Marriage Rules! E-Book

Ryan O'Quinn

• Herausgeber: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 144

Beschreibung

Getting Married? Newlyweds? Been Married for 50 years? Whether you are currently in the throes of wedded bliss or you aspire to walk the aisle one day, this book will give you a hilarious perspective to navigate the ups-and-downs and sometimes sideways roller coaster ride we call marriage.  You start with a fairytale idea of what marriage will be like; then reality and life happens… and all that entails. By finding the humor in everyday situations, comedian Ryan O'Quinn has discovered the secret to happily ever after. Only a finely honed sense of humor can help you survive the insanity of the M word! Regardless of your station, you can count on these 150 "rules" of marriage happening to you. Such as: - You will learn to clap loudly for your spouse. - Love scenes in the movies are not realistic! - Men want to be on a throne, women want to be on a pedestal… and they both want alone time on the toilet. - You will need to date your spouse. - Marriage is a contract for someone else to call you out on your junk. - This is not the person you married...and that is okay. - Husbands will lie about golf and dinners.

Leseprobe

BroadStreet Publishing Group LLC

Racine, WI 53403

Broadstreetpublishing.com

Marriage Rules!

The Hilarious Handbook for Surviving Marriage

© 2015 Ryan O’Quinn

ISBN 978-1-4245-5092-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4245-5093-7 (e-book)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Illustrations by Paul Manchester | www.wilwhimsey.com

Interior design by Chris Garborg | www.garborgdesign.com

Editorial services by Michelle Winger | www.literallyprecise.com

Printed in China.

15 16 17 18 19 20      5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

Newlyweds

Venus vs. Mars

Communication

Kids

Money

Bedroom

Better Half

Home

My Bad

Happily Ever After

Quick Reference Guide

An open love letter to my wife

Dear Heather,

As you well know, I am probably the least likely person on the planet to write a book about marriage. As I type this, we have been married for almost fourteen years, and I’m pretty sure I mess something up every single day. Maybe that is exactly why people need to read this book as a compendium of what not to do! Somehow, some way through many years of marriage, and years of dating before that, you still manage to overlook my imperfections and stick with me for better or worse.

When I first met you, I was blown away by your beauty and didn’t expect I had a chance, but I mustered up the courage to ask you out anyway. I quickly learned that the beauty you possess on the inside was the most attractive thing about you. And then you became my best friend. I couldn’t imagine a better match for me, and with you I can tackle anything life throws my way. There are so many things you have taught me. I am by far a better man for knowing you. One of the greatest things I have learned is to not take myself too seriously.

Marriage is the family you get to choose, and becoming a parent alongside you has been the greatest joy of my life. In the grand scheme of things, we are just getting started. I look forward to laughing out loud with you every day for the rest of my life. Thanks for all you have given to me: your heart, your wisdom, our silly kids. I dedicate this book to you with hopes that others may learn a little bit along the way and see the comedy in it all!

Ryan

Newlyweds

Rule #1

How you fed each other the wedding cake says a lot about your marriage.

There are a number of ridiculous traditions at a wedding. Some can be explained, and others just don’t make any sense at all. What caused people to carry these strange traditions through the years is unknown. Everyone knows about finding something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. That one is sweet and fun for the bride. She often gets those things from a relative or bridesmaids. It’s a tradition that has been passed down from an old English rhyme in the late nineteenth century and is a sweet symbolic gesture.

There are other traditions that have crept into our culture and, for better or for worse, you will find them at every single wedding reception—the chicken dance, the YMCA song, tossing the bouquet, and the infamous cake feeding.

Sources say the cake feeding tradition between the bride and groom models courtship behavior where animals feed each other tiny morsels of food. That is just weird. Still others say it is held over from when the tradition was tiny wheat cakes baked by the Romans to symbolize fertility and prosperity. Apparently this somehow morphed into throwing the bread cakes at the bride and groom (similar to rice or birdseed today), and that oddly and miraculously morphed into sprinkling the breadcrumbs over the bride’s head. Then the bride would shove wheat cakes into the groom’s mouth—literally telling him to be more fertile! This is not exactly what I want to think about the next time I see this at a reception, but now you know and you have to think about it too.

Some trustworthy sources say this little ritual of cake feeding is symbolic of how the couple will care for one another for the rest of their lives. This one carries a little more weight with me. Will the husband put a dab on her nose and kiss it off, thereby garnering a collective, “Aww” from a few hundred people? Will she tease him with a bite and then finally let him have a small taste after some prompting from the crowd? OR will it go something like what happened at my wedding?

