If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - Can We Talk? Obviously Not
CHAPTER TWO - Sleep in Heavenly Peace, My Ass
CHAPTER THREE - “I Was Watching That!”:Life with the Cable Guy
CHAPTER FOUR - What’s Cooking? (I’ m Gonna Go Out on a Limb and Say Me)
CHAPTER FIVE - Domestic Bliss and Other Big Fat Lies
CHAPTER SIX - Gee, Honey. Are You Sick? I Never Would Have Guessed.
CHAPTER SEVEN - The View from the Passenger Seat . . . Sucks
CHAPTER EIGHT - Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?
CHAPTER NINE - It’ s Only Money, Honey
CHAPTER TEN - It’s My Potty and I’ll Cry If I Want To
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Should We Just Skip the $200 Dinner and Duke It Out at Home?
CHAPTER TWELVE - It’s the Thought That Counts (but Thanks for the Blender!)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - If It’ s Broken . . . Please God, Don’t Fix It
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Friends and Family: not Just a Phone Plan
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - If You Build It, There Will Be Many, Many Arguments
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Are You In or Are You Out?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Vacation: All I Ever Wanted
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - He Can’t Help It, He’s a Guy
CHAPTER NINETEEN - You’re Merely the Sperm Donor, Dear
CHAPTER TWENTY - See? It Really Could Be Worse
AFTERWORD
RAVES FOR
If It Was Easy,
They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing
a Honeymoon
“If Chelsea Handler and Dr. Phil had a love child, it would be Jenna McCarthy, whose fabulous If It Was Easy, They’ d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon is at once profane, irreverent, warm, and wise. This is the best kind of relationship advice book, one written by someone who is smart enough to follow and smart-ass enough to make you savor the journey. Brilliant!”
—Celia Rivenbark, bestselling author of
You Can’t Drink All Day If You Don’t Start in the Morning
“Hilarious, smart, and utterly addicting. Watch out, Nora Ephron.”
—Valerie Frankel, author of Thin Is the New Happy
“Every relationship is like being fit, healthy, and happy—you have to work at it. Jenna reminds us of this with wit, insight, and self-deprecating humor. At the end of the day, you’ll recognize yourself in these pages and applaud her honesty.”
—Lucy Danziger, editor-in-chief of Self magazine and coauthor of
The Nine Rooms of Happiness
“An uproariously funny, deliciously satisfying, and completely accurate take on wedded bliss.”
—Tracy Beckerman, syndicated humor columnist and author of Rebel without a Minivan
“When Jenna McCarthy turns her wicked wit to the, ahem, challenges of modern-day marriage, hilarity ensues. Anyone still in love with the oaf they married will find a lot to love here.”
—Julie Tilsner,
author of 29 and Counting: A Chick’s Guide to Turning 30
“This should be required reading for all brides. No, make that required reading for any woman who has been snookered into believing that finding and marrying the right person will somehow catapult her into a fairy tale—complete with a snorting horse, castle, and prince.... An enlightening tour of the true realities of marriage, [McCarthy] amazingly pulls off the impossible: She helps us to fall in love with our farting, nose-picking, burping, sex-obsessed doofus husbands all over again.”
—Alisa Bowman, author of Project: Happily Ever After
The Parent Trip
“Clever and irreverent.”
—Janet Evanovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Wildly funny, intimate, and ever-so-honest. Trust me, you won’t want this trip to end.”
—Cheryl Richardson, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Extreme Self-Care
“Funny, smart, and utterly original. Jenna McCarthy is the new Erma Bombeck.”
—Alexis Martin Neely, bestselling author of Wear Clean Underwear!
“You can’t make this stuff up! . . . [B]rilliantly captures the hilarious insanity of motherhood and family. Whether you have little ones running around or just got pregnant, this book is for you.”
—Gabby Reece, supermodel, volleyball phenom, and mom
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Copyright © 2011 by Jenna McCarthy.
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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCarthy, Jenna.
If it was easy, they’d call the whole damn thing a honeymoon : living with and loving the tv-addicted, sex-obsessed, not-so-handy man you married / Jenna McCarthy.—Berkley trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54500-3
1. Marriage—Humor. I. Title.
PN6231.M3M4 2011
818’.607—dc22
2011011581
http://us.penguingroup.com
To Joe,
for loving me anyway
INTRODUCTION
’Til Death Do Us Part
Is a Really Long Time
All marriages are happy.
