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

by Jenna McCarthy

  “You know what? I think I’m just going to go read,” I say, because obviously boob-tubing is not something we were built to do as a team. He’s got the TV tuned to SportsCenter before I am even on my feet. Joe knows I can’t stand the sound of televised sports, so he courteously dons the headphones he gave me for Christmas one year (they were a mock gift because we both knew he’d be the one wearing them, and because he actually does wear them with loving regularity, they were the best gift he’s ever given me). From this point forward, any attempts to communicate with him are strictly prohibited. It’s hard enough for him to tear his attention away from the screen when he’s not wearing sound-canceling headgear. Should I dare to require his input or consideration then, there’s usually a great show of locating the remote and finding and pressing the pause button before he’ll look at me with a dramatic sigh, because clearly I should know that a man cannot watch, listen, and talk at the same time. When the headphones are in place, I could run through the room naked with my hair on fire and unless I stopped to smolder directly in front of the screen, my bare-assed pyrotechnic show would go entirely unnoticed.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  He can’t sleep without the television blaring, or more accurately he takes the position that he can’t sleep without the television blaring. Which is complete and utter bullshit because what is the first thing he does upon boarding a plane, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, watching a movie in the theater, or reading a book to his kids? You guessed it: fall asleep. Seriously, he is a strong sleeper. He sleeps deep and long but insists that the white noise and white light of the television remain on until he is into a solid REM cycle. So in order to keep the peace I do one of two things: One, attack him when I get into bed and insist he turn off the TV; or two, wait until he’s asleep and then turn the damn thing off myself.

  VICKY

  As frustrating as it may be to try to watch TV with my husband, it’s picnicking in Versailles compared to trying to watch it solo. I’m not saying that Joe is smarter than I am, or that he orchestrated this intentionally just so that I would never, ever watch TV of my own accord, but you need an advanced engineering degree to watch a simple sitcom in my house. I discovered this the hard way the first time Joe went out of town after having set up our high-tech new “home theater system.” (The one I still argue should have come with a popcorn maker or something useful and deserving of the name.) He made me diagrams and cheat sheets, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of them. It wouldn’t matter, he assured me, because if I got stuck, all I had to do was press the handy “help” button on the $400 universal remote and it would walk me right through any possible scenario. Turns out the professed “help” button isn’t so helpful if you’re the sort who gets lost trying to find the bathroom in Best Buy and you wouldn’t know a coaxial cable from a crossover conduit if your very life was riding on the correct answer.

  “Is the TV on?” the remote asks right off the bat. Already I am stumped. I study the TV. The screen is black but there’s a little light in the corner. Since “I’m not sure but I think so” isn’t an option, I hit YES.

  “Is the PVR on?” it wants to know.

  I’m sure it would help if I knew what a PVR was, but I don’t. I look around the media cabinet for something that says PVR on it, but I can’t find anything so I randomly select NO.

  “Is the AV receiver on? Is the video monitor set to output 6? Is the DVD/VCR set to input mode? Is the remote sensor window blocked? Do you want to restore factory settings? What’s the square root of 4,309,782, who was the eleventh president of the United States, and if I offered you a million dollars, could you define the word the?”

  Go Zen, I tell myself as I randomly answer YES and NO to thousands of bewildering questions. “Now is the PVR on?” it asks at one point, and I think I hear it sigh. I start to feel the way I always do at the optometrist when he asks me to cover one eye and tell him whether A or B looks sharper, clearer, better. My personal theory is that since they look exactly the same it is unmistakably a trick question, a way of seeing if you’re paying attention. “Yes,” I tell the remote control this time. “Now the PVR is on!”

  Suddenly—and I am not just saying that for dramatic emphasis, believe me; it really does happen out of nowhere—the impossible happens: The television set turns itself on. Surely this is merely a miraculous coincidence and not the result of something I’ve done. If it’s the latter, I’m actually bummed—because it’s not like I could reproduce the winning sequence if you held a gun to my head.

