Guide To Marriage And/Or Sex

by Dave Barry

  What I hate about this is that restaurant men’s rooms are often fairly small and intimate places, and while I’m standing there, waiting for my son, strangers are constantly coming in to pee, and there I am, inches away from them, lurking there with no apparent purpose, like some kind of sex pervert who likes being in disgusting men’s rooms. So, to show that this is not the case, I try to keep a conversation going with my son. Except the only thing I can think of to talk to him about is how the old Number Two is going. I mean, you’d feel like an idiot in that situation, talking about the Strategic Defense Initiative. So we have these ludicrous exchanges:

  ME (brightly): So! Robert! How’s it going in there?!

  ROBERT (irritated): You just asked me that.

  ME (grinning like a madman at the peeing stranger so as to reassure him that everything is okay): Ha ha!

  Eventually, the child will emerge from the stall, when he or she is absolutely sure that the entrees are stone frozen cold. The child doesn’t care about the food, because children don’t go to restaurants to eat. They go to restaurants to go to the bathroom and play loud shrieking games under the table, so that you, the parents, are constantly ducking your heads under and hissing, “Stop that!” like some deranged species of duck. The child never actually touches the food, which is why many modern restaurants are saving money by serving reusable children’s entrees made entirely out of plastic.

  Where Can I Find Decent Affordable Child Care?

  Hahahahahaha. Forgive me for laughing in a bitter and cynical fashion, but you happen to have hit upon the most serious problem facing the Free World today: the international child-care crisis.

  In the old days, of course, the Free World had an excellent system of high-quality, low-cost child care in this country, namely your mother. Unfortunately, however, your mother is no longer interested in caring for children. She is interested in spending what little is left of her life among furniture that does not have Hawaiian Punch stains all over it. And you, of course, can’t engage in child care, because you need to get out and have a Rewarding Career so you can have a chance to earn enough money to pay for child care.

  Except there is hardly any available. You go around checking out preschool facilities, and you keep finding yourself in dank basements where the staff is missing a large percentage of its teeth and the educational materials consist of four crayons—all burnt sienna—and a GI Joe doll with most of the limbs pulled off. The result is that people are desperate. People who work in New jersey are dropping their children off each morning at child-care centers in Utah.

  Fortunately there is some hope. A new company recently opened for business, called the Exactly What You Are Looking For Child Care Company. It has spacious, clean, modern, well-equipped facilities within walking distance of your home or office; it’s open from 5 A.M. until as late as you want; and it’s staffed by middle-aged British women who love children and attend church regularly and are all licensed pediatricians. The cost is $3.50 per child per day. If you’re interested in enrolling your child in this excellent program, all you have to do is kill the Wicked Witch of the West.

  How Children Affect Your Sex Life

  Children are Nature’s very own form of birth control. To illustrate how they perform this vital function, let’s take a look at a minute-by-minute schedule, showing how my wife and I put our six-year-old son, Robert, to bed on a typical evening. To make sure we have some time to ourselves, we try to have him in bed by 8 P.m., which means we start the procedure a full hour earlier:

  7 P.m.—We announce to Robert that it’s time to get ready for bed.

  7:04, 7:09, 7:12, 7:14, 7:17, 7:18, 7:22, 7:24, 7:25, 7:26 & 7:27—We announce to Robert that he really has to start getting ready for bed Right Now and we are Not Kidding.

  7:28—Robert goes to his room and actually starts getting ready for bed.

  7:29—Robert notices that his rubber Godzilla doll is missing. How he notices this, in a room containing roughly 78,500 toys, nobody can explain, but he does notice it, and of course all other activities must cease until we can resolve this matter because God forbid that a child should be required to go to bed without his rubber Godzilla doll.

  7:43—We locate Godzilla and Robert begins getting ready for bed again. He is supposed to take off his clothes and put on his pajamas. He can do this All By Himself.

  9:27—So far, All By Himself, Robert has removed his shirt and, if he is really on a roll, one of his shoes. I go in to help him along.

