Behavior tips for my husband for the next 25 years of our married life

The minute I declared that I would write on this topic today, the day I completed 25 years of wedded bliss and wedded hiss (isn’t it interesting – bliss rhymes with hiss and kiss and wed rhymes with dead and bed), I got a ton of email from desperate women who want help in their married lives.

“Can you please write one for how a husband should behave for the first 25 years of our married life? It’ll come in really handy for me.”

Before I begin, I would like to say that my husband is a (mostly) good man with a (mostly) good heart and a (mostly) good head. His is a head that plays a mean, mean game of Scrabble even though he’s a computer scientist and you’d think he doesn’t have the rhythm on anything other than an algorithm. But this dude often slaps me with a bingo when I’m gloating over my own anemic wooden creations like “bill” and “sick”.

I found out recently–from Judith Thurman of the New Yorker–that computer scientists and mathematicians have a thing for Scrabble. Great. So now the only power I had vested in me, the power of the word, is now wrested from me. Thank you, Ms. Thurman. Of course, she then pacified me somewhat a little further in her story by disclosing that scrabble maniacs abound in India. If anyone of you thinks your vocabulary is earthshaking, please whimper and suck your thumb as you read about the characters in her story here.

Returning to the list that’s driving this blog entry, let me begin with the first thing my husband should not do for the next 25 years. He should not buy me a card at Safeway because that’s so ‘by the way’. Think about it, it’s a place where you get milk and butter mindlessly and it doesn’t have style as it would if he were to get me a card at Target or Kohl’s. On the other hand, Safeway is fine as long as the card isn’t on clearance. Then he must call me before he leaves work everyday because then I’ll be able to tell him what he must pick up on the way before he gets home. It’s the one thing the best husbands do, I hear. Then he should really “Talk” to me; I don’t want him to talk to me via Google Talk or Facebook. I want him to face me without an LCD screen between me and him. He should get rid of the phone from those UT Austin days that I’m hiding behind our fax machine. Is it too much to ask for an upgrade? He should really consider at last buying me a diamond necklace at Kadam & Kadam because, as you know, in our Tamilian culture others will wonder what he got me for our wedding anniversary and I won’t have an honest answer for them. And once in a while, he may want to interpret a “How about a getaway?” as a romantic getaway; I don’t understand, he seems to get away on his own every time I ask that question. Also, computer science logic works very well even in our kitchen and he should apply it everyday from now on. For example, “IF dishes pile up in the sink, THEN load the dishwasher OR ELSE wife will turn into Elvira, Mistress of the Dark”. See, there’s natural order and logic in the world that folks like Don Knuth and Dennis Ritchie applied in Computer Science to great success. He should also do his taxes every year by April 15th and not wait until October to do them or panic and go away on assignment so Price Waterhouse can do them. Also, no more asking “do you have the directions” whenever we go anywhere; twenty-five years of being asked the same question is showing up now in all my audiology reports. The California Ear Institute told me that there are some questions I just don’t hear anymore, whatever the frequency. So I’m considering getting these really fancy Oticon hearing aids to compensate for the hearing loss but I'm talking $3000 and insurance won’t cover it. So may be we’ll just live with my hearing loss even if it’s somewhat selective. There’s many more behavior tips coming up as I write but then he’ll yell at me later saying I told everyone he wears Hanes size 34 and Jockey (India brand) size 36 so I’m just going to be a good wife and shut up for once.