When it came time for cake cutting at our reception, I carefully contemplated the actions I was about to take and the impact they would have on my beautiful new bride. After all, she had spent hours picking out her dress, getting her hair done, and going through whatever rigorous makeup ritual brides go through on their wedding day. I wasn’t about to ruin it by smearing vanilla icing all over God’s (and Maybelline’s) perfect creation. So I took the perfect amount of delicious cake on my fork to fit her perfect mouth and placed it gently in front of her face so the paparazzi relatives could do their thing. She ate a small bite right on cue.

Then came her turn. I should have known I was in trouble when she picked up the entire piece of cake in her bare hand. She lifted it to my lips, and as some of the cake bounced off my tonsils, her hand continued up my face, plunging cake deep into my nostrils. This brought a roar of laughter and an eruption of applause from the crowd who somehow expected exactly this at our wedding.

I feel like this was symbolic. Not necessarily that I am sweet and she is evil, but more that we love to have fun. We love to make other people laugh, and we rarely take ourselves too seriously. We have been figuratively smearing cake on each other’s faces for years and hope to pass on to our kids the same sense of humor and love of life that we share.

Rule #2

You will realize how selfish you really are.

It would be good if there were such a thing as the selfishness police; unfortunately, there is no agency that will give a citation when we are being selfish. I would be incarcerated most of the time if that were the case. Instead, we depend on our spouse to let us know when we are being egotistical, self-absorbed human beings.

Humans are selfish by nature. Don’t believe me? Give a kid a toy or a piece of candy. In most cases, their first thought is not to find someone to share it with. Not always, but generally, we are programmed to innately look out for #1. By definition, marriage is the exact opposite. We are to look out for and care for someone else. We make promises before God and our friends to actually put the well-being of someone else before our own. When you get married, it will likely be a whole new way of disruptive thinking that rebuts the very nature of life as you knew it prior to the wedding day.

I know you will find this shocking, but even I (the extremely witty, brilliant, and humble author of a book on marriage) am not as aware in this department as I should be. A few weeks ago, my wife was busy making lunch for the kids. I walked into the kitchen and she handed me a plate of little grilled cheese sandwiches. As I finished the last bite of warm, gooey, cheesy deliciousness, my wife threw her hands up in an “I give up” gesture and said, “That was for the kids!” Oops.

Unfortunately there is no magic that happens at the exact moment the officiant pronounces you husband and wife. It would be great if there were a supernatural spell that occurred and poof, you became less selfish and started putting the feelings of your spouse first. But alas, no such luck.

We can count on our spouse to police us, but it would be better if we all started policing ourselves. Try to catch yourself being selfish. Apologize, correct it, and train yourself to think about your spouse’s needs before your own on a regular basis. They say (whoever they are) that it only takes twenty-one days to form a new habit, so maybe we should all give it a try. After all, there is nothing but a healthy marriage to gain.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go hide that last root beer in the back of the fridge so my wife and kids don’t grab it before I do.

Rule #3

Establish control.

There are many struggles couples are faced with throughout marriage. Some are over money, religion, parenting, intimacy, health, and the list goes on. But there is a specific type of power struggle that has affected more marriages than perhaps any other kind of struggle. It is a serious issue that causes strife between husbands and wives, and studies show that it seldom gets resolved. This ongoing conflict is over domination of the remote control.

The power that this tiny device wields is far more complicated than simply flipping channels. If your spouse gets to the remote before you do, your entire evening could consist of rapid channel flipping, stopping on the last five minutes of a movie thereby spoiling the end and rendering it pointless to watch later, failure to fast-forward through commercials, or worst of all, landing on reality programming.

The other night, somehow my wife was able to slip past me, brush her teeth, put on her PJs and snag the remote control before I even knew what was happening. By the time I caught up to her, she had already crash-landed on some reality show about botched plastic surgery and she was transfixed. The next thing I knew, I was frozen in my tracks, unable to turn away until I saw the reveal of the dance teacher’s (near unrepairable and previously botched) new nose. I can never get those minutes back and who knows how long it will be until I can close my eyes without seeing the image of skin being sliced and stretched in unnatural ways.