  9:30—Now in his pajamas, Robert has his teeth brushed, which is the signal for him to announce that he is hungry. We tell him that this is his own fault, because he did not finish supper, and he absolutely cannot have any more food, no sir, forget it, not a chance, it’s time he learned his lesson, etc.

  9:57—Robert finishes a bowl of Zoo-Roni and submits to having teeth brushed again.

  10:02—We read a bedtime story, Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr. Seuss, which takes us quite a while because we must study every page very, very carefully in case there is some tiny detail we might have possibly missed when we read it on each of the previous 267 consecutive nights.

  10:43—We announce that it’s time to go to bed.

  10:45, 10:47, 10:51, 10:54, 10:56 & 10:59—We announce that it really is time to go to bed Right Now and we are Not Kidding.

  11:03—Robert actually gets into his bed. We tuck him in, kiss him good night, and creep silently out of the room, alone at last.

  11:17—Robert falls asleep and is immediately awakened by a terrible nightmare caused by being in bed with his face six inches from a rubber Godzilla doll. We remove it.

  11:28—We kiss Robert good night and creep silently out of the room, alone at last.

  11:32—Hearing noise from Robert’s room, we return to find him sobbing loudly. So upset that he is barely able to choke out the words, he explains that he has just realized that the mother bird in Horton Hatches the Egg loses her baby in the end, and even though she was terribly mean, she is probably very sorry by now, and very lonely. We try to explain that this is not at all the point that Dr. Seuss was trying to make, but Robert is inconsolable. Finally we agree to let him climb into bed with us, but “just for one minute.”

  2:47 A.m.—We return Robert to bed, kiss him good night, and creep silently from the room, alone at last.

  3:14, 3:58, 4:26, 5:11 & 5:43—The household goes on Red Alert status as various routine nightmares occur, each one causing us to stagger, half-asleep, down the hallway, like actors in a scene from Night of the Living Dead Parents.

  6:12—Dawn breaks.

  Whenever I read newspaper stories about people who have, say, nine children, I never ask myself: “How do they manage to take care of them all?” I ask myself: “Where did they find the time to conceive them all?”

  I don’t mean to suggest, by what I’ve said in this chapter, that children are bad for a relationship. Because in the end, the negative aspects of being a parent—the loss of intimacy, the expense, the total lack of free time, the incredible burden of responsibility, the constant nagging fear of having done the wrong thing, etc.—are more than outweighed by the positive aspects, such as never again lacking for primitive drawings to attach to your refrigerator with magnets.

  Chapter 10. How To Have An Affair

  My first piece of advice is that if you’re planning to have an affair, you should read this chapter in a safe place, such as the linen closet. You don’t want to be sitting around the living room, in plain view of your spouse, reading a chapter entitled, in great big letters, “How to Have an Affair.” I recommend that you hide this book under your garments and say to your spouse: “Well, I guess I’ll go sit in the linen closet with a flashlight for a while!” Your spouse will never suspect a thing. Unless you don’t have a linen closet. That would be a dead giveaway.

  Another dead giveaway is acting guilty. Let’s take a typical person—we’ll call him “Ed”[1]—who is having an affair with a woman at his office. If Ed has a
guilty conscience, he may accidentally reveal this in casual conversation with his wife:

  ED’S WIFE: Would you like another corn muffin, dear?

  ED: I’m having an affair with a woman in my office!

  Even if Ed’s wife is not a trained psychologist, she might conceivably gather, from certain subtle verbal “clues” Ed is subconsciously dropping, that something “fishy” is going on. Ed must make more of an eff ort to watch his words:

  ED’S WIFE: Would you like another corn muffin, dear?

  ED: I’m not having an affair with a woman in my office!

  Most affairs occur at the office, of course, which leads us to another important rule of affair-having: Never be discreet at the Office. To illustrate why this is important, let’s consider two people, Ellen and Chuck, who have worked together in a large corporate office for several years, and have recently started having an affair.

