The Guinea Pig Diaries (23 page)

Third, women don’t really like it. As the saying goes, if you behave like a doormat, you’ll get treated like a doormat.

A former evangelical preacher, Glover left the church following his divorce. His life shattered, he reinvented himself: he ingested the writings of Robert Bly and others, started workshops for men, and penned a book called
No More Mr. Nice Guy.

According to Glover, Nice Guy Syndrome is reaching epidemic proportions. “Every generation of young men is becoming less masculine, and more passive and pleasing. Hell, I just think we have more estrogen in our drinking water.”

So what’s the alternative?

Be a man. “The metaphor is being the lead on the dance floor. Being clear and firm, making her look good and feel good. I grew up in the sixties and seventies, so when I say this, I still expect pink lightning to hit me, but women are security-seeking creatures. They want to trust. And if you mess with a woman’s sense of trust, she’ll never get wet.”

If I continue to be the Nicest Guy in the World, he warns, I’ll disappear as a human.

“I’ve seen this happen. Men forget what they like. I put a legal pad in front of them and say, ’What do you like to do,’ and they literally just stare at this legal pad. They’ve forgotten to ask themselves, ’What would make
you
happy.’ ”

But Dr. Glover actually thinks my strategy is good. I’ll overdose on Niceness. It’s like when you’re on a diet and you force six pieces of cheesecake down your maw until you’re fully nau
seated and won’t crave cheesecake for a long, long time. I’ll leave behind my cocoon of wussiness and emerge a man.

Oh, and Julie will get sick of me, too. “If you leave it all up to the woman, they get tired of that. They feel burdened. If a man leads, has a plan, and says, firmly, but with love, ’Let’s go out and have pizza,’ she can say, ’I don’t want pizza. How about Mexican?’ It gets the conversational ball rolling. . . . Women don’t like people who kiss their ass.”

After I hang up, I go into our bedroom and tell Julie that Dr. Glover says she’ll get bored of being in total charge.

“Does he know me?”

SATISFYING THE WIFE’S APPETITES

In the 1780s, protofeminist Judith Sargent Murray made the radical suggestion: that men should help prepare meals, since men do at least half of the eating.

I know. The gall!

I’ve decided to implement Murray’s crazy notion. I’m making Julie some chicken piccata—chicken with lemon juice, olive oil, and white wine. Julie comes into the kitchen when she hears the baffling sound of me pounding the chicken breasts with a rolling pin.

She looks surprised. Then skeptical.

“Is this going to be more work for me?” she asks.

“That’s what you say to me when I’m making you dinner?”

“You’re right,” she says. “Thank you for making me dinner.”

Since our twins were born, Julie rarely cooks aside from microwaved hot dogs and mac ’n’ cheese. We adults in the family rely mostly on her color-coded binder of order-in menus.

My dinner does not result in any
Mr. Mom
wackiness. The
rice pilaf doesn’t explode all over the kitchen walls. The chicken breasts don’t send us to the hospital with botulism.

I light the candles, pour the wine, serve the chicken.

“No napkin over your arm?” asks Julie.

“Sorry.”

Aside from the napkin oversight, I’d go so far as to say it’s a little romantic.

“If you cook for me every night, we could have sex every night,” Julie says.

“I don’t want to have sex every night.”

“I thought all men did.”

“All men who are seventeen.”

Which brings up a question. How often should the ideal husband have sex with his wife? The average married couple has sex
just about twice a week
, according to several recent surveys (a statistic probably skewed by the randy just-married twenty-two-year-olds).

Is that what the woman wants? Or is it some compromise? It’s not clear.

I know from my biblical year that Jews consider it a husband’s obligation to satisfy his wife. The Talmud has star-tlingly specific instructions on frequency. Namely:

A man of independent wealth is “obligated” to have sex with his wife every day
A donkey driver once a week
A camel driver once a month
A sailor once every six months
A scholar once a week, on the Sabbath

It’s not clear whether the sages consulted women when drawing up this list.

I may not be an official scholar, but the once-a-week schedule sounds good. Especially for an unofficial scholar with three very loud children.

