With Valentines Day just around the corner, here are two marital spats that can disturb your peace and the romance of this special celebration of love. If you’ve been married very long, you’ve probably had a form of both of them. Fortunately there is a solution to both common spats: GPS and hors d'oeuvres.
IN THE CAR
GPS, eliminates a common marital fight: “the map fight.” Most husbands expect their wives to be natural navigators. Most wives are not. The map fight most commonly occurs when the husband is driving on an unfamiliar freeway at 70 mph and he tosses the map to the wife and says, “Where are we?” If she’s like me, she can only read the map when the car and the map are going in the same direction and that’d be north. South is out of the question, because it’s just too hard to read a map upside-down.
I wasn’t prepared for the real world of marriage. My parents had three four fights in their entire marriage of 60+ years. It was always over the same issue. Dad would lose track of time fishing and as it started getting dark, Mom would get worried. The fight looked something like this. He’d come in the door wearing his waders and holding his fly rod in one hand and a couple trout on a string in the other. He’d hang his head with a beseeching, I’m-sorry look and Mom would shake her head, tighten her lips and sigh with a mix of disgust and relief that he hadn’t drown. My sister and I would run to our room, sure this would end our happy home because they were going to divorce and we’d be put in foster care.
In my first marriage, I learned quickly I was in for some advanced education.