Marriage and TV: The Amazing Race/ Designing for the Sexes/ The Simpsons - 9/06

[Smartmarriages]

- MARRIAGE: THE AMAZING RACE
- MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN FROM.....OR, "DESIGNING FOR THE SEXES"
- THE SIMPSONS AS OUR ROLE MODELS?  D'OH!

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- MARRIAGE: THE AMAZING RACE

Imagining my marriage as ŒThe Amazing Race¹
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Theresa Walsh Giarrusso
September 17, 2006

How¹s your teamwork? Do you support your spouse even when things go poorly
or immediately point fingers?


Picture it. You¹re in a race across Europe. Your spouse is your teammate,
and you¹ve just discovered you left your only money in a cab. How does your
team handle the stress? Is there finger pointing or do you pull together to
make the best of things?

This is a typical scenario on ³The Amazing Race,² which premieres its 10th
season tonight on CBS.

The exotic locations and crazy tasks the teams perform may be the draw for
some. But my husband and I are mesmerized by the team dynamics. We try to
figure out who will work best together: will it be the long-married husband
and wife, the same-sex best friends, the dating couple or the siblings? We
love to think about how we would perform under similar circumstances.

Last season, there was a husband and wife from the South. This guy yelled at
his wife and belittled her ideas in almost every show. Every now and then
she would fight back and tell him not to speak to her that way, but for the
most she let him get away with it. Not only did she take it, she often then
massaged his ego telling him how smart he was and what a great guy he was.

Most of the married couples come off similarly on the show‹just plain mean
to each other. I can think of only two couples in the last three seasons who
have actually been kind and supportive.

One of the couples had been married for 40 years. The 60-something spouses
were patient and encouraged each other. At one point, the wife told her
husband she thought she could quickly put together a motorcycle (they had a
choice of a different task). In the end she couldn¹t do it, and they wasted
a lot of time. However, her husband never blamed her. He was sympathetic and
acted like it was a team choice and a team failure. He never pointed fingers
and focused on how to recover.

If we ever got on the show, I¹m pretty sure my husband and I would be the
couple who yelled at each other the most that season. We both generally want
to be the captain of the ship, the problem is we never have any sailors.

Before we had kids we took a kayak trip through the estuaries of St. Simons
Island. We decided to share a two-person kayak. Big mistake! We struggled to
paddle at the same pace and in the same direction. We had a terrible time
turning corners because I didn¹t want to listen to his ideas, and he didn¹t
want to listen to mine.

After 12 years of marriage we have developed the perfect way to work well
together ‹ we don¹t. I¹m kiddingŠ sort of. There are many projects that we
seriously have learned that we would just rather tackle alone. We completely
disagree on the proper way to hang Christmas lights on a tree. So now I just
let him hang them his way and come back to admire his work. The same is true
for painting rooms in the house. For the last few years, I would paint every
fall when he took an annual business trip. I realized last year I did it to
avoid fighting with him about colors and painting technique.

Of course when you¹re married, you have to tackle many things together. We
now know we work best if there is a pre-anointed leader and a routine that
we follow. For example, my husband leads at our children¹s bath time and
that production is like clockwork. We also work well together getting ready
for church and getting the kids out the door in the morning.

Our amazing race of marriage will enter a new phase this spring when we
welcome a third child into our family. I think to succeed as a team, we will
have to get the house and our plan of action more organized, not be so
stubborn and work harder at not assigning blame.

How¹s your teamwork? Do you support your spouse even when things go poorly
or immediately point fingers? Do you treat them with respect or think
they¹ll forgive you no matter how rude you are to them?

Article/photo: 
http://www.ajc.com/health/content/shared-blogs/ajc/parenting/entries/2006/09
/17/imagining_my_ma.html

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- MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN FROM.....OR, "DESIGNING FOR THE SEXES"

'Designing for the Sexes' host saves marriages
By JANE MCBRIDE, The Enterprise (Beaumont, Tx)
09/17/2006

"Call Michael Payne!"

My husband, tiring of conversation, flung the words over his shoulder as he
exited the room, taking his plate of apple pie crumbs to the room with bare
walls where our kitchen once existed.

He was kidding, of course. The HGTV interior designer who has made quite the
name for his British-American self with the show "Designing for the Sexes,"
works wonders negotiating peace treaties between couples whose tastes are so
disparate that their remodeling projects can't get off dead center.

But the last I heard, Payne doesn't make house calls to overwrought couples
in Southeast Texas whose kitchen remodeling project has them hissing at each
other when they cross paths.

But wait.

The day after my husband made his offhanded remark about the only person
alive who might save us from impending divorce, I was on the telephone with
Michael.

Yep, we're on a first-name basis now.

