Guide To Marriage And/Or Sex

by Dave Barry

  The Wedding Day

  This is it! The biggest day of your life, and there’s no way that any dumb old 108-degree fever is going to put a damper on it!

  A good idea is to put your wedding gown on early, so the sweat stains can expand from your armpit areas and cover the entire gown, and thus be less noticeable. And now it’s on to the wedding site!

  As the guests arrive, the ushers (What do you mean, you forgot the ushers?! Get some!!) should ask the guests whether they want smoking or non-smoking, and seat them accordingly (except the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom, who should be seated in separate states). Then, at the appointed time, the organist should start playing a traditional song, such as “Here Comes the Bride” or “Happy Birthday to You,” and the wedding procession should come down the aisle, in the following order:

  1. A cute little nephew, who will carry the ring and announce, at the most dramatic part of the ceremony, that he has to make poopy. If you have no cute little nephew, rent one.

  2. The groom (if available).

  3. The bridesmaids, walking sideways to minimize the risk that they will injure a member of the audience in the eye with their puffed shoulders.

  4. You, the bride, the Center of Everything, smiling radiantly, your eyes sparkling like the most beautiful stars in the sky until, as you reach the altar, they swell shut in reaction to the antibiotics.

  From that point on, it Will all be a happy blur to you—the ceremony, the reception, dancing with your new husband to your Special Song (“New York, New York”). Enjoy it all, for you’ll never have a wedding like this again, even if you do recover fully.

  But the best part of all will come later, on your Wedding Night, just the two of you, alone at last—you in your filmy, lacy, highly provocative peignoir, and your groom on his back in the shower snoring and dribbling saliva on his rental tuxedo. My advice to you is: relax, have a glass of wine, and check his pulse every 15 minutes. Don’t be alarmed if he has none. This is normal, for grooms.

  Pranks

  It is the responsibility of the best man and the ushers to play fun and comical pranks on the Happy Couple, such as—this is a good one!—just before they come rushing out of the reception, ready to leave on their honeymoon, you take their car and—get this, guys!—you sell it and keep the money. Ha ha! The Happy Couple will sure talk about that for a number of years!

  The Honeymoon

  Most couples prefer to take their honeymoons away from the familiar and the ordinary, to go to an exotic, different, and foreign place, such as Epcot Center. I am not kidding here. A lot of couples really do honeymoon at Disney World. Of course they don’t admit this. They say they’re “honeymooning in Florida,” because they don’t want people to know that the highlight of the whole wild lustful romantic adventure was shaking hands with Goofy.

  Of course there are plenty of other possibilities for your honeymoon. Your friendly travel agent will give you mounds of brochures from all kinds of resorts desperate to obtain your honeymoon dollar.

  Thank-You Notes

  Thank-you notes are your last major responsibility as a bride, and the rules of etiquette require that you try to get them all done before the marriage legally dissolves.

  The proper wording depends on whether or not you remember what the people gave you. If you do remember, your note should say specific nice things about the gift:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sternum:

  Thank you ever so much for the very thoughtful fondue set. Mark and I feel that, of all the fondue sets we received, the one you gave us is definitely one of the nicer ones, in that particular color.

  Sincerely, Elaine and Mark

  If you don’t remember what gift they gave you, you’ll have to compensate by sounding very grateful for it:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sternum:

  We just don’t know how we can ever thank you for the extremely wonderful gift you gave us. It has become the focal point of our entire lives! We think about it all the time. We are seriously thinking about quitting our jobs and forming a religious cult that just sits around all day worshipping this gift.

  With Extreme Sincerity, Elaine and Mark

  Chapter 7. Newlywed Finances

  Household Money Management

  It Is sad but true that money causes a great many unnecessarily fatal squabbles among newlyweds. Very often this is because of a difference in priorities. For example, you want to buy food, while your spouse wants to buy a thoroughbred racehorse. It’s important, in these situations, for both of you to be willing to sit down together and try to achieve a work able compromise. In this case, you could buy a thoroughbred racehorse and eat it.

  Often, however, the solutions are not that simple. This is why it’s so important that right now, while you’re just starting out, you draw up a realistic household budget. I can help you here. I have lived in a realistic household for many years, and I would say, based on experience, that your typical weekly expenses should run pretty close to the following:

  REALISTIC WEEKLY HOUSEHOLD BUDGET FOR TWO PEOPLE

  Food that you buy and eventually eat $30.00

  Food that you buy and store in the back of the refrigerator until you have to throw it out because it looks like the thing that burst out of that unfortunate man’s chest and started eating the spaceship crew in the movie Alien 55.00

  Pennies that you get as change and put in a jar, intending to someday put them in those wrappers and take them to the bank, when in fact you will die well before you ever get around to this 117.48

  Rent, clothing, car payments, insurance, gas, electricity, telephone, magazines 829.12

  Miscellaneous 2,747.61

  As you can see, there are a lot of expenses associated with running a household, and to meet them, you will need Financial Discipline. Each week, when you get your paychecks, you must set aside $3,779.21 right off the bat, to cover your weekly household budget. If your combined weekly paychecks total less than this amount, perhaps you should go back and marry a rich person (see Chapter 1). Your other option is ...

