Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART III

Love and Marriage

13

Advice for New Husbands

Billy Crystal declares in When Harry Met Sally that “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

Well, guess what? It’s started.

Wise rabbis, priests, and ministers often say that a marriage isn’t just bringing together two souls, it’s bringing together two families. Not to mention two sets of furniture—and a roommate.

Some of this is great. You’ve met the love of your life, and you’ve wanted her around 24/7; now you’ve got her. You can fall asleep on the couch together, and take your time with lazy weekend breakfasts. Suddenly everything in your new home is a shared battle—noisy neighbors, rent hikes, the clogged sink. In a successful marriage, there’s a sense of you and your loved one taking on the rest of the world together.

Some of this, though, is fraught with peril. All of the tensions and issues and potential landmines of living with a roommate are now applicable to the woman you love, the most important person in your life.

You’ll be amazed at the sort of issues that arise, each one a seemingly small issue that can, at almost any point, blow up into a significant conflict and ruin your plans for a nice dinner, a movie, and some nookie that evening. Did you leave the toilet seat up? Your nice romantic weekend is gone, you fool. You may have a shot at détente by Monday.

When putting on a new roll of toilet paper—God help you if you leave your beloved a toilet without toilet paper!—do you have the paper hang over or under? (A little-known fact, this over-or-under dispute is actually what set off the conflict between the Hatfields and McCoys.)

Do you squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom or middle of the tube? The bottom, obviously, unless you’re some sort of inefficient philistine with no sense of toothpaste-maximization—not that either of us married one! Not that we mind re-squeezing it and rolling it up from the bottom every morning!

In what drawer does each kitchen tool go? (This fight is actually somewhat moot, because when your parents or in-laws visit, they will put those instruments back where they think they should go. Hell is a house full of microbrew bottles and an inexplicably missing bottle opener.)

At its very best, daily life can become a negotiated division of labor: When there’s a bump in the middle of the night, she gets the reassurance you’ll get up to see what it was. When you’re sick, she’ll bring you tissue boxes, orange juice, and hot bowls of soup. When there’s a big spider, you’ll be there to squash it. That too-tight jar lid? All yours.

Marriage is actually easier if you and your loved one have a yin-and-yang dynamic—different strengths, different preferences. We’re a bit wary when a couple insists they’re perfect together because they “have so much in common.” Your spouse isn’t supposed to be a clone of you; you’re supposed to have offsetting strengths, weaknesses, perspectives, and ideas. She’s a woman, after all, and you’re a man; you’re different, and that’s good; it’s literally what makes life possible, not to mention more fun.

Things That Go ZZZZZ in the Night

Before I was married, I foolishly assumed that living with my wife wouldn’t be that different from having a roommate. Well, I knew it would be very different in some very important ways (cisnormative dude that I am), but I figured that when it came to the day-to-day stuff like paying bills, dividing up chores, and just generally occupying the same enclosed space with another human being, the fact that I had roommates before would prepare me for the adjustment. I was wrong, and mostly for the better.

First off, you may share an apartment with a roommate, but you’re likely not sharing a bed. Learning someone’s bed-iquette takes time, but it also takes being comfortable with the person you’re sleeping with. I come from a long line of loud snorers on both sides of my family. One of my former roommates would fall asleep with headphones on every night, usually opting to drift off to Smashing Pumpkins instead of Snoring Cameron.

My wife, however, doesn’t fall asleep listening to music. She doesn’t have to. As it turns out my wife can fall asleep roughly thirty seconds after telling me good night and turning off her bedside light. I’ve never been able to fall asleep that easily, so it made it much easier for her to deal with my snoring, because she rarely heard it. I, on the other hand, was able to hear her snoring. Not only could I hear it, it was right next to me. At least my roommates had been all the way across the apartment from me when I was buzz-sawing my way through the Dreamland Forest.

Through trial and error I learned the best way to deal with her snoring was to gently try to get her to shift her sleeping position, which would usually give me a couple of minutes respite so I could fall asleep. Some of the errors I committed in the research phase of Operation Silent Sleep included waking her up to tell her she was snoring (spectacularly bad idea) and tickling her side to get her to move (she reflexively lashed out and smacked my nose with her elbow).

Every now and then I’d go to bed before she did, and my wife had her own learning curve in dealing with my snoring. We both figured out that the main objective was to get the other person to change their sleeping position without actually waking them up. Our standard defense against spousal snoring became a gentle but firm push applied to the nearest shoulder of the spouse, increasing slightly in pressure until they rolled over. It works pretty well. Other occasions might lend themselves to the brutal simplicity of yelling “There’s a spider on your face!” at your sleeping partner.^*

When conducting the “There’s a Spider on Your Face” maneuver, start by slowly tickling your spouse’s face with the tips of your fingers. Do this two or three times if possible before bellowing as loud as you can about the spider. This will help ensure that you don’t hear any snoring for the rest of the night from your bed on the living room couch. Remember, always have your smartphone recording before you begin. And don’t be an amateur. Good lighting is key to capturing the facial expression of your spouse. Also, invest in a good case for your smartphone so it doesn’t break when thrown to the floor.

