How to train a husband

By EVE MARX

My husband has a new expression. He says he’s over-trained. “I’m over-trained,” is his response now to everything I say. Examples of his over-trainedness mostly manifest themselves in the kitchen. “I loaded the dishwasher this way because that’s the way you taught me,” he lies, because I never told him to load it that way. Who would train someone to stack fragile glassware on the bottom, where it will surely break?  “You’ve over-trained me,” he protests when I stare curiously at him as he eats his snack of matzo sprayed with fake butter, hunched over the sink. “You told me not to make crumbs,” he says. “You trained me.”

While my husband’s characterization of me as a cross between a circus trainer and a dominatrix is annoying to say the least, at the same time I feel a certain pride that he thinks of me this way.

Over the years I have tried, with varying success, to train him. I’ve worked on getting him to remove muddy shoes before entering the house, to make a bed, to put down the toilet seat. (The last is an utter failure.) I have successfully trained him to let a dog in or out, and at least aim to throw his soiled clothing in the laundry basket. Writing this, I attempted to make an inventory of areas I’ve successfully trained him in, and realized the list is woefully short.

Still, my husband maintains he’s over-trained. Vis a vis the garbage. “You tell me to put a new bag in when you’ve told me to take the garbage out,” he whines. “ So I’m standing there with a leaking bag in one hand, and you want me to put in another bag. Which do you want me to do first?” He claims there are so many household rules it makes his head spin. Maybe that’s the explanation for why the first 5 years of our marriage, he walked around with a wool scarf wrapped around his head, like a bandage.

I asked him to describe how he feels about all of this.

“I feel tormented,” he said. “I’m always torn between two impossible options. I can either do one thing and be pilloried, or another and get whacked. In the end I always end up cowering in the corner, holding the Chihuahua as a shield,” he said, prone, as always, to hyper-exaggeration. That’s another thing I’ve failed to train him out of, his propensity for inflating every situation. Let’s not forget, when we met, he was a screenwriter.

I recently asked him to explain what he means by saying he’s over-trained. “If I hear your car pulling up, I’ll immediately race around fluffing pillows and folding blankets and grabbing the broom to start sweeping,” he says, meaning he’s just trying to clean up the mess he made in my absence. “And then the kicker is I manage to step in some tiny poop Rinaldo (the Chihuahua) made. How do I clean my foot, clean the floor, and get rid of the poop before you even walk in?” he said. “It’s impossible.”

He also wanted to discuss what he called his dress. “Am I supposed to tuck in my shirt or not tuck in my shirt?” he said. “If I don’t tuck it in you say I look a mess. If I tuck it in, you say it’s all bunched up. So I leave it half in and half out and then you say I look ridiculous.”

A couple of years ago when I announced I was sick of grocery shopping, my husband volunteered to take over the job. He’s become much better about buying produce, a weak area since he started out barely knowing the difference between a pear and an avocado. (“Why do they call them ‘avocado pears’?’ he protested.) Onions continue to elude him. “They’re poorly labeled,” he says. “You told me to never buy those small, hard yellow ones. But you also don’t like the tiny white ones, either. To me, they all look the same.”

It’s what he calls, “the multiplicity of rules,” that has left my husband paralyzed in some of his dealings with me. “I can’t buy onions, I don’t know how to tuck in my shirt,” he said. “I’m afraid to walk around the house. All I can do is hide in my man cave, or go to the office.” He says we live in a 2500 square foot house where he spends all his time in a room “smaller than a NYC apartment.”

A friend posted on Facebook that 8 days and nights with no internet or television might be grounds for divorce. I laughed. I know I’ve trained my husband to leave me alone when I watch my Real Housewives. But don’t think he doesn’t have his own arsenal of training tools to keep me on my toes. For example, he’s got me trained to run away whenever he starts playing the saxophone, which is for a minimum of 40 minutes a day, easily hours on the weekends. His man cave is home to multiple sax’s; tenor, alto, and soprano, the last whose sound makes my heart pound with anxiety, especially when he hits certain notes that set the dog to howling and that another friend described as “insane asylum music.”

Another friend got on my advice purchased a tiny riding whip. She lives in south jersey but not by the shore and nowhere near The Horse Connection which has an excellent selection of crops. So I sent her to a site called JustForPonies.com and she bought a girlish crop to enhance her demeanor around her own spouse. “You were right,” she said, when I told her every woman needs a crop, especially during football season when the domestic training of males usually could use reinforcement. “He jumps right to attention when I whack it against the coffee table and tell him to get his shoes off the couch.”

Ladies, are you paying attention?