  Credit Cards

  Credit cards are an excellent source of money. The way they work is, people you don’t even know mail them to you, and then stores, for some reason, let you use them to actually buy things. (No, I can’t figure it out either!)

  The thing is, you have to be responsible about how you use your credit cards. You can’t just rush out and charge every single item in the store. Think ahead! How would you fit it all into your car?

  So I strongly recommend that you be cautious with credit, following the wise Borrowing Rule of Thumb employed by the federal government, which is: “Never borrow any amount of money larger than you can comfortably pronounce.”

  Your Checking Account

  This is another potential source of money, although it’s usually impossible to tell how much money is in it. The important thing is to try to keep your checkbook “balanced.” Here’s how.

  1. Each month the bank will send you an envelope containing a bunch of used checks, which, for tax purposes, you should place in a two-ply grocery bag and eventually misplace. Also in the envelope will be:

  * A little note entitled “TO OUR CUSTOMERS!” that will feature a cheerful and totally unintelligible message like this: “Good News! First Fiduciary Commonwealth National Savings & Loan & Bank & Trust is now offering 3.439087654970 Growth Bonds of Maturity yielding 2.694968382857%

  Compound Annualized Rate of Secretion!” You should try to save this note, for tax purposes.

  * A piece of paper covered with numbers (your “statement”).

  2. Okay. Now open up your checkbook and take a look at the kind of checks you have. If you have the kind with little nature scenes printed on them, or, God help us, little “Ziggy” cartoons, you’re much too stupid to balance your own checking account, and you should definitely go back and marry a rich person (see Chapter 1).

  3. Now examine your check register (the part of your checkbook that you sometimes write o
n).

  4. Now compare and see if any recognizable numbers on the “register” are the same as any numbers the bank has printed on the “statement.” If you find any, you should put a little happy face next to them.

  5. If your total number of happy faces is five or more, then your account is what professional accountants call “in balance,” and you can go on ahead and watch TV. If you score lower than five, you should get on the phone immediately and explain to your bank that they have made some kind of error.

  Your Home: Buying vs. Renting

  Aside from Madonna and Sean Penn, most newlyweds rent their first home. This can actually be a pleasant experience, as you discover the Fun Side of apartment life: getting to know your new neighbors; listening to what kind of music your new neighbors like to play very early in the morning on their 150,000-watt sound system; having your new neighbors’ legs come through your ceiling when water from their leaking toilet rots their floor, etc.

  But sooner or later, despite this recurring joy of these communal experiences, you’re going to want to have a place of your very own. Step one is to figure out how expensive a house you can afford. This depends on your combined annual incomes, as is shown by the following chart:

  YOUR COMBINED ANNUAL INCOME PRICE OF HOME YOU CAN AFFORD Up to $20,000 Don’t be an idiot. There are no homes that you can afford. $20,000-$40,000 Don’t be an idiot. There are no homes that you can afford. $40,000-$80,000 Don’t be an idiot. There are no homes that you can afford. $80,000-$100,000 Don’t be an idiot. There are no homes that you can afford.

  But don’t despair, young couples! You can still realize the dream of owning a home of your own, provided you’re willing to do what generations of newlyweds have done before you: roll up your sleeves, do the hard work, and make the tough sacrifices involved in nagging your parents for a down payment. They probably have some money left, even after your wedding, and your job is to whine and wheedle and look pathetic until they give it to you. Make sure you leave them something for food:

  COST OF YOUR NEW HOME AMOUNT YOUR PARENTS SHOULD HAVE LEFT FOR FOOD AFTER LENDING YOU THE DOWN PAYMENT

  Up to $50,000 $150

  $50,000-$100,000 $75

  Over $100,000 Various canned goods.

  Chapter 8. How To Argue Like A Veteran Married Couple

  Most young couples begin married life knowing very little about how to argue with each other, and are forced to learn through trial and error. Sadly, some of them never do learn, a good example being that couple on “The Waltons” who never fought about anything, and consequently wound up with three or four hundred children.

  There is no need for this kind of tragedy. We veteran married couples have, over the years, especially on long car trips, developed certain time-tested techniques that even an inexperienced person can use to turn any issue, no matter how minor, into the kind of vicious, drawn-out argument where you both spend a lot of time deliberately going through doors you don’t really need to go through, just so you can slam them viciously.

  When you get involved in marital arguing, the role model you want to bear in mind is World War I, which got started when some obscure nobleperson, Archduke Somebody, got assassinated way the hell over in the Balkans, and the next thing you know people in places as far away as Cheyenne, Wyoming, were rushing off to war. These were people who wouldn’t have known a Balkan if they woke up in bed with one, but they were willing to get shot at because of what happened there. It’s the same with a good marriage argument. If you really do it right, you should reach the point where neither of you has the vaguest recollection what the original disagreement was, but both of you are willing to get divorced over it. This is the kind of veteran marital relationship you young couples can develop, if you follow these proven techniques.

