My wife is a smart lady. You could even say she is a genius. Sure, she still tries to put five pints of fluid into a two-quart cup. But, regardless of her inability to understand spatial relationships, she truly is quite intelligent.
Even people with an IQ of 140 struggle with the complex conversions of the English system, as opposed to simpler base 10 metric system. Pints or liters, either way you measure stuff, my wife is smart. She is so smart in fact that she has found a way to have someone else do all of life’s dirty work for her. That someone else is me, of course. Spider assassinations, garbage compacting, toilet unplugging, these are just some of the undesirable jobs that she doesn’t concern herself with. She doesn’t need to get her hands dirty; that is why she has me around.
I do all the heavy lifting around the house. Literally, it is my job to lift stuff, like the couch, so we can search for lost crochet hooks and earrings. If my only reason for existence in the household is to give her a couple kids and lift furniture, I could be replaced by a simple forklift and a test tube filled with semen. My wife doesn’t have a use for me other than being a sperm donor and cleaning the rain gutters.
Instead of hanging out with me—when there are no chores to be done—she would rather watch her favorite show, Bones, on television with the tall, dark, and handsome David Boreanaz. I doubt this Boreanaz guy even knows how to clean rain gutters. Luckily for me, he’s currently unavailable to do the crappy jobs at our house, so my wife keeps me around.
Even though she doesn’t do any of the dirty jobs at our house, she actually does have a job. Her “job” is to tell me what to do. As I lift heavy stuff and strain my back, my wife “delegates” how I should be doing the heavy lifting. Inevitably, about the moment I can no longer handle the strain of the heavy furniture I’m holding, she will change her mind about where it should go and delay me putting it down. Eventually she will give my poor old tired back a break and let me set the furniture down in its “new” resting place. I have found that in most cases the object goes back to where it was originally located, making me wonder why I lifted the piece of furniture in the first place.
There is no logic behind the annual furniture shuffle, other than providing income to my chiropractor. I can’t assume to understand the complex female mind. But I’m guessing it works something like this: My wife, whom I love, sees something that she wants taken care of but can’t bother with the menial labor. She probably thinks to herself, “I could clean up the dust-covered junk that has fallen behind the refrigerator, or I’ll just convince my idiot man-child husband that something important of his fell back there. Then he will move the refrigerator and clean it up.” Easy peasy.
I come home from work, fat, dumb and happy, ignorant to the fact that I am about to be manipulated by the very woman I have sworn to spend the rest of my life with, and move furniture around for no apparent reason. My wife will say something like, “Some stuff fell behind the refrigerator. I think one of the things may have been a memory card from the digital camera. You know, the one you used to take those dumb pictures of your car with the sunset? Could you move the fridge and get it? Oh, and while you’re back there, you might as well dust up all of that stuff.”
In desperation to find the epic sunset shots of my car, I will move the fridge, clean up the mess, and wonder why I don’t see a memory card. Then, coincidentally, when the job is done, she will magically find the card somewhere else. Suckered again. This is why I consider my wife a genius. She is a genius of marketing. She sells me on all sorts of jobs I don’t want to do—and I always do them eventually. She could sell snow cones to Eskimos, sand to the Iranians, and ice water to penguins—and penguins don’t even have currency.
You see, I used to be confused. I assumed that if my wife was married to me and settled on being stuck spending a lifetime dealing with me, then she probably wasn’t too bright. Obviously she made some questionable choices in life. But then I realized she has done such a great job convincing me she’s the victim of our love that I have been brainwashed to think I need to be especially nice to her. How did this happen? She’s a marketing genius, that’s how.
I realized how badly I have been under her voodoo marketing powers the other day when I had what alcoholics call “a moment of clarity.” It was in the early evening after I had spent most of the day on the garage floor changing the oil in her car. I came into the house and I was sitting on the couch rubbing her feet while she laughed at David Boreanaz’s dry humor on television. I asked her, during a commercial, of course, so as not to interrupt her “David time,” if I could get her anything. Without missing a beat she told me she could use a soda and some aspirin because she had a headache. Then it hit me: A headache? Uh oh, I was rubbing those feet for nothing.
Last Sunday night Rob’s wife convinced him that he should go out to buy her ice cream because she had a few hard days at work telling him what to do all weekend.
This article appears in Feb 2-9, 2012.