If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon

Table of Contents

 

 

RAVES FOR

 

“If Chelsea Handler and Dr. Phil had a love child, it would be Jenna McCarthy, whose fabulous
If It Was Easy, They’ d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon
is at once profane, irreverent, warm, and wise. This is the best kind of relationship advice book, one written by someone who is smart enough to follow and smart-ass enough to make you savor the journey. Brilliant!”

—Celia Rivenbark, bestselling author of
You Can’t Drink All Day If You Don’t Start in the Morning

 

“Hilarious, smart, and utterly addicting. Watch out, Nora Ephron.”

—Valerie Frankel, author of
Thin Is the New Happy

 

“Every relationship is like being fit, healthy, and happy—you have to work at it. Jenna reminds us of this with wit, insight, and self-deprecating humor. At the end of the day, you’ll recognize yourself in these pages and applaud her honesty.”

—Lucy Danziger, editor-in-chief of
Self
magazine and coauthor of
The Nine Rooms of Happiness

 

“An uproariously funny, deliciously satisfying, and completely accurate take on wedded bliss.”

—Tracy Beckerman, syndicated humor columnist and author of
Rebel without a Minivan

 

“When Jenna McCarthy turns her wicked wit to the, ahem, challenges of modern-day marriage, hilarity ensues. Anyone still in love with the oaf they married will find a lot to love here.”

—Julie Tilsner,
author of
29 and Counting: A Chick’s Guide to Turning 30

“This should be required reading for all brides. No, make that required reading for any woman who has been snookered into believing that finding and marrying the right person will somehow catapult her into a fairy tale—complete with a snorting horse, castle, and prince.... An enlightening tour of the true realities of marriage, [McCarthy] amazingly pulls off the impossible: She helps us to fall in love with our farting, nose-picking, burping, sex-obsessed doofus husbands all over again.”

—Alisa Bowman, author of
Project: Happily Ever After

 

 

 

“Clever and irreverent.”

—Janet Evanovich, #1
New York Times
bestselling author

 

“Wildly funny, intimate, and ever-so-honest. Trust me, you won’t want this trip to end.”

—Cheryl Richardson,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Art of Extreme Self-Care

 

“Funny, smart, and utterly original. Jenna McCarthy is the new Erma Bombeck.”

—Alexis Martin Neely, bestselling author of
Wear Clean Underwear!

 

“You can’t make this stuff up! . . . [B]rilliantly captures the hilarious insanity of motherhood and family. Whether you have little ones running around or just got pregnant, this book is for you.”

—Gabby Reece, supermodel, volleyball phenom, and mom

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or thirdparty websites or their content.

Copyright © 2011 by Jenna McCarthy.

 

All rights reserved. Do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

BERKLEY
^®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2011

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCarthy, Jenna.

If it was easy, they’d call the whole damn thing a honeymoon : living with and loving the tv-addicted, sex-obsessed, not-so-handy man you married / Jenna McCarthy.—Berkley trade paperback ed.

p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54500-3

1. Marriage—Humor. I. Title.

PN6231.M3M4 2011

818’.607—dc22

2011011581

 

 

To Joe,
for loving me anyway

’Til Death Do Us Part
Is a Really Long Time

All marriages are happy.
It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.

• RAYMOND HULL •

 

 

This book was born of something from which few good things (besides hot, furious makeup sex) ever come: a nasty, namecalling, knock-down, drag-out brawl with my husband. After we exchanged some particularly ugly insults and I lobbed a large cup of ice at his head, we did what the pros tell you never, ever to do (besides lob large cups of ice at your partner’s head): We went to bed angry at each other. Pissed off, if we’re being totally honest here. When we woke up in the morning, I looked at the man I’ve spent thirteen years assuming I will purchase adjacent cemetery plots with and I thought:

No, that’s a lie. That’s not what I really thought. What I really thought was:

Now, as husbands go, I have to admit I did all right. Joe is unquestionably handsome, doesn’t leave ragged toenail clippings scattered about the house, and has never once, in nearly five thousand days of togetherness, left the toilet seat up. He also knows his way around a grill, occasionally makes the bed (if you can call straightening the duvet and tossing some pillows in the general vicinity of the headboard “making the bed”), and is not addicted to porn, painkillers, or crystal meth. He’s seen me naked on numerous occasions and still wants to have sex with me. All in all, he’s a catch by pretty much anyone’s standards.

And yet he still can make me madder than a bag of rabid badgers. From the ill-timed get-to-the-point-already hand gesture in the middle of a riveting play-by-play of my chat with the UPS guy to his incessant references to, fantasies about, and demands for sex, the guy seems hell-bent on personally driving me to the nuthouse. Sometimes, these things merely bug me; other times they are nearly enough to make me want to pack up and leave him. But I haven’t and I won’t, and there are three particularly compelling reasons for this:

Like I said, my husband is a decent guy. No, he’s a great guy. But living with the
same person
day in and day out, for years on end, is no confetti-dusted cakewalk. I once saw a comedienne slay an entire audience with this line: “When I said ’til death do us part, I had no idea it was going to take this long.” Clearly she was joking. Mostly.

This book originally was going to be a blog post, maybe a magazine article. After the ice-to-the-temple incident blew over and I returned to my formerly happily married state, I posted a few queries—in newsletters, on my Facebook wall, around Twitter, on my blog—with a simple question: “What does your husband—whom you still love—do that drives you nuts?” The idea was to tease out precisely the sort of irritating behaviors that women who consider themselves “happily married” are
indeed willing to live with
. The replies were astonishing not only in their content and volume, but most of all for the utterly venomous tone these smart, funny, remarkably sane women used to describe their significant others’ reasonably benign traits. “He eats ice cream every single night with the tiniest spoon in the house,” lamented one. “Over and over
and over and over
—a kazillion fucking times a night—I have to listen to that spoon hitting the side of the bowl. He says he’s been eating ice cream that way for forty-five years and isn’t going to change. And yes, I love him.”

These gals weren’t talking about their lying, cheating exes or the buffoons that beat them; they were talking about the men they live with and continue to love. Their gripes ranged from merely amusing (“He only ever half-finishes a bar of soap!”) to downright asinine (nipple flicking?
Really?
), and every last one made me feel infinitely better about my own enchanting Neanderthal. Nothing like peering over the neighbors’ fences and catching a glimpse of their withered, pathetic excuse for a lawn to remind us all that the grass isn’t always greener.