  The most important technique is: Always be on the lookout for conversational openings that can lead to arguments! To illustrate this, let’s look at a typical marital conversation:

  MARY: Honey, could you please try not to leave your socks on the coffee table?

  JOHN: Why of course, dear. I’m sorry.

  Pretty pathetic, right, married couples? Mary has created the perfect opening for a good argument, and John has totally dropped the ball, by admitting he was wrong. Never admit you’re wrong, young married persons!

  Now you’re saying, “But what if John’s socks are right there, on the coffee table? How can he argue about that?”

  The answer is: He can’t. So what he has to do is, he has to somehow get the argument, or at least his end of it, focused on a completely different topic, ideally a strident accusation that he has dredged up out of his memory and that is totally unrelated to the issue at hand. This is very important, young married persons: You must always maintain a supply of retaliative, irrelevant accusations in your mind, so that you can dredge them up when you need them.

  Let’s say, in this case, that John once thought Mary was flirting with her old flame Bill at a party. This is a good thing to accuse her of in the current argument, as it is totally unrelated to the coffee table. However, John must be careful how he brings it up; if he does it too abruptly, Mary could become confused, and the argument could end right there:

  MARY: Honey, could you please try not to leave your socks on the coffee table?

  JOHN: Oh yeah? Well what about your old flame, Bill?

  MARY (confused): Huh?

  So what John needs to do—this is the essential skill of marital arguing—is to come up with a smooth way to get from Mary’s topic to his topic. This technique is called a “segue,” (pronounced “segue”), and if you do it right, it will usually lead to a whole new series of mutant topics you can argue about. Let’s see how it works:

  MARY: Honey, could you please try not to leave your socks on the coffee table?

  JOHN: Why do you always do that?

  MARY: Always do what?

  JOHN: Always look for things to criticize.

  MARY: I don’t always look for things to criticize. I just don’t like finding your damn ...

  JOHN: Fine. Great. Curse at me. I didn’t see you cursing at Bill, at the Johnsons’ party.

  MARY: What is that supposed to mean?

  JOHN: Oh, come on. You were flirting with him.

  MARY: I was flirting? And I suppose you weren’t all over Jennifer?

  JOHN: I don’t see how you could have known what I was doing, after all you had to drink.

  See how effectively this veteran married couple handled the situation? In just a few quick sentences, they have gone from a seemingly silly topic, socks, to a whole treasure trove of issues that they can debate and dredge up again for years to come. I’m not saying you young couples will get this kind of results your first time out of the gate, but with a little practice, you’ll get the hang of it, and it can lead to the discovery of a whole new facet of your relationship (see Chapter 11, “How to Put New Life into Your Marriage or Else Get a Divorce”).

  Chapter 9. Children: Big Mistake, Or Bad Idea?

  In this chapter, we’re going to talk about how children affect your marriage. We’re not going to talk about how you actually produce the children in the first place. We covered that topic thoroughly in an earlier book, Babies and Other Hazards of Sex, which explores the whole area of childbirth in great detail and reaches the following scientific breakthrough conclusions:

  1. It is very painful. (If you’d like additional facts on this topic, you can read the book, although it doesn’t contain any.)

  For now, however, we’re going to talk about how your married life will change after you have children, so that you’ll be able to carefully and rationally weigh the pros and cons of parenthood, then barge right ahead and have children without any understanding of what you’re really getting into, just like everybody else.

  What It Really Means to Be a Parent

  What it really means to be a parent—note this carefully, because it’s the essence of the whole thing—iS: YOU Will spend an enormous portion of your tim
e lurking outside public-toilet stalls.

  For reasons that modern medical science has been unable to explain, children almost never have to go to the bathroom when they are within eight or nine miles of their own home toilets. It does no good to try to make them. Tell a child to go to the bathroom before you leave home, and the child will insist that not only does he or she not have to go now, but he or she will probably never have to go to the bathroom ever again.

  And of course when you get where you’re going, let’s say a restaurant, the child will wait until your entrees are about to emerge from the kitchen, then announce that he or she has to go. Children are incredibly sensitive to approaching entrees.

  So you will take the child to the bathroom, and, if it is an especially loath some bathroom, a bathroom that has clearly not been cleaned since the fall of Rome, a bathroom where the floor is littered with the skeletons of Board of Health employees who died attempting to inspect it, if it is this kind of bathroom, the child will immediately announce that he or she has to do Number Two.

  And of course you must stay there with the child. The child will want you to stand right outside the toilet stall, while the child goes in there, and ... and nobody really knows. It’s a real mystery, what young children do in public-toilet stalls. Whatever it is, it takes them longer than it took you, the parents, to produce them in the first place.