It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.
• RAYMOND HULL •
This book was born of something from which few good things (besides hot, furious makeup sex) ever come: a nasty, namecalling, knock-down, drag-out brawl with my husband. After we exchanged some particularly ugly insults and
I lobbed a large cup of ice at his head, we did what the pros tell you never, ever to do (besides lob large cups of ice at your partner’s head): We went to bed angry at each other. Pissed off, if we’re being totally honest here. When we woke up in the morning, I looked at the man I’ve spent thirteen years assuming I will purchase adjacent cemetery plots with and I thought:
I hate you.
No, that’s a lie. That’s not what I really thought. What I really thought was:
I fucking hate you.
Now, as husbands go, I have to admit I did all right. Joe is unquestionably handsome, doesn’t leave ragged toenail clippings scattered about the house, and has never once, in nearly five thousand days of togetherness, left the toilet seat up. He also knows his way around a grill, occasionally makes the bed (if you can call straightening the duvet and tossing some pillows in the general vicinity of the headboard “making the bed”), and is not addicted to porn, painkillers, or crystal meth. He’s seen me naked on numerous occasions and still wants to have sex with me. All in all, he’s a catch by pretty much anyone’s standards.
And yet he still can make me madder than a bag of rabid badgers. From the ill-timed get-to-the-point-already hand gesture in the middle of a riveting play-by-play of my chat with the UPS guy to his incessant references to, fantasies about, and demands for sex, the guy seems hell-bent on personally driving me to the nuthouse. Sometimes, these things merely bug me; other times they are nearly enough to make me want to pack up and leave him. But I haven’t and I won’t, and there are three particularly compelling reasons for this:
1. He’s a guy, and all guys are basically the same, and since I really don’t want to die alone, if I got rid of him I’d just be trading in his sometimes-infuriating tics for someone else’s, and I’m too old and tired to even consider that.
2. He puts up with all of my shit. (This really should not be underestimated.)
3. I love him.
Like I said, my husband is a decent guy. No, he’s a great guy. But living with the same person day in and day out, for years on end, is no confetti-dusted cakewalk. I once saw a comedienne slay an entire audience with this line: “When I said ’til death do us part, I had no idea it was going to take this long.” Clearly she was joking. Mostly.
This book originally was going to be a blog post, maybe a magazine article. After the ice-to-the-temple incident blew over and I returned to my formerly happily married state, I posted a few queries—in newsletters, on my Facebook wall, around Twitter, on my blog—with a simple question: “What does your husband—whom you still love—do that drives you nuts?” The idea was to tease out precisely the sort of irritating behaviors that women who consider themselves “happily married” are indeed willing to live with. The replies were astonishing not only in their content and volume, but most of all for the utterly venomous tone these smart, funny, remarkably sane women used to describe their significant others’ reasonably benign traits. “He eats ice cream every single night with the tiniest spoon in the house,” lamented one. “Over and over and over and over—a kazillion fucking times a night—I have to listen to that spoon hitting the side of the bowl. He says he’s been eating ice cream that way for forty-five years and isn’t going to change. And yes, I love him.”
These gals weren’t talking about their lying, cheating exes or the buffoons that beat them; they were talking about the men they live with and continue to love. Their gripes ranged from merely amusing (“He only ever half-finishes a bar of soap!”) to downright asinine (nipple flicking? Really?), and every last one made me feel infinitely better about my own enchanting Neanderthal. Nothing like peering over the neighbors’ fences and catching a glimpse of their withered, pathetic excuse for a lawn to remind us all that the grass isn’t always greener.
Here’s the funny part, though: The women who contacted me weren’t exactly tripping over themselves to confess their own annoying habits or less-than-desirable qualities. (Granted, I didn’t ask. And to the helpful husbands who e-mailed offering to do it for them? Thanks for sharing! Now go write your own goddamned book.) Because we’re perfect, right? Okay, not perfect exactly, but pretty damned close. I mean, relative to the men we married at least, and certainly according to our friends and a majority of the literature available on the subject. Wise and witty author Charles Orlando wrote a wonderful book with one of the best titles in all of literary history: The Problem with Women . . . Is Men. (What’s not to love, right? Blame the guys! Obviously it’s all their fault!) It really is a moving manifesto, filled with fun facts and packed with appalling confessions from the boorish oafs we can’t help but love, as well as some not-very-gentle reminders—and these are coming from a guy, mind you—that it would behoove the male population on the whole to try to be a tiny bit less boorish from time to time. With all due respect to Charles, who may very well be on to something, the author of this book would like to add that the other problem with women . . . is women.