  Slightly shaken by this unexpected turn of events, I begin scrolling through the online TV guide, which features incomprehensible portions of the titles of the roughly one thousand shows I have the luxury of choosing from. I’ve made it to 277 when the phone rings.

  “You’re still awake?” Joe asks. I look at the clock and it’s more than an hour past the time I normally turn in.

  “Oh, yeah, I was just reading,” I lie. I refuse to admit how I spent the last several hours.

  “I was just going to leave you a message asking you to record something for me while I’m gone,” he says. “It’s super easy. Want me to walk you through it?”

  “Can we do it tomorrow?” I ask. “I’m exhausted.” And if I have to look at that godforsaken remote again tonight, something is going to get broken.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  My husband has this awful habit of pulling out back hairs with his fingers while we’re watching TV. He just reaches behind his neck to his back and yanks them out one by one. We’ll be sitting there watching True Blood when all of a sudden the couch jerks with this crazy force of him pulling his back hairs out! He doesn’t have a hairy back, just a few stray hairs, which he only feels the urge to remove when we’re watching TV together. It is beyond gross.

  DEILIA

  This may come as a shock to you, but it is universally accepted (by most people with penises at least), so you might as well get used to it: Once a man has pressed the power button on the TV, he is officially “watching it,” for all of eternity or until he manually turns it off himself, whichever comes last. (Power outages don’t “count” as an active act of disengagement, either. Just so you know.) You might think because he is fast asleep, has gotten into the shower, or just boarded a plane for a twoweek business trip on another continent that you might then be free to change the channel or—if you’re feeling really ballsy—turn the thing off entirely, but you’d be wrong.

  “Did you turn off the TV?” he’ll ask in a terrifying Hannibal Lecter voice.

  “Well, um, yeah, I did—” you’ll stammer, confused.

  “I was watching that!” he’ll roar from the puddle of drool/ steamy bathroom/faraway tarmac, frightening the bejesus out of you because you’d have bet your last dollar that you were well within your legal/marital television operating rights when you assumed control. Do not even try to rationalize with him by pointing out that he was unconscious or in a different time zone, because the conversation will turn preschool on your ass before you can say Hanna-Barbera.

  “Honey, you were not watching that,” you’ll say with a small chuckle, as if you are both mature adults who can laugh and admit when they are being patently ridiculous.

  “Was too!” he’ll bellow, huffing and planting his hands on his hips dramatically. (You won’t be able to see this over the phone, but trust me—he’s doing it.)

  “Were not,” you’ll say incredulously. Well, he wasn’t!

  “Was to-oooooo!” he’ll shout, eyes closed and index fingers stuck in his ears. To answer your unspoken questions: Yes, you married him, and no, it’s not worth divorcing him over unless you want to stay single and celibate forever, because eventually you would have this exact conversation with every other man on the planet.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  When I’m in bed watching TV, he’ll come in and try to persuade me to change the channel to something we “bot
h” like. I’m not stupid. What he means is that he wants to change it to something he likes.

  MIKEY

  Now, I know lots of people—some of them even women—who like to watch TV in bed. As you could probably surmise, I am not one of them. I like to go to bed early and get up early, and I can’t sleep unless I’m in silent pitch-blackness, so it just wouldn’t work. Joe has begged many, many times over the years to get me to just try it, but I always stand firm on this one. He even attempted to woo me with the compelling argument that it would be “really fun for the girls to climb in here on Saturday mornings and watch cartoons.” It’s hard not to hate a man who can easily sleep through the SpongeBob theme song, but my husband really does have many redeeming qualities, so I try to fixate mostly on those. No matter what Joe’s argument is, I know I will win as soon as I whip out the sex card, the one that conveniently details the scores of studies that have found that couples who have TVs in their bedrooms have less sex than couples who don’t.

  I am sure it is because he is so deprived of bedroom entertainment (and I’m mostly talking about the televised kind here) at home that Joe acts like an inmate who’s just discovered his cell has a free cigarette machine whenever we walk into a hotel room.

