The Indelible Bonobo Experience

Most unhappy marriages are unhappy for the same reason. The wife is angry and complains that she has to do everything for her lazy husband. The husband accuses his wife of nagging and bossing him around. Nothing he does is good enough for her, and she’s not affectionate the way she used to be. (via Marriage, men, and mother syndrome - Shine from Yahoo! Canada, How Can I Be Your Lover When I’m Too Busy Being Your Mother: The Answers to Becoming Partners Again, Why Mr. Right Can’t Find You: The Surprising Answers that will Change your Life…and His )

• When a wife no longer wants sex, she often sends anti-erotic signals to her husband to turn him off. In a conference call last week, Dimerman confessed that the turnoffs listed in the book spring from her own experiences as a married mother of two kids. “Yes, I do have to admit it,” she laughs. The signals include sitting on the toilet with the door open, picking your nose, and agreeing to take a bath with your man and then pushing your hair into a plastic shower cap just before climbing in.
• “And I immediately agreed with it,” Kearns chimes in on the other line from his home in New Jersey. When Kearns first heard about Dimerman’s book idea, he felt guilty thinking about some of the women he’s lived with. In the foreword, he explains. “I thought about the many times I’ve watched a woman doing something that benefited me—preparing a complicated meal or scrubbing gunk out of a sink—and I’ve thought, ‘I should be doing that. Why aren’t I doing that? I should take over right now … No, maybe not.’”
• The authors theorize that husbands would help more if wives would stop controlling the way in which a task must be performed to meticulous specifications.
• Take the thirtysomething bachelor who has been living in a one-bedroom apartment. He’s never scrubbed a sink with Comet or deep-cleaned a stove. He changes linens when he thinks a woman might stay over. Then he meets a “house-proud” woman who dusts, vacuums and scrubs. The bachelor’s first shock after marriage is finding there’s “a whole lot of cleaning goin’ on that didn’t exist in his former life,” the authors write. “There isn’t twice as much laundry. There’s five times as much. In every area of homemaking, his 50 per cent share of what needs doing is greater than 100 per cent of what he used to do.” The man who thinks he can ease off and enjoy a cushy deal once he has a new woman in his life is sadly mistaken, warn the authors.