reader.
It's not that I don't care about you honey, it's that I know the odds of my actually making the right call on what we're doing for dinner are the same as the odds of being struck by lightning while holding a winning lottery ticket. Whilst jumping over the space needle and dunking on Lebron James.
So we cope. We defer a bit more. We insist a whole heck of a lot less. And we hope in our mumbling acquiescence to stumble upon, if not the right words for the situation, at least words that aren't totally wrong. Like these words in the dangerous column of the Hormone Guide:
Angie Was Here's blog also includes a brilliant male version, but I can't post it here, because kids might read this crap.
While marriage itself, is clearly dangerous, dieting while married approaches that of having a death wish. An eagle often dives at over 100 miles per hour as it engages its prey. This I have been told, though whether or not that was clocked with by a police officer with a radar gun that was properly calibrated or timed using the stopwatch method by an ornithologist or what I'm not sure.
Of course if it was a police officer with a radar gun, that's probably not a very effective use of public funds, but hey those guys probably get bored sometimes and if I was a police officer setting up a speed trap and it was really a slow day and there's a river nearby with this giant bald eagle circling over it, I'd be like "hey, what the heck, that's cool", and most likely try to see how fast it was going, though the act of actually catching the bird in a dive is kinda unlikely, which makes me doubt that is how the speed of an eagle's dive was determined.
Anyway, imagine the danger inherent in diving towards a fish near the top of a river at 100mph. Or a mouse or something. While it seems dangerous to fly through the air at 100mph, this is clearly not as dangerous as marriage, since if eagles had a 50+% fail rate on their dives, we'd have a heck of a lot less eagles. In fact, we probably wouldn't have any eagles left and we'd be laughing about how majestic the American Chicken looked. My point is that taking the wine away is like taking away the eagles feathers. You, my man, are going to crash and burn. And how the heck did you get way up in the sky without feathers in the first place?
Anyway, imagine the danger inherent in diving towards a fish near the top of a river at 100mph. Or a mouse or something. While it seems dangerous to fly through the air at 100mph, this is clearly not as dangerous as marriage, since if eagles had a 50+% fail rate on their dives, we'd have a heck of a lot less eagles. In fact, we probably wouldn't have any eagles left and we'd be laughing about how majestic the American Chicken looked. My point is that taking the wine away is like taking away the eagles feathers. You, my man, are going to crash and burn. And how the heck did you get way up in the sky without feathers in the first place?
A figurative "before" picture of said bumper.
Given the graph above, with wine taken out of the equation, every comment in the "ultra safe" column is gone. Nothing I can say is ultra safe. Maybe it's not like an eagle - that was a stupid analogy that got out of hand. Wine is like an airbag for your marriage. Yeah, that's much better than the eagle thing. Come to think of it, if I was going with feathers at all it probably would have been better to work in an "Icarus" analogy, since that would have made me sound literate and erudite or whatever and the fly too near the sun thing would have been a way cool image of marriage, probably in a romantic flattering way too, which would have won me points. Ugh. Hindsight. Definitely would have moved more towards the "Safe" column with that one.
I guess what I'm saying is that if wine is an airbag, we're just making the whole damned marriage car more dangerous when we diet while married, you know?
On the upside, we do get a hot looking car, and that rear bumper is beautiful.
I guess what I'm saying is that if wine is an airbag, we're just making the whole damned marriage car more dangerous when we diet while married, you know?
On the upside, we do get a hot looking car, and that rear bumper is beautiful.
RSS Feed