Snoring is one thing, but before you can snore you have to sleep, and that likely means several other adjustments. For some people, like my wife, deciding who’s going to sleep on which side of the bed is a big issue. For me, having a bed that wasn’t simply a mattress on the floor was a bigger deal. I let her take the right side of the bed, and we went to Goodwill that weekend and bought a Hollywood frame and a used box spring. That was an easy adjustment. Getting used to her morning routine, on the other hand, was really tough.

I’m not exactly a morning person, but once I’m up, I’m up. My wife, on the other hand, likes to ease into the day. If we have to be awake at 7 a.m., for instance, the alarm will go off at 6:40, then 6:49, and again at 6:58. I mentioned earlier my wife can fall asleep within seconds, so this system works perfectly for her. For me, it meant getting up about twenty minutes earlier than I really needed to get out of bed. Keep in mind that I was usually falling asleep after my wife as well, which meant that most nights I’d get anywhere from thirty to forty minutes less sleep than she was getting. That might not seem like much, but over time it can add up. By my estimates, in our eighteen years of marriage my wife has racked up more than 197,000 minutes of sleep than I’ve managed. That’s more than four months of extra slumber!^* No wonder my wife looks younger than me.

My wife disputes this math and also points out that my calculations do not take into account things like her waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again because of my snoring and the midnight feedings of our three youngest kids when they were breast-feeding. My contention is that if I wasn’t so sleep deprived my calculations would have been more precise.

Beyond the bedroom there are more adjustments in store. It’s likely that your décor will change, for example. My wife’s brother was a painter, and when we married she moved several rather large canvases into our rather small apartment, where they fought for wall space with my posters of the movie Clerks and the band R.E.M. And for whatever reason, my wife wasn’t interested in the perfectly acceptable couch that my roommate Todd and I had curb-picked months earlier. Sure, there was a little stuffing coming out of a couple of cushions, and there was a mysterious stain on the back of the couch, but you couldn’t even see it if you pushed the couch against the wall. It didn’t smell much, except on dank rainy days when there was a musty, old-man funk that seemed to emanate from the plaid fabric.

I don’t miss that couch, and I couldn’t tell you what happened to my R.E.M. posters, though I suspect they disappeared in a spring cleaning purge or were sold at a yard sale. The walls in our house now are full of pictures of our family (along with my brother-in-law’s paintings, my 1974 Boston Red Sox pennant, and a framed poster for my old band). Our couch still smells a little funky at times, but that’s usually because of teenage boys, not the ghost of the old man who left his couch at the curb.

As it turns out, I probably needed to make some adjustments, and not just with my furnishings. When I was single, the contents of my refrigerator generally consisted of a package of bologna, a package of cheese, a jar of mayonnaise, and some soda and beer. My pantry contained a few packages of mac and cheese, canned soup, and ramen noodles. When my mom came to visit for the first time, she immediately went shopping and returned with frozen vegetables, fresh fruit, and a package of multivitamins. The veggies were there when I left, though the fruit did get eaten and I remembered to take my vitamins at least twice a week. I’m convinced those vitamins were the only things keeping me from getting scurvy during my bachelor days.

My wife, on the other hand, could flat-out cook. She knew how to stretch a budget too. Being a poor single mom didn’t mean she bought the cheapest frozen pizza and fish sticks to feed her kids. Well, okay, it meant she bought more than just the cheapest frozen pizza and fish sticks. Actual flour. Rice, and not in an Uncle Ben’s box. Frozen vegetables appeared in our freezer, and steamed veggies appeared on our dinner plates. I discovered that chicken came in something other than nugget form. It’s amazing how quickly you can get used to sitting down to a hearty home-cooked dinner. Those expectations were usually exceeded, with one spectacular exception.

Cam’s Christmas Story

We married in August, and a few months later the triple-digit days had disappeared and the winter winds howling across the Oklahoma prairie rattled the thin-paned windows of the upper floor of the rambling and somewhat dilapidated duplex we lived in. We had a magnificent oak that grew near the home and provided much-needed shade in the summer, but at this time of year its branches pointed skyward like a hundred accusatory fingers, wagging at the wind that had stripped it naked.

Inside our tiny apartment, however, it was bright and cheery. A small tree stood decorated in the corner of our living room, and our dog Buttercup lay sleeping in the warm glow of the electric lights. The wrapping paper had been gathered and thrown away, and our kids were happily playing with their new Christmas toys. It was a perfectly Rockwellian scene, and I hearkened back to A Christmas Story, one of my favorite movies growing up. I had always identified with Ralphie, but now I was The Old Man. This was my first Christmas as a husband and father, and it felt good. It felt right. It felt … like I was hungry. It was growing late. When was my wife going to start cooking Christmas dinner?

I had gained roughly twenty pounds in the four months that we’d been married (and I would balloon even larger in the months to come). It was simple food, but it was prepared exquisitely. I swear a good portion of that twenty pounds was gained on Thanksgiving that year. We had a small turkey and the most amazing stuffing I had ever tasted. Add in sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes and real gravy, homemade rolls, green beans, and a chocolate cake and a pumpkin pie. And now we were going to get to eat it all again for Christmas. Only I didn’t smell anything cooking.