As it turns out, Michael is coming to Beaumont Saturday to present two
seminars at Howell's Furniture and to promote his new line of furniture.

How positively providential. Why not, I thought, call his publicist and see
if he'd grant an interview?

He answered his own telephone.

"I think I've got Michael Payne on the line," I said to him, as if there
could be any doubt about that lilting British accent.

"You do!" he said, just like that, with an exclamation mark on the "ooo."

After talking with Michael about his upcoming appearance, we chatted about
our personal kitchen crisis.

He asked me to e-mail details about the vastly different looks we wanted and
offered to make suggestions to bridge the gap.

My husband was leaning toward light painted cabinets with a washed finish,
travertine floor in a neutral shade, granite countertops in a light color
and cream-colored tumbled marble-like ceramic backsplash, I told him.

I was looking at cabinets with a warm cherry stain, a light cork floor,
dramatic, heavily-veined granite in a rich color and a backsplash with
colored accent pieces.

For photo of 
http://www.southeasttexaslive.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17207777&BRD=2287&PAG
=461&dept_id=512551&rfi=6


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- THE SIMPSONS AS OUR ROLE MODELS?  D'OH!
 
Homer & Marge & Dave & Jana
The Simpsons as our role models? D'oh!
By David L. Goetz
 
I guffaw at "The Simpsons," now the longest running TV sitcom at 17 seasons.
My wife, Jana, is annoyed by it. I, obviously, get the cartoon sitcom.

Billions can't be wrong, I say. "The Simpsons" are now so embedded in
American culture, you can write a graduate thesis about them. I weighed
returning to college for a degree in Early Romantic Simpsons Literature, but
Jana put the kibosh on the idea.
 
I hoot at Homer's stupidity, Marge's practicality, their son, Bart's,
disrespect, their daughter Lisa's activism, and even baby Maggie's binky
habit.
 
I should make one caveat: "The Simpsons" isn't a morality show on marriage.
Yet, through the years of watching Homer and Marge, I've encountered several
principles from their marriage that seem to resonate with mine.
 
1. Compatibility is overrated.

Jana's and my taste in sitcoms is no commentary on our marriage, though it
sums up our degree of compatibility on a range of interests. And that,
perhaps, is the first lesson I've learned from Homer and Marge, America's
First Middle-Class Couple of Sitcoms: You can stay married for at least 17
seasons even if you're not compatible on all fronts. (My wife and I just hit
15 this summer.) For starters, with his brain-dead job at Springfield's
nuclear power plant, Homer is definitely blue-collar in flesh and spirit, no
matter his off-beat adventures, such as running for political office. Marge,
the mostly stay-at-home mom, owns both the highest eq (emotional
intelligence) and iq of the two. If I were writing the script, I'd have
Marge finish her college degree and then head to law school, once the kids
are out of the house.
 
My friends would definitely concur that Jana owns the highest eq and iq in
our marriage, and while we like to watch the Top 20 Countdown on cmt
(Country Music Television) at night after we've berated our kids into
staying in bed, she's a little bit country, and I'm a lot (alternative) rock
and roll. So I submit to her radio and cd tastes in the minivan, and nobody
gets hurt.
 
2. Twenty minutes is about the right amount of time before saying, "I'm
sorry."

Yes, I know the marriage of Homer and Marge is an artificial construct. They
have to resolve all tiffs in 20 minutes of script. Good things happen when
you have a short script to resolve your marital beefs. Twenty minutes
attaches a short leash to grudges. Homer and Marge's marriage is like ours:
I'm most often the dope. Jana and Marge are good at the fundamental but not
intuitive skill of forgiving their spouse.
 
In one episode, Marge is angry at Homer, once again, and the final shot
recreates a scene from the movie Thelma and Louise, where the two women on
the lam drive their car off a cliff. In "The Simpsons" episode, however,
Homer leans out the police car (one of a legion that's chasing Marge and a
friend as they head for the cliff) and shouts into a megaphone: "I'm sorry
for making gravy in the bathtub." Marge immediately forgives Homer, the car
swerves to avoid the cliff, and Marge averts her demise. VoilÀ! The marriage
and sitcom are saved.
 
There are a lot of "I'm sorry for the gravy in the bathtub" apologies in our
marriage. . . . . .

3. Some hurt takes more than 20 minutes to process. In the last episode of
season five, at Marge's suggestion, Homer enrolls in an adult education
course. In a twist, instead of taking a class, Homer is hired to teach!

, , , , ,
 
 
4. There is, after all, such a thing as sexual healing.

Midway through the first season, Marge faced, literally, a fork in the road
as she drove to the apartment of Jacques, the professional bowling
instructor. . . . .

To read the full article, visit:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/mp/2006/003/2.30.html

David L. Goetz is author of Death by Suburb: <http://www.deathbysuburb.net>
 

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