  Before I’ve even had a chance to scope out the honor bar or check to see if the last guests left anything good in the safe, he is sprawled spread-eagle on top of the comforter (he obviously doesn’t read the studies where they report the sorts of things they find on there), looking a bit like a hairy, mannish Angel with his remote control “gun” pointed at the TV. It matters not if the room’s set is smaller and older and has far fewer bells and whistles than any of the models we have at home. To Joe, the ability to indulge in this beloved pastime from the unparalleled comfort of a bed ranks up there with winning the Heisman Trophy, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the super lottery all in one day.

  My husband, an astute guy who knows how to play any situation to his advantage, has picked up on the fact that “vacation rules” are quite different from “home rules.” They must be, if the wife who is a veggie-pushing nutrition Nazi at home will give in to her family’s pit stop pleas for Doritos and Yoo-Hoo and then actually be cool enough to call it dinner.

  “Wow,” he’ll say, sucking the powdery processed cheese from his fingers. “I’m proud of you.” For relaxing your ridiculously rigid standards for the first time in possibly ever, is the part he is wise enough not to say out loud.

  “Whatever,” I reply breezily. “We’re on vacation!”

  Totally abusing my laid-back holiday attitude, he will try to squeeze as much TV time into any given getaway as I’ll allow. Every time we return to our hotel room, he molests the set like it’s his long-lost, war-torn lover. He begs me to order room service, thinking I’ll be impressed with his big-spender façade, when really the fantastical idea of watching TV and eating in bed—at the same time—is almost more than he can bear. If I protest, he flings my words back at me like poo in a monkey cage.

  “Come on, honey,” he pleads. “We’re on vacation.”

  Lots of wives complain about husbands whose nonstop channel surfing makes them dizzy and nauseated. I once read an article—and it was pure speculation, mind you, not a scientific exposé—that suggested that a man’s inability to settle on one channel could be merely an extension of his evolutionary need to expose himself to as many women as possible in the (subconscious) hope of maximizing reproductive success. In other words, more channels equal more chicks. Another theory suggests that channel surfing is just another of the many ways a man—the aggressive hunter to our more laid-back gatherer—is built to explore. Perhaps Joe is more evolved than most, because when it comes to television he’s not much of a surfer. In fact, I’d say if anything he’s a loiterer. Something on a random channel will catch his eye—a stock market ticker, a black-and-white movie with cowboy hats, anything to do with sports or nature, a big voluptuous pair of knockers—and he’ll be spellbound for hours.

  One day he appeared to be watching a screen saver of a forest. It piqued my interest only in the is-that-TV-broken-or-is-hereally-watching-a-screen-saver? sort of way.

  “Whatcha watching?” I asked.

  “It’s a documentary about birds,” he replied.

  “Is it interesting?” I prodded.

  “Not really,” he admitted.

  “Oh,” I said. “So why are you watching it?”

  “I want to find out what happens,” he answered. “Besides, I’ve got an hour invested in it already.”

  What I wanted to say is, Dude, we have at least 899 other channels! Cut your losses! That’s already an entire hour of your life you’ll never get back! But that combination of hopefulness and loyalty is rare and sweet, when you think about it. So instead, I did what I always do: I said good night and crawled into bed with Sheldon, the cats, and my book and prayed for sleep to come quickly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What’s Cooking?

  (I’ m Gonna Go Out on

  a Limb and Say Me)

  Anybody who believes that the way to a man’s heart

  is through his stomach flunked geography.

  • ROBERT BYRNE •

  Heart disease may be the number one actual killer of women in this country, but the whole orchestrating-of-the-meals thing has to be the number one killer of their little spirits. I mean, honestly. Unless you’re Rachael Freaking Ray and somebody is paying you to come up with a crowd-pleasing spread under a certain price point night after identical night, what is there to love about the gig? To be fair, I am sure there is at least one woman out there who wakes up each day eager to show her family how much she cares for them through a new and innovative display of culinary wizardry. I would genuinely love to meet her and shake her flour-dusted hand. Then I’d like to shove a flaming lamb chop into her annoyingly chipper pie hole.

