By Lavinia Plonka
This morning, my husband Ron, obviously possessed, decided to make a stab at some of yesterday’s dirty dishes. He got as far as a wooden bowl. He picked up the obviously Asian, delicately painted bowl gingerly. His expression was reminiscent of someone who, on a casual walk through woods, stumbles upon an alien’s ray gun. Now this bowl was given to us almost five years ago, one of two with matching chopsticks, by a houseguest. Ron looks at me, holding the bowl, “Where does this go?”
I stare at him. “What?” is my incredulous reply. I heard him. Of course I heard him. And I could simply say, “It goes on the display shelf next to its mate.” But I don’t. Sadist? Masochist? You be the judge.
He’s now intently contemplating the chopsticks. He now knows, just from the timbre and nuance of my, “What?” that he’s supposed to remember this bowl. He’s supposed to know its history, its place in the house. He knows that his question has triggered Irate Condescending Female Syndrome. His mind is feverishly trying to decide whether to surrender, or attempt to rescue himself. He digs himself deeper. “These chopsticks. They match the bowl, don’t they?” I can barely contain myself. “Yes, dear, they are a set.” He ponders the little notch and hole, cleverly placed there by some underpaid laborer so that the chopsticks rest neatly on the bowl. After a couple of minutes of fiddling, he has them together. He glances, slightly desperately, around the kitchen. He does not want to ask me again, so he opens the cabinet where we keep bowls and starts to quietly put the bowl with the chopsticks in.
“Not there!” I sputter, appalled at the resemblance of my voice to Daffy Duck’s. He jumps back.
“I know!” he protests. “I was uh, I was just rearranging the shelf in there, see?” He pulls out an ancient salad bowl, given to us as part of a set for our wedding forty one years ago. “I would never put this lovely, delicate, painted bowl in with these cracked, old things.”
Now I have to prioritize my ire – how dare he call those lovingly oiled cherished walnut bowls cracked old things? But that would distract me from the more immediate game – the “you never remember anything game.” So I let go of the righteous indignation and zero in for the kill. “Well now, I think that bowl goes with the other bowl. Remember, we got two?”
His eyes panic. “Two bowls? Of course, we have two bowls.” He is now whirling around the kitchen, bowl in hand, opening cabinets.
I stop him and lead him to the display shelves, placing the bowl next to its brother. “That’s where they’ve been. Remember? We decided they were too beautiful to hide away?”
He stares at them. “Display. They’re display items. Why would I think of getting food bowls from a display shelf?” Somehow we have staggered and flailed together for years of riotous adventures, several teetering brinks and countless arguments over how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Our atomic dance of positive, negative, yes and no, right and wrong, I did, you did not, has kept us spinning in complex patterns that would make John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Live dizzy. Friends often ask me how, in this age of broken marriages, Ron and I have managed to stay happily together. I sort of vaguely remember principles from physics that had to do with attraction, covalent bonds (or was that chemistry). My guess is that Ron’s and my cha cha through time, if shrunk to subatomic size would resemble exactly the atomic behavior of a bedroom slipper. Something cozy and familiar. An object that finds its way into unexpected places. (“Have you seen my bedroom slipper?” “Hey, how did this slipper get in the stove?”) But of course I have no way of proving that our relationship is a macrocosm of a slipper, so I concentrate on continuing to perfect my dance, and keep our relationship as cozy and unpredictable as I can.
Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned in trying to share my life with a human of the male persuasion. This is a very unscientific report, based on research with one subject. For a more exhaustive study on the vast gulf between male and female, don’t stop at books like Men are From Mars. There’s a vast literature written by professionals who are eager to help confuse us further with titles like: Why Men Don’t Have A Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes (Barbara and Allan Pease) or 9 Secrets to Bedroom Bliss: Exploring Sexual Archetypes to Reveal Your Lover’s Passions, and Discover What Turns You On (by not one, but two PHDs – James Herriot and Oona Mourier) Books are wonderful, but experience is a marvelous teacher if you just recognize the lesson.
The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, I saw a movie a while ago about a family that was so ordinary they were extraordinary. The husband so loved his wife’s cooking that no matter what she served he said, “My god! This is delicious! What is it?”
“Ice cream.”
“How’d you make it?”
“I bought it at the grocery store.”
“Brilliant!”
Ron does that. I can make a tuna melt and he dives in with such joy, you’d think it was chateaubriand.
Separate vacations. Nothing makes a man appreciate his wife more than sleeping on sheets he keeps forgetting to change for more than a week. Not to mention the fact that he’s lived on peanut butter and pizza all week.
Which brings me to: Let them eat pizza. I used to try to provide for Ron’s meals when I traveled. Once I tried to be the perfect housewife by making and labeling meals. When I returned, the refrigerator was full of science projects and there was a pile of pizza boxes in the recycling. “Why didn’t you eat the food in the refrigerator?” I asked.
“I couldn’t find anything,” was his reply. A friend of ours calls this MLD: Male Looking Disorder. “If it’s not a beer bottle, we can’t recognize it,” he explained. I’ve decided that Ron just needs to go back to his roots periodically: pizza, peanut butter, turkey sandwiches. Then when I return, he is ready for risotto.
Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is: nagging gets you nowhere. We’re talking chromosomes here. There is undoubtedly a genetic predisposition to deafness when the line, “When are you going to….” is repeated. Here is my secret weapon: start doing whatever it is you wanted your husband to do. Loudly. Need a picture on the wall? Start with “Honey, I need your hammer and the picture hanger hooky things.” Want a table refinished? “So . . . I bought this highly toxic furniture stripper stuff and I’m going to re-do the table on the living room carpet.” Need new track lighting? “Hey, honey, I’ve got this light panel open and I’m wondering about these loose wires hanging out of the wall?” They can’t stand it. You will get instant results, guaranteed.
Like any partner dance, there is one important rule: pay attention. Try not to step on each other’s toes. Remember that his moves mirror your own. Somewhere in the dance between negative and positive, electron and proton, yes and no, there is a nucleus, a center, and that is called love.
Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.
For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com