Synergize, then Compromise
Exercise 6.4 What Have I Done?
A woman will marry a man with the hope that he will change. He won’t. He can’t. He has no idea he should change and, even if he wanted to, doesn’t know how. Nagging will only reinforce bad behavior and that’s not what we want, is it? No, it isn’t. What we want is to turn this guy into something you can take out into public, someone with whom you would be happy to share your life. Now to be fair, it is likely that many of the things about him which you now find annoying or unacceptable might have been perfectly fine prior to being married. So, anything involving change will be a foreign concept to a man since, in his opinion, you wouldn’t have married him if he had not been perfect in the first place. Funny little man, isn’t he?
The first thing you’re going to have to do is to decide just what it is about this guy that you want to change. Now realize, that once you really get into the details of this, you may find that it's just easier to start over rather than to fix this one up. That decision is yours to make, but remember: “The devil you
know is often preferable to the one you don’t”. But before we get into the specifics of your man, let us delve a bit more into this generic thing called Man. Men, for the most part, are incased in a thick layer of uninformed rational foolishness. This essentially means that they think they know what they’re talking about, but of course they really don’t. Even if proven wrong they don’t usually care, and that’s typically what makes men stupid. Bottom line is that men think they know, but they don’t really know and as a result will resist any attempt at change.
With respect to change, men don’t respond well to frontal assault. It’s much more effective, not to mention more fun, to get them to adopt new behaviors by virtue of your clever tactics and subterfuge rather than hitting them over the head with kitchen implements. However, as my Grandma once said to me while brandishing a flour covered rolling pin, “This here’s all the therapy Pa ever needed”. So, it would seem that there is some merit to tackling these issues head-on, but this would require a great deal of effort, arm strength and practice as hitting a moving object with a rolling pin is not as easy as one might think. So, assuming that you’ve decided to deal with your mans issues in a more subtle fashion, lets take a look at some examples of changes you might like to see in your man, and how we might go about installing these updates.
• His Hygiene. This is a real problem for some guys. If you have one of these, one who has somehow missed the basics and fundamentals of self preservation, then it’s up to you to correct this situation. Take some time out of each day to go over some of the more complex tasks with him like cutting and cleaning his finger and toenails (most men don’t know about the cleaning part), keeping his hair washed, the use of a very strong deodorant, using mouth wash before brushing (he does brush doesn’t he?), and dealing with the ancient mysteries of ear wax. Don’t let up on him here or he will quickly and happily regress back to the state of someone living under an overpass.
• His Friends. He has had his friends longer than he’s been with you.
His friends will remind him of this fact when they’re at a bar and he’s drunk. He will sluringly agree with them. His friends will say things to him like, “Let’s go find us a couple of low mileage pit-whoopees and 'em help build a memory.” Although he may not be certain of the exact meaning, in a drunken haze this will sound like a good idea to your man. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to remind him of just how useless his friends really are.
You might consider getting this point across to him in a rather direct manner, if you get my drift, while in bed together. Here is my advice.
You might consider doing something special for him, something that I know you thought you wouldn’t have to do anymore once you were married. It’s either that or continue to deal with his friends. It should take no more than a few minutes of your time and should result in your having no further problems. Also note that it would be rare to find that any of his friends are married. Married men have single men as friends, if only to remind them of what they had when they were single, which was Ketchup on crackers with a side of pickles, if I remember correctly.
• His Bachelor Stuff. This is his dowry, the stuff that came with him into the marriage, which included his collection of Flintstone Jelly drinking glasses, his collection of NFL drinking glasses, his collection of glasses with beer logos on them, his matchbook collection, 8 tons of car parts, a stuffed and rotting armadillo, a stuffed and rotting moosehead, a stuffed and rotting fish, 12 small green and blue rocks, 3 gallons of barbeque sauce, 3 horseshoes, a deck of 50 playing cards, a broken toilet bowl and a brown towel. You were expecting perhaps a yacht, or maybe a helicopter spiriting you away to your mansion in Tenerife? No doubt those illusions were shattered as was his collection of NFL drinking glasses soon after being married.
It is important to understand that men love to hang onto things. A man never knows which of several thousand rusted and corroded nuts and bolts might just fix something important. That’s why men keep all sorts of things in the garage hidden away in jars, small drawers, boxes and bottles. Men know instinctively that as soon as they throw away some seemingly unimportant bracket, bolt or spring they will need it a week later. This has happened to every man, so over the years they have developed a simple mechanism for dealing with this problem;
they save everything.
• His Sanctuary. This would usually be either the garage or a workshop. This is the place where he can go when he needs to think, when he needs to get away, when he needs to break something, when he needs an airtight room and an idling car. Regardless, this is his sanctuary. Look upon this area like his American Embassy, his Guantanamo, and understand that usually your presence is by invitation only. Other men can come and go into other men’s garages and workshops with impunity, it’s a guy thing. Women, however, are another matter. They are usually not welcomed and are often treated as spies without regard to the possibility that they are probably not.
There are not many places he can call his own, so you need to give him this one. Everyone needs a place to go when they’ve got nowhere else to go.
• His Mom. Oh Lord, where to begin. If his Mom is at all an issue in his life then you’ve got bigger problems than I can realistically deal with here within the bounds of this book. At some point he will have to realize that it’s either his Mother or you, his woman. He can’t have both and we don’t even think about it if he could. Know that whatever he is, good or bad, is due in large part to his Mother. So, hate her if you must or praise her if you will, but best to do either from a safe distance. There is nothing like a large distance separating
him and his mother to help him focus on what is important in his relationship; you and your needs.
Having bashed mom around sufficiently, let me say that his mom is going to be a wealth of useful information relative to the sorts of foods he likes and dislikes, ways in which to get him to do things he doesn’t want to do, and the locations of all those emotional buttons which moms do love to push. Moms know the locations of these, since they were instrumental in their installation. Yes, if utilized correctly, his mother can be a wealth of useful information. So, get to know her. You never know, you might just like her. Yeah I know, probably not.