Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage And/or Sex Read Free Page A

this is also a time when you must try to be practical. You must bear in mind that no matter how much you love each other now, somewhere down the road you will inevitably have traditional “lovers’ quarrels” wherein one of you will hurl all of the other one’s possessions out the window and possibly kill an innocent pedestrian. This is why most experts recommend that you get a ground-floor apartment furnished mainly with lightweight, easy-to-hurl Tupperware.

The Most Serious Issue Likely to Come between a Man and a Woman Living Together
    (WARNING: Those of you who detest blatant and unfair but nonetheless generally true sexual stereotypes should leave the room at this time.)
    Okay. The major issue facing a man and a woman who decide to live together is: Dirt. I am serious. Men and women do not feel the same way about dirt at all. Men and women don’t even see dirt the same way. Women, for some hormonal reason, can see individual dirt molecules, whereas men tend not to notice them until they join together into clumps large enough to support commercial agriculture. There are exceptions, but over 85 percent of all males are legally classifiable as Cleaning Impaired.
    This can lead to serious problems in a relationship. Let’s say a couple has decided to divide up the housework absolutely even-steven. Now when it’s the woman’s turn to clean, say, the bathroom, she will go in there and actually clean it. The man, on the other hand, when it’s his turn, will look around, and, because he is incapable of seeing the dirt, will figure nothing major is called for, so he’ll maybe flush the toilet and let it go at that. Then the woman will say: “Why didn’t you clean the bathroom? It’s filthy!” And the man, whose concept of “filthy” comes from the men’s rooms in bars, where you frequently see bacteria the size of cocker spaniels frisking around, will have no idea what she’s talking about.
    So what happens in most relationships is, the man learns to go through the motions of cleaning. Ask him to clean a room, and he’ll squirt Windex around seemingly at random, then run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet, totally oblivious to the question of whether or not it’s picking up any dirt.
    I have a writer friend, Clint Collins, who once proposed that, as a quick “touch-up” measure, you could cut a piece of two-by-four the same width as the vacuum cleaner and drag it across the carpet to produce those little parallel tracks, which as far as Clint could tell were the major result of vacuuming. (Clint was also unaware for the first 10 or 15 years of his marriage that vacuum cleaners had little bags in them; he speculated that the dirt went through the electrical cord and into the wall.)
    What this means is that, if your live-together relationship is going to work, both of you must be sensitive to the special needs of the Cleaning Impaired. Unfortunately for you women, this means you must spend many hours patiently going over basic cleaning concepts that may seem simple and obvious to you, but will be baffling mysteries to the Cleaning Impaired person, such as:
    1. Where clean dishes actually come from.
    2. What you can do with used pizza boxes besides stack them in the corner of the living room for upwards of two years.
    3. How some people do more in the way of cleaning the bedroom than simply spray a few blasts of Right Guard deodorant on the two-foot-high mound of unlaundered jockey shorts.
    And so on. The best way to avoid conflict is if you make up lists that state clearly what cleaning chores each of you will be responsible for. At first, the Cleaning Impaired person’s list should be fairly modest:
    NORMAL PERSON’S WEEKLY CHORE LIST
    1. Clean kitchen.
    2. Clean bathroom.
    3. Clean entire rest of domicile.
    CLEANING IMPAIRED PERSON’S WEEKLY CHORE LIST
    1. Don’t get peanut butter on sheets.
    Speaking of peanut butter, another area where a first-time live-together couple can run into