Tag Archives: husband whisperer

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The Husband Keeper

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Login and face the music like a man

Login and face the music like a man...husband-man

One Monday on Facebook,

Me, status update: Working for a living.

My Sister-in-Law, comment: yes but at least you get paid for it.

My Sister-in-Law is an out of work Yale MBA currently staying at home with two small children. They live on the west coast with its inherent expenses.

Me, comment: I’d rather get paid for my thoughts on golf, technology, and the future. Or for thoughtful, heroic roles in important epic feature films. Or for inventing something on the scale of post-it notes. By the way, your work is not gratis.

  • Cook- 2000/mo
  • Chauffeur -2000/mo
  • Nannyx2 2000/mo
  • Sugar baby 1500/mo
  • Consultant -1000/mo
  • Cleaner -1000/mo
  • Gardener -1000/mo
  • Tutors 2500/mo
  • Room/board for all these people 3500/mo

I can go on. This is with no benefits -health or retirement.

My Lovely Wife, J, comment: Do you want a bill?

Me, comment: Yikes!

Sister in Law, comment: kee kee…

Guess now that you’ve convinced me I’ve earned it, I can afford to redecorate, treat myself to those spa treatments, and toss in that Marc Jacobs handbag I’ve been eyeing. I think we may also need to add Psychologist, Nutritionist, Hair Stylist and Health Care Professional to the list…

Me, comment, exeunt: You go girl. It doesn’t apply to J because she employs me.

This exchange made me think, which is the first step into getting into big trouble. Why do do women want to get married and stay married? If you look at the job description, the housewife takes on at least 5 or 6 essential jobs, goes through great deal of risk to have children, and starts having incredible headaches after about five years of marriage.

If the husband was the first domesticated animal (link), the husband-keeper was the first pet owner. Some husbands are useful and clever like the sheep dogs in that Samsung commercial (link). Others are more like those giant dogs people get when they’re small and cute, but are horrified soon to find that the dog eats food bought in fifty pound sacks and lays turds bigger than theirs. They’re messy, they’re high maintenance, and they’re horny.

So what do you do about a problem dog? You “fix it.” And that is what the husband keeper does to the problem husband. The fix involves:

  1. limiting access to non-family activities with the guys (hunting, fishing, golfing!) that increases testosterone driven pack behavior
  2. letting them overeat (to make them less appealing to other women and by increasing body fat, increase relative estrogens and brooding behaviors while tamping down on demon testosterone)
  3. making them drive ungainly automobiles that have the profile of pregnant women (minivans, Priuses, Lexus anything). Through  about a million years of monogamy, the original savage brute is transformed into the domesticated house-husband.

Being married, I clearly benefit by not having to employ an army of assistants while getting a leg up on unmarried people with the help of my wife. I am presentable because of my wife. The unattached, middle-aged man has the shelf life of a can of anchovies -more than a few years, but not more than about five to twenty. Being unmarried, unattached, or sadly widowed in your sixties or later is a formula for showing up sallow, unshavened, unpressed, and unwashed -a homeless man. There is good data to show that longevity is associated with marriage. Most guys who run off on their wives and families immediately turn around and get married and start another family -what were they running from?

What benefit does a woman get? Pride in ownership? Someone to kill varmints? I have very little insight into this question. I did kill a mouse in my NY apartment in 2003 -last time I did something tangibly useful for my wife. It is shocking to me that we are nearing our 15th anniversary and I look at my wife and nothing has changed about her and us. And maybe this two-happy-bugs-preserved-in-amber-for-a-billions-years thing is it: it is not one person’s benefit or the other’s, but the sum of the whole. By getting married, we enter a time compression bubble where one year can feel like seven but fifteen can feel like one. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, I am hers and she is mine.

Now about that Porsche.

golf culture, golf philosophy, Naturalism , , 2 Comments

The Husband Whisperer and the Five Denials

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early_manThe first domesticated animal was not the dog. It was the husband. Early man was likely a wild creature, larger and stronger than the woman. It was with much difficulty and many generations of clubbed heads to domesticate the husband. Fact was, it was the more docile of the men that hung around and the exclusively paired off man-woman unit had a survival advantage in the savannah over the usual style of primate relations.

The aggression and anti-social tendencies were bred out of men, and husband whispering skills, the innate ones, increased. This allowed for monogamy to prevail and is the established pattern for our species. Our biology demands it -we don’t know when our women are fertile -their vulvae (vulvitae?) don’t turn huge with bright red and blue colors like the baboons’ do, so we are left to guess and protect the woman against couplings with other males while exclusively tending to her to insure that the offspring are ours. Thus the nuclear familial unit.

Cultures evolved over these biologic imperatives to determine how families, clans, and tribes, and nations interacted. But at the very core is the untamed man -the echoes of which we see in our 1-5 year old boys who we “socialize” to not hit people to get their way, to not pull hair, and to obey their mothers.

Of course, with our lifespans increased many multiples beyond the 15-20 years of early primates, we are paired for life which means that the relationship extends beyond the weaning and sending off of the offspring, beyond the reproductive age of the women, and well into our senescence. The result is that men have about 65-75 years to shunt testosterone driven urges into “civilized activities.” The challenge is how to survive in face of the five denials of the long march marriage.

Denial of Solitude -This comes early, with requests for conversation and chores after a long day of hunting and gathering. The cave man only wants to lumber down to the deepest reaches of the cave and draw on the walls, and carve sculpture out of deer bone (see below, image of his wife of 20 years).

Denial of Comfort -The inevitable onset of refractoriness of desire on the part of women and men results in a waning of connubial relations. The cave man only wants to lumber down to the deepest reaches of the cave and …well, you can only imagine.

Denial of Grooming -The hotness of the young she-primate that the caveman paired with ends soon after a few young ones come around. The hair is no longer bunched up with dung like she used to when they were courting. The clay face paint -not even there -just bits of yesterday’s mammoth clinging to her neck. It’s called letting yourself go, but you can see that the cave man had something to say about it (see carving below).

Denial of Male Fellowship -Despite this lack of desire on the part of the cave-woman, she is very suspicious of all the time that the cave man spends away with his hunting and gathering buddies, and assigns many chores -carrying out of animal carcasses, beating of the mammoth hides, and grooming her mother of ticks and fleas.

Denial of Porsche -self explanatory. Very sad. Poor cave man.

405px-wien_nhm_venus_von_willendorf2

Addendum: apparently this has data as someone just published this obvious fact. It relates to species self domesticating to arrive at more sociability. Link here.

Reference

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208607120