In Baby Magazine This February: Sheldon Cooper?

This article may be found in full, with wonderful illustrations by Natasha Bautista, in this month's Baby Magazine. Please buy the magazine, if only for Ms. Bautista's wonderful depiction of a parallel universe Sheldon Cooper manfully struggling through the travails of married life. Of course, non-nerds who are unfamiliar with the wonder that is The Big Bang Theory can instead revel in a celebration of the month of love the Baby Magazine way. Further details are available here.

I just thought, that so soon after Valentine's Day, this article, which was written right before Carmen Amparo was born, would be a great reminder for lovers both young and young at heart.

Enjoy!

When You Say Nothing at All: Can You Read my Mind?

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to riddle the wall with a hail of bullets.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“Well, I’m a panda”, he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Miscommunication among married couples may provide rich entertainment for modern situational comedies, or situations that call for light, sophisticated banter among friends and family. But as is often the case with humor, which relies upon a shift in perspective from seriousness to frivolity, it is just as easy for a seemingly humorous occasion to descend from frivolity to seriousness. What happens when misplaced “commas” reduce “loving pandas” to gun-toting wildlife?

It is important to understand that in marriage, many noble aspirations are wedded to the reality of equally plentiful emotional reactions. How does one make sense of dizzying cacophony which occurs when the ideal clashes with the actual? How does one, in the spirit of the musings of popular music philosophers Patti Austin and James Ingram, keep the music playing?

Here are some tips which could help married couples understand just how much they love one another:

When You Say Nothing at All, You Say Nothing at All.

The image of the taciturn, long-suffering, wise-cracking husband is a staple in most contemporary representations of the modern family. While this is often executed to exaggerated effect, there is some truth to this stereotype.

Many men feel that by performing their roles as providers, they have discharged their primary contribution to their families. As such, they would rather not deal with minutiae such as monitoring the activities of the children, doing the grocery, or maintaining a general level of cleanliness, that running a household demands.

Yet, it is precisely in that quagmire of hyperactive children, incomplete grocery lists and mite-infested rooms that a loving wife willingly loses herself in. At work, many professionals often talk about their work as a way of reinforcing professional and personal ties with one another. Doesn’t your spouse deserve the same courtesy?

Perhaps one should heed the advice offered by Captain Von Trapp in the movie “The Sound of Music”: nothing comes from nothing. Invest in your spouse. The interest, both in terms of a growing intimacy between spouses and a renewed appreciation for the many different forms such joyful sacrifices entail, is well worth the initial investment. If one is truly dedicated to making a marriage work, then one must begin by willing to share their daily experiences with one another.

Can You Read my Mind? Uh, No.

George Bernard Shaw once observed that “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” This is especially true of married couples. Due to the increasingly complex nature of modern life, men and women sometimes inadvertently fall back on modes of behavior that they are more familiar with.

While men and women have come along way from the Paleolithic era, what with the recession of sagittal crests and the advent of opposable thumbs, at times, it is just too easy to perform strictly delineated sociocultural roles such as hunter-gatherer and nurturer: that men simply provide food for the family, and that women provide for home and hearth.

Expectations rising from such assumptions could be a source of miscommunication. This seems to be the case with men, especially those who have found uses for their opposable thumbs beyond twiddling them. Men, at the end of a hard day’s work, might want to spend some time relaxing at home before pitching in with some household chores. While men might not always be in the mood to digest a comedy upon entering the family home, it is with reasonable certainty that we can assert that they will never be in a mood to be confronted by a tragedy.

When a wife greets her husband with an endless litany of woes suffered at the hands of boisterous children, indifferent plumbers, or a cruel consumer-driven society, she does not help him resolve to be more active in the preservation of their family life and the different duties, responsibilities and joys that it consists in. Rather, she’s simply making it easy for her husband to resolve not to be home early enough to listen to that tragic summation of her working day, perhaps ever.

More Today than Yesterday

“Marriage is an institution in which the man loses his Bachelor’s degree and the woman gets her Master’s.”

While the joke above pokes gentle fun at the role of husbands and wives in marriage, there is some truth to the premise that the joke is founded on: that marriage enforces change on the people who enter it. As such, the admonition “You knew the person he/she was when you married him/her,” an admonition that many parents bludgeon into their mature offspring prior to Holy Matrimony, holds true. The good news, however, is that it is possible to change, and for the better.

It is important to understand that people marry not just because they want to find an appropriate expression for the love that they share. People also marry because they realize that their shared love is merely the beginning. It could be so much more.
One way of encouraging married couples to share, renew, and revise their visions of happily wedded bliss is for husband and wife to keep journals. In these journals, it is best to start by writing down what the married imagine wedded bliss to be like, and ton constantly appraise it from the point of view of everyday life. Journal entries don’t have to be drenched in metaphors, or dripping with profundity. It could be as simple as the song from the classic musical, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”:

Happiness is two kinds of ice cream...
Knowing a secret
Climbing a tree.

Happiness is five different crayons...
Catching a firefly
Setting him free.

Make sure that the journals are updated regularly, and that time is set aside to share the journals’ contents. The entries may be read silently, or out loud. Just remember that whatever the couple documents should hew closely to the spirit of the chorus:

Happiness is morning and evening,
Daytime and nighttime too.
For happiness is anyone and anything at all
That's loved by you.

Gentle, warm and light-hearted reminders of why husbands and wives married one another in the first place are the best way of both renewing themselves in wedded bliss and moving forward to discover just how much more there is to be joyful about.

Photo Credits:

Picture of Dr. Sheldon Cooper comes courtesy of Swarls Barkley at Fan Pop.