Being Nice To My Wife Is Not A "Survival Mechanism"
My wife is long used to being disappointed in me. I think most marriages are, if the people are honest.
Not the big disappointments. If you’re disappointed in your spouse’s fidelity, or their trustworthiness, or their support, then usually that marriage is gonna collapse like a deflating hot air balloon. Those are worth getting really mad about. But any normal co-existence is studded with little disappointments like:
“Did you remember to pick up the rubbing alcohol on the way home?” “…shit.”
“You watched that show? But I told you I wanted to see it with you!” “…shit.”
“You went to my favorite take-out fried chicken joint in the world, and didn’t bring any back for me?” “…shit.”
And yesterday, I almost – almost – committed that crime. I went to Hot Chicken Takeover, which is quite literally the best fried chicken I’ve ever had, a place so good that there’s a 200-person line at 10:00 on a Sunday morning and the chicken is usually gone by noon. I stood in that line with a friend, ate my chicken, and then realized in horror that I’d forgotten to get takeout for Gini.
So I went back and got some more. Then posted this status:
Love is getting in a very long line again because you were so sleepy you forgot to get your wife chicken but you’re not going home w/o it.
— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) September 13, 2015
And the interesting thing was the number of friends responding across the social media platforms with something like, “That doesn’t seem like love. That seems like a survival instinct, so she doesn’t kill you.” And I’m uncomfortable and then baffled by that.
I’m uncomfortable because – even though I do it sometimes – that whole “My God, my wife will kill me” joke plays into a stereotype that normalizes male abuse and trivializes women’s power. Basically, it’s a gag that springs from the whole idea that women are so powerless that they can’t really hurt a guy, and so it’s okay to discuss disproportionate fatal rage that springs from a lack of take-out chicken.
(Don’t believe me? Switch the genders. It’s a little more uncomfortable to joke that it might be a “survival instinct” for a wife to not forget to bring home the chicken to her male husband.)
And given that it’s hard to say just how prevalent female-on-male domestic abuse is, simply because so many men are ashamed to be “unmanly”, and because that “the wife will kill me joke” can wind up being toxic, I’m a little tentative to just nod and smile with it. (Even if said jokes are often made by both feminists and whatever we’re calling anti-feminists this week.)
Yet even aside from my social concerns, I have personal concerns about how dangerous that line of thought is.
The proper survival technique to survive disproportionate rage is to lie. It would have been nothing to say, “Aww, by the time we got to the front of the line, they’d sold out.” I wouldn’t have gotten in hot water, and Gini wouldn’t spend the day fuming what a fucking idiot, how could you do that to me, and I’d still have a belly full of delicious chicken. If your partner is really going to fly off the rails for trivial things, then they don’t encourage honesty: they encourage subterfuge.
But Gini wouldn’t have been mad. She’s reasonable. She understands mistakes will happen, particularly when I’m running on four hours’ sleep after a long convention, facing a two-hour drive home. If I’d come back without any Hot Chicken Takeover, she would sigh, and be sad, and get over it.
And in our relationship – and, again, I think most sane ones – it hurts me a lot more when I see my wife sadly accepting than when she’s yelling. Yelling gets me defensive; seeing her sad thinks Oh, fuck, my life’s goal here is to make her happy, and I just did… not… that… thing.
(I get very nonverbal when I realize I’ve fucked up.)
And if I had forgotten, there could be two outcomes:
The next time I’m at Hot Chicken Takeover, I’d remember Gini screaming at me for an hour when I got home without the chicken. And everyone, bafflingly, seems to think that fury and shame is a great incentive – as witness Donald Trump’s candidacy – but really what happens for me is that I see Hot Chicken Takeover and I feel that defensive anger welling up inside me again, and my fear has a battle with my resentment, and I think, She yelled at me, I don’t wanna reward that bitch with chicken.
And maybe I get her the chicken, if fear wins. Or maybe I skip getting chicken entirely because now my chicken’s now tainted with the unpleasant reek of verbal abuse. Or maybe – just maybe – I go get one over on Gini by getting my chicken, and lying about it, and feeling like I’ve secretly gotten my victory in here.