  Up to this point, Ellen and Chuck have probably been behaving the way men and women always behave in offices, which is to say: constantly winking and leering and engaging in loud and fun suggestive sexual banter. Behaving like lust-crazed fools has been a major form of entertainment in offices for as long as anybody can remember; in terms of total American corporation employee hours consumed, suggestive banter ranks well ahead of work, and only slightly behind making Xerox copies of personal documents.

  But like so many couples, Chuck and Ellen, now that they are engaging in real, as opposed to pretend, sexual activity, suddenly decide they have to be discreet. They never banter. They never eat lunch together any more. They walk past each other without even looking at each other. When they are forced, by circumstances, to be together, they display the same kind of warmth and closeness toward each other as the Vice-president of the United States displays toward deceased heads of state. They are formal and cool.

  They are also morons. The other employees, who, if they have been in the corporate world more than six weeks, have already witnessed hundreds of other major office affairs, will immediately recognize the cause of this sudden change in behavior. Ellen and Chuck might just as well go around wearing convention-style nametags that say: HI! MY NAME IS ELLEN! I’M HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH CHUCKI!

  Within days everybody in the office will know what’s going on. The affair will be discussed extensively in staff meetings. It could well appear in the annual report to the stockholders.

  What this means, of course, is that if you want your affair to go unnoticed by your co-workers, you have to be blatantly obvious about it. Chuck should wait until the office is extremely quiet, then stand up at his desk and shout across 47 desks to Ellen: “HEY ELLEN! WHAT DO YOU SAY WE MEET AT THE OUT O’TOWN MOTOR LODGE AFTER WORK TODAY AND HAVE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE!” And Ellen should shout back: “HECK YES!! I HAVE MY DIAPHRAGM RIGHT HERE IN MY PURSE!”

  Chuck’s and Ellen’s co-workers would never suspect a thing. “What a couple of kidders Chuck and Ellen are!” the co-workers would chuckle.

  How You Can Tell If Your Spouse Is Having an Affair

  You can always tell. No matter how careful your spouse is, he or she is going to make a mistake somewhere, and you’ll catch it, if you know the Major Warning Signs, which are:

  1. Your spouse acts strange.

  2. Your spouse, trying to trick you, acts normal.

  If you notice either of these Warning Signs, you should wait until your spouse is in a vulnerable position, such as reclining in a dental chair, and then you should point-blank ask the following gently probing question (if your spouse is male): “Well? Who is she?”

  Now listen closely to the answer. If it’s something specific like: “You mean the person I’m having an affair with? She is Dorina Mae Swiggins,” that means your suspicions are probably justified. But if it’s something evasive like: “What are you talking about?” or “Who is Who?”, then you quite frankly have to ask yourself how come your spouse is refusing to answer a simple direct question. Either way, this would be a good time to read the next chapter.

  Chapter 11. How To Put New Life Into Your Marriage Or Else Get A Divorce

  Time takes its toll on every marriage. The sense of romance and adventure that you feel as you take your wedding vows on that bright Saturday afternoon in June inevitably gives way to familiarity and even boredom, often as early as 8:30 that evening. Yet some couples seem to go on happily forever, a good example being Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, former owners of the Philippines. Long ago, they discovered a secret that has worked its magic for many successful couples: thoughtfulness. Ferdinand and Imelda were always showing each other, in little ways, that they cared. For example, when Imelda would get depressed because of the hassle and strain of everyday life, plus the fact that she was bloating up like an inflatable life raft, Ferdinand would say to her: “Buttercup, you look depressed. Why not take the national treasury and purchase every luxury consumer object in France?” This thoughtful gesture never failed to perk her up.