“How often is ideal for you?” I ask.

“Once a week sounds good, too.” She pauses. “Please don’t put that in the book.”

“You’ll read it and see how it looks on the page.”

Incidentally, I recently read that Madonna had a “marriage contract” that ordered Guy Ritchie to devote time to the couple’s “sexual expressiveness.” He was also given words to say during an argument, including “I understand that my actions have upset you; please work with me to resolve this.” Madonna allegedly taped the contract to the fridge, and if Guy broke the rules, she’d chide him, “Contract, contract!”

Like Madonna and Alix Kates Shulman, I’m not opposed to writing down some mutual guidelines for a partnership. But maybe including “sexual expressiveness” in there isn’t the path to marital bliss.

EVERYBODY LOVES JULIE

We’re late for a dinner date with her friends. I’m scouring the closet for my wool hat.

“Step it up,” says Julie.

“Great idea!” I say, all chipper.

“We’re late.”

“Thanks for the motivation!”

That’s my new strategy—exaggerated enthusiasm.

“I actually don’t like this new ’great!’ and ’super!’ thing.”

“Great! I’ll have to work on that.”

Calvin Trillin, in his wonderful tribute to his late wife, Alice,
said that every writer portrays his or her family somewhere on the spectrum between sitcom and Lifetime movie. Julie’s and mine is firmly in the sitcom genre. She’s the sensible one, the straight man to my wacky schemes. She makes the realistic decisions, and I do what she says.

Our real marriage is like the one portrayed in my books, and yet it isn’t. I overrepresent the conflict, for one thing. It’s not that the conflict doesn’t exist. The fights happen. But I don’t write about the hours of peaceful, contented coexistence.

But here’s the weird thing—I think the reality is starting to catch up with the writing. We’re starting to act more and more like our characters from my books. We do the bantering with more frequency. She rolls her eyes more often at my antics.

I think this happens in every relationship, not just writers’. Each partner gets a label—the messy one, the neurotic one, the forgetful one—and then they start to live up to that label. That’s what I’ve noticed in my experiments: almost everything in life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Probably even believing in self-fulfilling prophecies is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I call up Coontz to ask her about the classic sitcom setup where the woman is the foil for the man. Who’s in charge? We all know it’s not Raymond. It’s Raymond’s wife.

“I think it’s a face-saving way to deal with the fact the men are actually dominant. I enjoy a show like
Everybody Loves Raymond,
but I don’t see it as empowering to women. The women get their way, but in the little things. They give in on the big things. They can’t decide where to live, but they get to decide what furniture to buy.”

Just for the record, Julie decided where to live (I wanted a warmer climate) and also what furniture to buy.

THE CLICHÉ TRUTH-O-METER

While we’re on the topic of Mars-Venus stereotypes, Julie and I go through a list to see how we stack up.

Cliché:
Men leave the toilet seat up.

Not true. I put the seat down, and not just out of chivalry. Out of hygiene. As a mild OCD sufferer, I’ve always shut the toilet cover before flushing, for fear of unseen mist. Then, just a few weeks ago, I read a review of a book called
The Big Necessity,
a cultural history of the bathroom. That took things to a new level. It said—and here’s a spoiler alert: very unpleasant information coming up—that “aiming a stream of urine at a toilet bowl sends a fine spray around the room . . . which leaves a chemical deposit on anything surrounding the urinal. It can also change the color of wallpaper.” Oh man. The book said that there’s a vogue among German men to sit down when they pee. So as a mini-experiment, I’ve been trying the German style for the last week or so. My wallpaper color looks stable, and, as Larry David once pointed out, you get a little time to read. Okay, moving on.

Cliché:
Men hate chick flicks.

Actually, Julie and I both love chick flicks, up to a point (that point being
Must Love Dogs).
I just like watching happy couples interact—such a rarity in real life. In fact, I’d be satisfied to watch the first act of a romantic comedy (couple falls in love) and the third act (couples makes up) and skip that stressful second act where they have all those unpleasant conflicts and misunderstandings.

Cliché:
Women are wildly sentimental, men are emotionally repressed.

