Marriage is about passion. Loving passionately, living passionately, arguing passionately … about the most trivial matters imaginable.
Really.
Anybody whose marriage has outlasted the honeymoon can tell you that no lawyers pleading a case before the supreme court ever argued more energetically than a couple trying to settle the question of who controls the TV remote.
She’ll want to watch something aimed squarely at her demographic — female, age nineteen to ninety-nine. These shows include the “makeover” genre in which a team of experts helps some poor woman compensate for her past mistakes in wardrobe selection, hairstyle selection, home decor selection and/or spouse selection. Closely related to this are shows in the “at least you didn’t marry this badly” genre. The big stars in this field are Oprah, Dr. Phil and Dr. G Medical Examiner.
If she’s not interested in reality, the woman might want to watch a romantic period piece like Sense and Sensibility, Casablanca, Thelma and Louise, or Fried Green Tomatoes.
The guy on the other hand will want to watch the big game, This Old House, the other big game, a Three Stooges movie, the not-quite-so-big-as-the others game, a war movie, the game on the alternate sports channel, the weather channel, and the elimination round of a bass fishing tournament – simultaneously. Years of solitary practice with the remote have given him dexterity which would be the envy of any tree-swinging orangutan. Unfortunately, years of watching TV this way have also given him an IQ the equivalent of any tree-swinging orangutan. That’s why the woman can never win this argument. How do you reason with someone that dumb?
To compensate, women usually win the thermostat wars. For some reason – evolution or Divine design or just plain bad luck – men and women run at completely different temperatures. There’s no “perfect” setting on the thermostat. Somebody’s gonna boil or somebody else is gonna freeze. My own personal wife has a surprisingly low body temp. In the winter my only option is to keep the furnace on high or the wood-burning stove stoked. If I don’t I’ll be punished when we go to bed. My loving wife … the light of my life … will crawl under the covers and put her delicate size six foot-sicles on my back to warm them up. To let her get cold is to risk death by frost-bitten kidneys.
Speaking of the bedroom, it’s worth mentioning that the bed itself is a major source of marital discord. A lot of wars throughout history have been fought over imaginary boundaries marking out the territory controlled by two different nations. These all look like third-grade playground shoving matches compared to the domestic disputes that arise of who is on whose side of the bed and who has more of the covers.
Personally, I think there’s a malicious magical force at work when I sleep. We can go to bed with the covers neatly arranged so that each of us has a fair share (sixty-forty, seems fair to me) and when we wake up virtually all of the covers will have mysteriously migrated to my side of the bed (ninety-ten). I don’t know how this happens, it just does. My wife claims its my fault, but that’s ridiculous. I know that if she gets cold during the night, I’ll be visited by the ten icy toes of doom!
The only sensible solution would be for us to sleep in separate beds as portrayed in the highly realistic television documentary series The Dick van Dyke Show. Not that my wife would ever agree to anything that would put my warm back out of icy-tootsie range.
For most couples, the really serious disagreements arise over the lasting decisions they have to face; how many children to have, what to name the children and what color paint should be used in the living room. Once each of the partners becomes committed to a particular paint color, there’s no going back. Even if she wants the eggshell and he wants them white, they’ll fight. Scientists working with complicated, sensitive instruments can find no detectable difference between the proposed colors, but the couple will construct elaborate arguments as to why their color choice is substantially different from (and better than) their partner’s.
The bigger the home improvement project, the worse the disagreement. If you really want to stress-test your marriage, build a house together. At some point you’ll find yourself passionately championing the necessity of building a breakfast nook even though you’d never heard of such a thing before the architect brought it up and you’ve never much cared for breakfast anyway. The important thing is that you win.
An argument that you’ll never win is the infamous “what do you want to do tonight?” non-argument. It doesn’t matter who starts the conversation, it always goes the same way.
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I guess we could go out for a bite.”
“No. That’s too expensive.”
“Fast food and a movie?”
“No. I think I want to stay in.”
“Okay. Do you want to rent a movie?”
“Not really.”
“Well, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
If nobody intervenes this low-key non-argument can go on for hours until the evening is spent and the subject is rendered moot by the passage of time.
Psychologists will tell you that these petty disagreements are a mask for deeper issues in the marriage. Namely, the conviction on the part of both partners that they have married someone with a vastly inferior intellect. Let’s face it, if they actually thought their partner was the smarter one, why would they bother to argue?