Honestly, we’re never happy, are we? We tell our husbands we want them to surprise us with hidden love notes, flowers for no special reason, romantic dinner reservations, big honking diamonds. We want them to pick up after themselves without having to nag them to do it. We want them to turn off the goddamned TV and pay attention to us as we regale them with details of our day. (“And then the cashier said, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re out of the low-fat maple-nut scones,’ so I wound up having to get a lemon poppy, even though those have like eight billion calories, and on top of feeling guilty about that I’ve been worried all day that I’ve got a poppy seed stuck in my teeth. Hey, do I? What do you mean, ‘Do I what?’ Have a poppy seed stuck in my teeth!!!”) We want them to not roll their eyes when we are on the phone and to promise us in writing that they would cook veggies for the kids every single day if we died tomorrow. We want them to lay off the gas pedal, roll up the windows, turn down the air-conditioning, fix the leaky faucet, notice our new highlights but not ask how much they cost, spend more, save more, spot the bag of moldy, festering lettuce in the crisper drawer and then throw it away, and once—just one bloody time—ask for fucking directions.
These things would indeed make us happy, wouldn’t they? Not even all of them, maybe two or three. Or one. If he did just one, we’d be content. Right? Well actually, probably not. Because fundamentally—and bear with me as I’m going to tiptoe right out on a limb here—the marital minutiae we fight about has nothing whatsoever to do with money or messed-up hair or all of the rotting produce on the planet. We’re not really that bothered by the stinky socks on top of the hamper lid or the sound of back-to-back episodes of Throwdown Fishing constantly droning in the background of our lives. If these insults were perpetrated by, say, the best friend we hadn’t seen in a year or a beloved, dying relative, we’d either not notice them in the first place or at least find a way to overlook them. The problem isn’t him, and it’s not you. The problem is attempting to live in excruciating proximity with another full-size person who can’t read your mind and also isn’t a carbon copy of you.
Think about it: When you were dating—and going home at night to your respective living spaces—there wasn’t all that much to argue about. When you did have the rare disagreement, you’d go all Hollywood and sigh happily and think “He completes me,” and clearly it was all that damned Renée Zellweger’s fault. But when couples try to share one electric bill, they turn into a pair of Japanese fighting fish, those colorful, carnival-prize favorites that come one to a bowl for a simple reason: If you put two in there, they will immediately try to rip each other’s gills off.
If you ever had a roommate, you’re familiar with the basic cohabitation timeline. It starts out all hopeful promise, the two of you deciding amicably who will park where and who will pay what and shopping for a new shower curtain together at Target. She insists you take the bigger bedroom since you found the place; you accept since you were gracious enough to grant her boyfriend’s pit bull regular visitation rights. You’re neater and more courteous than you
have ever been in your life, because you know how hard it is to find a good roommate. You wait patiently as her laundry festers in the washing machine for three days because, really, it’s not worth arguing about or anything. She drinks your last beer, but you ate her last bagel so it all seems fair enough. You spend weeks trying to come up with a way to broach the subject of her luxurious twice-daily hour-long showers, which obviously aren’t fair seeing as you have to pay half of the water bill. After a while you notice—or is it a new thing?—that she has this irritating habit of not closing the bathroom door when she brushes her teeth. The sound rather reminds you of a room full of wailing babies who are also scraping their tiny fingernails across a giant blackboard while they vomit, so you gently close the door for her, hoping she’ll take the hint. She doesn’t. One day she discovers P90X, and from that point forward she insists on doing her workouts every bloody night when you’ d very much like to be watching Glee. You smile as you seethe and start socking away dough to buy your own goddamned TV, which you will keep in your bedroom, the bedroom you may never leave again. Then one day she comes home drunk and accidentally pees in your hamper, or uses the rent money you gave her to buy a pair of designer boots, or invites a bunch of her obnoxious friends over on the very night you told her you were planning to wax your mustache, and it occurs to you that you don’t have to live like this. From this point, you wage many a minor battle before the final war, the one that will determine which one of you is going to borrow the van and hock your futon.