  My friend Jill owns a restaurant that makes the best chicken you have ever tasted in your life. Somehow the wonder chefs over there can take a boneless, skinless slab of poultry and turn it into a mind-blowing series of multiple orgasms for your taste buds. Lunch or dinner, on a sandwich or à la carte, served alongside an award-winning bottle of wine or a glass of tap water, this stuff is the best of the breast, bar none. When Jill’s Place began selling its signature spice blend, I bought it and I even used it, but my chicken still tasted like, well, chicken.

  “You’re holding out on me,” I accused Jill over yet another plate of perfect poultry one evening.

  “What are you talking about?” my friend demanded, the picture of innocence.

  “There obviously is some ingredient or technique you use to make your chicken taste like this,” I charged, shoveling in another impossibly delicious bite.

  “We just season it and grill it,” Jill insisted.

  “Liar,” I replied.

  I begged and pleaded, and Jill continued to deny employing any steroid abuse, so I dared her to come over to my house and prepare it right in front of me. I bought the organic, free-range chicken myself, so that she wouldn’t be able to inject it with some sort of tenderizing flavor booster on the sly. When Jill arrived, she prepared the chicken just as she’d instructed me and cooked it precisely the same way I had. As usual, it was orgasmic.

  “I don’t get it!” I cried. “I did every single thing you did! I used your damned spice rub and I even got the kind of pan you have at the restaurant. Do I need to be wearing checkered pants and nurse shoes? Is it the hair net, because I’ll get one. Just tell me, what am I doing wrong? What’s the secret?”

  “You have to cook it with love,” Jill said, shaking her head sadly. Honest to God, that’s what she said.

  Well, fuck me, then.

  I don’t love cooking. I used to, back in another lifetime when I was doing it for other appreciative adults and had untold hours to scan cookbooks for ideas and peruse gourmet markets for inspiration and exotic ingredients. Once I had kids, putting a meal on the table became a chore that ranked up there
with getting my annual mammogram or cleaning the oven on the intrinsic-joy scale. Like most working moms, I had managed to assemble a meager arsenal of five or six familyfriendly meals—meaning the kids would eat them without threatening to puke or actually puking—that I cooked and served on a continual loop. It got to the point where the kids knew what day of the week it was by what was on the table.

  “It’s taco Tuesday again?” they’d moan. The only day that was a universal crowd pleaser was Saturday, also known as “breakfast-for-dinner day.” On BDD they could have any breakfast item of their choice—cottage cheese, fruit, French toast, pancakes, waffles, hash browns, bacon, omelets, or green eggs and ham if it meant quiet acquiescence. I bought an appalling selection of cereals, hoping to entice my family to the uncooked side. Occasionally it worked, which did slightly mitigate the pain of having to fire up the oven the other six days.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  When I go grocery shopping I’ll typically buy myself a couple of special treats, something I like to nibble on from time to time. At the same time, I’ll buy my husband a few treats I know he likes, so that he’ll keep his hands off mine. I’ve even been vocal about it. “Please don’t eat my stuff. I bought you your own.” Does it help? Absolutely not. He even knows I’ll get mad about it, so now he tells me that he ate my stuff and he’ll pick me up some more on his way home. If you think I tell him not to bother, you’re wrong. Making him go into a grocery store is his punishment.

  SUSAN

  When we were first married, Joe didn’t cook and I didn’t expect him to. Once the kids came along, however, I began to plead for his help. Not with the actual adding-heat-to-ingredients part, or even the shopping, slicing, dicing, battering, breading, puréeing, pulverizing, or cleaning up. What I wanted more than anything else was for someone else to plan an occasional menu, to say, “Tonight we are having this.” What a dream that would be, to have an assignment I could carry out on autopilot. No more torturous self-doubting parade of “Will everyone like this?” or “Has it been a week since we had it last?” or “What should I serve with it?” Not my problem, I could say. I just work here. But I’ll be sure to pass your complaint along to management.