  Of course you may not be in a position to demonstrate quite that level of care, but there are things you can do to show your commitment to each other—little, thoughtful, romantic gestures that say you still think the other person is “somebody special.” For example, you can:

  1. Try to remember (you guys, especially) to flush the toilet.

  2. Remember your spouse’s birthday. “Hey!” you can say. “Wasn’t your birthday last month?”

  3. Go dancing, or even ...

  4. Go dancing with your spouse.

  5. On your anniversary, give your spouse an appropriate traditional gift for whatever year it is, as shown on the accompanying chart:

  Number Of Anniversary Traditional Gift

  1st Ore

  5th McNuggets

  10th Veg-o-Matic

  15th Oil change

  20th “Slim” whitman album

  30th TV tray or assault rifle

  40th Frankincense

  50th Ointment

  60th Suppository

  70th Indonesian Fighting Snake

  6. Consider renewing your wedding vows. The best place to do this is Las Vegas, where “wedding chapels” are a major industry, along with divorce, gambling, and scorpion paperweights. My wife and I renewed our vows in Vegas a little while back, on a Friday the 13th, in the very same chapel

  (everything I am telling you here is the truth) where Joan Collins got married her third or fourth time. The whole thing took less than four minutes and cost only $50, plus a tip for the minister, who was named (I swear) Dr. Eva C. Tubby.

  7. Go on a Get-away Vacation Fling. just the two of you. One day, when the pressure gets to be too much, you should just say to your spouse, out of the blue: “Let’s go!” Then you should impulsively throw a few items into

  a suitcase, jump into a cab, race to the airport, and hop on the next plane to Hawaii, or the Caribbean, or Europe, or wherever you want to go. Why not? You’ll be glad you did it. Once you’re up in the air, settled back in your seats, sipping champagne (Why not?), the two of you can hold hands, close your eyes, and just let your minds drift away to ... THE

  CHILDREN!! MY GOD, YOU FORGOT THE CHILDREN!!! TURN THE PLANE BACK RIGHT

  NOW!!!

  Sometimes, however, even thoughtful and romantic gestures such as these don’t do the trick. Sometimes you find that the two of you, no matter how much you may once have cared for each other, are starting to drift apart. It’s the little things that give you away: you hardly ever talk any more; you no longer kiss each other when you come home; you live in different states; etc. Maybe it’s time to face up to the fact that you’re just not right for each other any more. Hey, it happens. People change. They get older, they get larger, and sometimes they start to smell bad. Maybe the time has come to think about—let’s come right out and say it:

  Divorce

  The most important thing is to get yourself a lawyer. Oh, I realize you probably think you and your spouse can work this thing out amicably without any third parties. But what if suddenly your spouse gets a
lawyer, and you end up stone broke on the street wearing only a Hefty trash bag? You can’t afford to take this chance. You need a lawyer, too, so you and your spouse can both end up wearing Hefty trash bags. I recommend the ones with the patented “Cinch Sak” drawstring top.

  How to Select a Lawyer

  The best way to select a lawyer is to watch late-night television, which is where your top legal minds advertise. You’re looking for one who can demonstrate:

  * Integrity, in the form of wearing a dark suit;

  * A sound knowledge of the law, in the form of standing in front of a shelf with a lot of books on it; and

  * A sincere personal interest in you, in the form of making the following speech: “Hello. I’m Leonard Packmonger, of Leonard Packmonger Legal Attorneys of the Law Associates. Does your back hurt sometimes? Do you ever use consumer products? If so, I would say that, based upon my many, many weeks of experience in handling cases just like yours, you definitely have good grounds for a major lawsuit. Come on in and let’s talk about it and sign some binding documents. just for stopping by, we’ll give you a free, no-obligation neck brace.”

  Grounds for Divorce

  At one time it was difficult to get out of a marriage unless there was some kind of very serious problem with it, such as that one or more of the people involved had become deceased.

  Today, fortunately, it is easier to get divorced in most states than to get a transmission repaired properly. The only requirement is that you have a legal reason, which is technically known as “grounds.” If you have no grounds of your own, you can probably get some from your lawyer, who will have an ample supply left over from previous cases; or you can select some from this convenient list of grounds, all of which are 100 percent legally valid in every state in the union. Or at least they should be.