Every year it seems like thousands of people come to me for advice on how to improve their love life. Most people call me the Love Doctor (except for my wife, who usually calls me by her pet name, “you bastard”).
For years people the world over have sought my advice as a foremost authority on matters of the heart. Perhaps it’s because I’m half-German. Or maybe because I got an A- in French in high school –the language of love. I don’t actually have any formalized training in this arena. And I still don’t quite understand position #27 of the Kama Sutra.
My love advice credentials stem from a series of devastating, soul-crushing, failed romances in my formative youth, all of which ended catastrophically. (To this day, I still can’t look at a wrist corsage without suffering traumatic flashbacks.)
February 14th is Valentine’s Day, officially recognized by Hallmark as the one day each year men are expected to demonstrate their love for their wife by buying a sappy card with flowers and chirping birds, inside of which is written a banal poem with hackneyed rhymes like “you’re my wife” and “rest of my life”. Oh, and don’t forget the heart-shaped box of chocolates. Here’s a useful tip: Make sure you leave at least 5 chocolates for your wife – I’d suggest the caramel-centered ones. You know how much she loves caramel. The other 364 days you guys can go back to not showering and channel-surfing between ESPN 1 and ESPN 2. Your job is done.
… is never to make any, of course. I mean, seriously. Just look at my track record over the past twenty years.
It’s January 2017 – a new year and another chance to wipe the slate clean and press the RESET button on all those failed commitments from the previous year. Every year, I revisit my New Year’s Resolutions from the previous year, not so much to analyze how many of them I kept, because of course I kept NONE of them. Rather, I look back to chronicle how many weeks it took before I had completely bailed out on my very last resolution.
Usually that date is approximately January 17. But then there was that one exceptional year – 2004. I made it all the way through February before completely giving up on all my resolutions, goals and dreams.
In looking back over my past New Year’s Resolutions, I’ve noticed an unsettling trend. Over time, the goals that I set kept getting increasingly ambitious. Meanwhile my results have hit a bit of a plateau… then slowly slipped off the edge of that plateau…. into the deep, dark, cavernous ravine of best intentions gone miserably awry. So this year, I’ve decided to set more reasonable goals in order to feel a sense of accomplishment. Let me explain with a few examples.
The following are a few of my typical New Year’s Resolutions from previous years:
Fitness and health: Lose 40 pounds before our July vacation. Build up to running ten miles. Use my Buns of Steel Ab Rocker machine, wear my Miracle Trim Vibrator Belt two hours a day, along with my Torso Tiger Sauna Suit I bought seven years ago but never wore once.
Nutrition and eating habits: Cut out eating anything pleasurable. Eat only steamed foods that are green and taste like dirt. Drink at least twenty 8-ounce glasses of water a day. Install a urinal in my car. (more…)
Don’t believe me? Then maybe you’ll believe a study which concluded that marriages where the women do all the housework while the men retreat to the parlor to smoke cigars, read the newspaper and discuss politics with other men in top hats are happier. Okay, so that study was based on focus groups of landed gentry horse farm owners in Greenwich, CT in 1879. But now a brand new study appears to validate those previous findings.
A recently released study by Norwegian researchers reports that the divorce rate among couples who share the housework equally is 50% higher than those where the woman does most of the housework. “The more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study titled Equality in the Home.
One conclusion emerges: Male Norwegian researchers apparently hate women. Another theory is that Norwegian men suck at doing chores. Still another theory is that lead researcher Thomas Hansen has a serious axe to grind over the fact his ex-wife, Ingebjørg, took him to the cleaners in their divorce. But that’s just my wife’s theory, and she’s never particularly cared for Norwegian men. (I’m talking to you, Sven Jorgensen.)
In my younger years, I used to jog five miles a day, do 50 sit-ups each morning, and row 15 miles to work. I was a nationally recognized fitness expert and author of the best seller, Earlobes of Steel. But now that I am older, I know better. At best, all that exercise will add less than 30 years to my life.
Not long ago, I tried out a fitness class called sports yoga. I stuck with it for what seemed like forever, by which I mean nearly four sessions. There was just one small problem: yoga was really hard. Try as I may, I could never get my left foot to wrap around the back of my neck. I never got the knack for how to balance my body off the ground using just my thumbs.
I even wrote about my nightmarish yoga experience previously in a post called The World’s Least Flexible Man – the 100% true retelling of my very first yoga class. So I hung up my yoga mat. I’m simply not that young anymore. My body is no longer capable of contorting like a human pretzel. And before you know it, I’ll be celebrating my 80th birthday. (Okay, technically not for another 23 years, but in geologic terms, that’s a blink of an eye).
[This week’s column is written by veteran sitcom writer/producer Miriam Trogdon. I am privileged to turn over the reins to Miriam this week. – TEJ]
I hear so many of my baby boomer friends complain that they never hear from their children.
– As soon as my son turned eighteen, he was out the door. I thought he might return for his belongings, but instead he got two jobs and bought everything new.
– My daughter graduated from college and stayed out east. She started working, got a loan for a car and asked to be taken off our phone plan.
And the most common sad tale:
– I thought for sure my kid would at least need us for health insurance, but no. He made sure his new employer had a great plan and then he moved out for good.
Sound familiar? Then you’re certainly not alone. Most boomers would give their eye teeth to have their semi-grown children living back in their homes, but alas, no matter how hard they try, they are unsuccessful. But not I. My husband and I are proud to reveal that our 24-year-old daughter moved back into our home after college and remains there four years later! And I want to share some of the ways we make sure this ideal situation doesn’t change.
A long time ago in a university far, far away, I attended law school and passed the bar exam. Which just goes to prove that an outstanding law school education is no guarantee your life will turn out the way your parents had hoped. But I digress. My point is that if there is one thing I learned from my legal training, it’s how to create oppressively one-sided legal agreements primarily designed to obfuscate.
Therefore, as a public service to all five of my readers, I urge you, before you enter into a long-term romantic relationship like marriage or going steady with Morgan from your 11th grade biology class, to be sure you and your very special someone have signed a legally enforceable Relationship Agreement that clearly spells out what each of you agree to do – and not do.
My point is, if we’re not careful, we’re liable to get sued for the least little hit and run car accident I failed to report. (Wait, did I just think that or did I just type that?) Sometimes our fairy tale romances take a few unexpected turns and what starts out as Happily Ever After may later descend into the War of the Roses.