I found her in our bedroom, curled up on the mattress that was no longer on the floor, reading a book. When I asked about our Christmas feast, she looked up at me with some confusion, then growing horror, and her eyes grew wide.

See, her Christmas tradition was to go to her dad’s house, where he would cook a big dinner for everyone. Only problem was, he was fifteen hundred miles away. My Christmas tradition was usually to eat whatever food was offered to me, so it never crossed my mind to inquire about our Christmas plans. We both simply forgot about dinner. My wife was crestfallen. I wrapped my arms around her and told her it was okay. We could eat Chinese food.

“I will NOT eat Chinese food on Christmas,” she flatly stated. “Let’s just get in the car and see what’s open.”

And so we did. Bundled up against the winter cold, we packed ourselves into my 1992 Mercury Topaz and headed off in search of an inn that would give us shelter and a turkey dinner. As we cruised the near-empty boulevards, we saw restaurant after restaurant dark and shuttered for the night. Well, Hunan Garden was open, and had a pretty good crowd, but the icy stare from my wife sealed my decision not to point it out. After a good twenty minutes of driving, with the grumbles of complaint rising from the backseat, we saw a beacon of fluorescent light in the darkness.

“No!” my wife said emphatically, before I could even inquire.

“Honey,” I started.

“Don’t ‘honey’ me, Cameron. I am not spending my Christmas dinner at Hooters!”

I wheeled into the parking lot.

“Look,” I said emphatically. “You don’t want to eat at a Chinese restaurant. Okay. I get it. But there aren’t any other restaurants open that we’ve seen. So, it’s either Hunan Garden or Hooters. Or we can go eat sandwiches at home.”

Let me state for the record here that I truly had no ulterior motive other than hunger. If Golden Corral had been open, we would have been merrily stuffing ourselves in the buffet line. But it was growing late, everyone was getting hungry and cranky, and a decision had to be made.

And so it was. We marched into Hooters, a steely look in my wife’s eyes and huge grin stretching the cheeks of my six-year-old son’s face (who, now that I think about it, was pretty much at eye level to quite a few cheeks in that restaurant). This was his first time in a Hooters, and not coincidentally, the last time my wife ever set foot in one.

The meal itself was fine. As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly a full house that evening, and so the servers paid plenty of attention to us (especially the cute kid with the missing front tooth). My wife, though, was quietly continuing to stew. After we paid our check and were walking out to the car, I noticed tears trickling down her cheek.

“I wanted it to be perfect,” she sobbed. “It was our first Christmas together. How could I be so stupid and forget dinner?!”

I reminded her that I, too, had forgotten all about it, and it wasn’t her fault. This was the first Christmas where neither of us was with our parents. We were doing it by ourselves for the first time. We were bound to make a couple of mistakes. Besides, I told her, in a way this was the perfect ending to our first Christmas.

My wife expressed her skepticism, but I pressed forward.

“Think about it,” I said. “If everything had gone as planned, we’d only have the usual memories of a Christmas dinner around the table. We have plenty of years ahead of us for those memories. This was our first Christmas, and we’ll never forget it.”

She laughed for the first time in hours, even if it was a bit forced.

I offered her my arm and she slid her hand into mine as we walked back to the car on the calm December night. It did take a few years, but eventually she came around and could view that night with a smile. The next year we also had a fantastic Christmas dinner of London broil, baked potatoes, veggies, and a homemade pie. Nothing that even remotely resembled a chicken wing could be found at the table.

With any big transition, there’s always a period of adjustment, and living with your spouse is no exception. That settling-in period can be awkward at times, but the first few months of marriage aren’t called the honeymoon period for nothing. It seems you find out something new about your spouse every day, or maybe that’s just a byproduct of marrying someone within six months of meeting in person. Enjoy the moment, stay curious about your spouse, be able to adjust, and you might be able to extend that honeymoon period for quite a while. At least as long as you don’t employ the “There’s a Spider on Your Face!” anti-snoring trick.

What Would Ward Cleaver Do?

Ward Cleaver would be more likely giving advice than taking it. What can we say? Ward Cleaver was a stud.

Consult Your Trusted Advisor

In his book The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image, Leonard Shlain offers the theory that the term “sleep on it”—as in waiting until you’ve had a good night’s rest when facing a big decision—originally meant more than just letting your subconscious wrestle with your unresolved question during a good night’s sleep. Shlain examines cultures going back to prehistory and notes that most ruling men had two realms where they sought counsel: first in their royal court, from other men, standing or sitting while fully clothed, and then in their bedchamber at night, from their wife (or concubine), naked, reclining. In that second chamber, a ruling man encountered the feminine perspective. Whether he overtly heeded it or not, the process of that secret unofficial advisor—the power behind the throne—undoubtedly influenced the thinking of the ruling man.

Fast-forward to today, and you will find that your wife is undoubtedly your most trusted advisor—or certainly should be—and that these conversations tend to occur late at night, when all the business of the day is done.