Sort of true. I repress my anger, especially since Project Rationality. But so does Julie. We both believe venting just makes us angrier. Don’t go to sleep angry? Are you kidding? That’s the best thing we ever figured out to do. It’s like hitting a reset button. Julie wakes up fresh, I wake up calm, and we can talk about the argument. Or not talk about it. That works, too.

As for the good emotions, Julie is certainly better at expressing joy than I am. But I’m working on it. And neither of us is as good as our kids. Jasper, for one, is the only nonironic user of the phrase “Yippee!”

Cliché:
Men like to stay at home and women like to go out.

Absolutely. Julie’s a connector, a three-dimensional Facebook. I’m a hard-core homebody. I envy the 1970s Hugh Hefner, not because of his daily sexual intercourse with buxom women, but because he got to stay in his house wearing pajamas all the time.

POWER CORRUPTS

Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, begging him to make America’s laws friendly to women: “All men would be tyrants if they could.”

I think she’s right. I’m wondering if all women would be tyrants as well, given the chance. We’re twenty days in, and the power is going to Julie’s head.

Her requests are coming faster and more abruptly.

“Change the batteries in the kids’ toys.”

“Clean out coffee machine.”

She has started snapping at me. Literally snapping. I try to
ask her something while she is watching
Top Chef,
and she answers me with three snaps and a wave of the hand, sign language for “Get out of the room now.”

She’s e-mailing me daily to-do lists. One item on today’s list is “
Put four Diet Cokes and four beers (any kind) in the refrigerator
.”

I write back: “Thanks for allowing me to choose the brand of beer! You obviously have a lot of faith in my judgment!”

“You’re welcome!”

You remember the Stanford Prison Experiment? Where a bunch of college students were chosen to pretend to be “guards” and a bunch were to play “inmates” for two weeks? And how alarmingly quickly the “guards” started to abuse their power and demean the “inmates”? And how the experiment spun so out of control, they had to shut it down after six days?

I think I’ve got a mini-prison experiment going on here.

“Can you turn up the volume?”

We’re watching
The Bachelor,
her choice.

“You have the remote,” I say.

“I know. But I want you to walk to the TV and turn up the volume.”

I’m not supposed to argue with her. I pause, but don’t get up.

“Come on. This is the best month of my life. Let me make the most of it.”

I heave myself off my chair.

HOW TO TALK TO YOUR SPOUSE

The best marriage advice book I’ve read is a paperback called
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.

As you might deduce from the title, it wasn’t meant as a marriage advice book. But the techniques in this book are so
brilliant, I use them in every human interaction I can, no matter the age of the conversant. It’s a strategy that was working well until today.

The book was written by a pair of former New York City teachers, and their thesis is that we talk to kids all wrong. You can’t argue with kids, and you shouldn’t dismiss their complaints. The magic formula includes: listen, repeat what they say, label their emotions. The kids will figure out the solution themselves.

I started using it on Jasper, who would throw a tantrum about his brothers monopolizing the pieces to Mouse Trap. I listened, repeated what he said, and watched the screaming and tears magically subside.

It worked so well, I decided, why limit it to kids? My first time trying it on a grown-up was one morning at the deli. I was standing behind a guy who was trying unsuccessfully to make a call on his cell.

“Oh come on! I can’t get a signal here? Dammit. This is New York.”

He looked at me.

“No signal?” I say. “Here in New York?” (Repeat what they say.)

“It’s not like we’re in goddamn Wisconsin.”

“Mmmm.” (Listen. Make soothing noises.)

“We’re not on a farm. It’s New York, for God’s sake,” he said.

“That’s frustrating,” I say. (Label their emotions.)

He calmed down.

Any time I see an adult tantrum brewing, I go right to my guidelines. Like tonight, when I gave our nanny our Netflix DVD of
Man on Wire
for the night.

“You lent it to Michelle without asking me?”

“I lent it to Michelle.” (Repeating.) “I’m sorry.”

“I was going to watch it tonight.”

“You were going to watch it? Tonight?”

“I’d planned this out for a couple of days.”

“Mmm.”

“This is the second time you’ve done this.”