As you bare your TV-watching soul to your mate, you may discover that a Seinfeld addict may not always get along with the Star Trek nerd. Is Game of Thrones on your DVR or are you strictly a Sportscenter kind of fan? The objective is to find shows that fall into neutral territory. Often you can find common ground in a procedural, sitcom, or late night talk show. This type of compromise, however, is not without its drama.

In our house, it is not uncommon for me to fall asleep part way through one of our “couple” shows, and then my wife is faced with the moral dilemma of finishing the episode without me or pausing the show and waiting for the next opportunity to finish it together as a couple. If you choose to continue on your own, at least have the courtesy to scrub the DVR back to the point where your spouse fell asleep.

I’m not exactly sure what couples fought over prior to the invention of the remote control. Probably which vaudeville act to see, whose public execution to attend, or who was going to draw a wooly mammoth on the cave wall. I hope that one day the two sides can reach an amicable agreement and end the decades-long battle over the coveted clicker.

Rule #4

Don’t be surprised by bad habits.

By the time you reach the “walk the aisle” stage, you hopefully know a bit about each other. But you probably don’t know the whole story. Spoiler alert: there will be bad habits. Let’s just get that out of the way right up front. The perfect angel that is the woman of your dreams will actually go to the bathroom, and it won’t be pretty. The hunky guy that swept you off your feet will definitely leave the toilet seat up, won’t shave every day, will probably get chubby, will sprout long hairs out of his ears… and do much worse things that I won’t mention in a sweet little gift book.

Prepare yourself in advance for every detail of your special spouse to not be 100% perfect. You know this in your mind of course, but trust me, there will be times when you will be flat out surprised. Put that filter in place and don’t act too shocked when he or she rattles the windows with a loud burp at the dinner table.

Other things to expect are open-mouth snoring, naval lint extraction, teeth grinding, hogging the covers, clipping toenails while on the potty, and picking teeth in public with a business card. (Hand raised.) My wife called me out on that last one a few weeks ago at the local Japanese restaurant. I thought it was resourceful, but she was not impressed.

Don’t be discouraged from openly talking about what annoys the stuffing out of you. Be honest and mature with discussions—unless of course your spouse is just being disgusting; then you have every right to fight fire with fire. The best way to break an undesirable pattern is by holding up a mirror. You’ll probably be able to fix a few bad habits as time goes on, but most importantly, it’s about accepting each other the way you are.

Rule #5

There will be sickness, health, and some very yucky stuff.

There is a line in traditional marriage vows that says “in sickness and in health.” Those five very important words are not to be taken lightly. There isn’t time to go into great detail during the ceremony about what that really means, and let’s face it, we’re a lot more excited to get to the “to have and to hold” part. What isn’t explained is sometimes there are going to be downright disgusting things that happen at some point in your marriage.

I am not so good with such things. To say I have a weak stomach is a drastic understatement. If a strong stomach is made out of iron, then mine is made of paper. When it comes to gagging and puking, I have a hairline trigger. It sounds better to say I’m a sympathetic puker, so I am going to go with that. It makes me sound more genteel somehow. Yes, that’s it, I’m a sympathetic puker. I first discovered this limitation of mine at a young age.

One day, my best friend Jon and I had school off due to a snow day. My mom came home from her accounting office next door to make us chicken noodle soup for lunch as we rested between playing in the snow sessions. I don’t remember the particulars, but I said something at the lunch table that made Jon laugh. As he laughed, he choked. As that happened, he realized that he was most certainly going to regurgitate the delicious chicken noodle soup and it was going to happen immediately. To his credit he made a beeline down the hallway to the bathroom. Of course, like any curious sixth grade boy, I was hot on his trail keeping pace a half-second behind. Jon made it as far as the bathtub and the puking started. As I watched the first noodles shoot out of his nose, an involuntary reaction started from within and I too leaned over the tub, sympathetically joining in on the disgusting upchuck party, unable to help my friend.

As an adult I managed to redeem myself slightly during the first year of marriage. Heather had a really bad bout of the stomach flu and had to be taken to the hospital. I remember wanting to help her and was determined to stay strong. I also wanted to keep our car puke-free when I drove her to the hospital, so I tied a little baggy to her shirt so she could just turn her head to the side and wretch into it. The plan backfired. It turned out there was a hole in the bag. As I later scrubbed the chunky puke out of my floorboard, I thought back to those noodles coming out of Jon’s nose, dry heaved once, and was proud of how far I’d come.

Venus vs. Mars

Rule #6

You will compromise on the important things… like old tee shirts.