But the outcome that happens here is that when I get to Hot Chicken Takeover, I think, my wife was so understanding of what happened last time. She looked so sad. And it’s a pretty shitty way of rewarding her for being so nice by forgetting again. And now, in getting the Hot Chicken Takeover – and I swear I wasn’t paid for this advertisement – I become not a convict being forced to provide services, but a fucking hero in a redemption story.
By bringing her the Hot Chicken Takeover, I become a better person, and my wife becomes more loved, and that is so more win-win than any bullshit “survival mode” framing.
And yeah, there are oblivious people who don’t ever think about their partner’s needs and need to be shamed and yelled at and banged around before they’ll listen to you. But I tend to think that someone who needs major overhaul work before they can remember the little things like chicken is gonna be even harder to teach when it comes to major things like fidelity and trustworthiness and support, and the question is – as it always is when seeking long-term relationships – “Do you want to spend years of your life trying to teach someone who’s not fundamentally compatible with you to be compatible, or would it be better to spend years of your life looking for someone who you don’t have to scream at so they remember your preferences?”
In any case, no. It’s not a survival mechanism. Gini would forgive me a tray of fried chicken, as she’s forgiven so much in life before.
The real survival mechanism is realizing that her acceptance of my flaws means I should do better. And I do. And she does. For there are days she forgets my fried chicken, and I hug her and tell her that’s all right.
The end result? We have a lot of fried chicken, and a lot more love.
Don't Go There. Just Please, Don't Go There.
(THE SCENE: Having gotten out of a lovely but exhausting convention, my friend Raven and I go out for fried chicken on the morning after, as is tradition.)
ME: Oh, God, this mac and cheese is brilliant. It’s gonna kill my heart, but it’s worth dying for.
RAVEN: Ferrett, no! You have to live until Star Wars! If you die on my watch, Gini is never gonna forgive me!
ME: All right, fine. I guess I’ll live until Star Wars.
(A few minutes later, when I snatch a bite of food off her plate:)
RAVEN (raises fork): Do not make me stab you in the throat with this fork.
ME, loftily: Too late! You’ve shown your hand. You’ve told me you don’t dare harm me, lest Gini harm you! You have to protect me!
RAVEN: …and what are the odds that Gini sanctions me injuring you after I’ve explained what you did?
ME: Don’t use that logic. It’s a very bad logic.
Physicists! Further Assistance In Breaking Europe?
So a while back, I asked you rampant physicists to assist me in destroying a (fictional) Europe, and I got some fine feedback. Then I had a bout of Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the experiment tumbled to a halt in a slurry of misplaced depression.
Unfortunately, I am now approaching the stage where I need to write the chapter that explores the wounded Europe – as in, “My muse is going there right now, and if I don’t follow it this very weekend, I’m gonna lose something vital” – and I need some assistance.
So! If you’re a) willing to deal with some mild spoilers in what happens in The Fix, and b) quickly ponder some questions about how to tweak the laws of physics so things will be awful for humans but survivable in spots, then please email me stat at theferrett@gmail.com.
(As an added bonus, anyone who helps out will get credit in the acknowledgments, and if they want will get to read a beta-draft of The Fix when I eventually finalize the sucker in a few months.)
Because I know what the characters are doing. I just don’t know where they are. And I’ll fake it if I have to. But it’ll be less cool without your assistance.
THE FLUX Has A Release Party! Come To Cleveland, October 9th!
The sequel to Flex is coming out in a month, and precisely one month from now we will be partying at Loganberry Books!
Now, I’ll be honest with you: the sequel is kind of a make-or-break moment for me. Sometimes, the first book does well and people liked it, but for no apparent reason folks don’t want to follow these characters into more narrative. So I’m nervous about The Flux, because even though I think it’s a way better book than Flex, will anyone show up for Round 2: Fight?
So I debated holding a book party for book 2, and then I asked myself a vital question:
Do I get to eat all the FLUX-themed cupcakes I want that night?
Yes. Yes, I do.
So there will be a release party at Loganberry Books, one of Cleveland’s finest indie book stores, on Friday, October 9th at 7:00 p.m. If you’re going, please say you’re attending at the Facebook event page, and share if you feel like it.
There will be new THE FLUX-themed nails, and cupcakes, and a dramatic reading where you find out exactly what happened to Aliyah. Things are… not good. And you should show up to see how it all turns out.
How Neil Gaiman Inadvertently Gave Me Some Great Advice On Polyamory
When you go to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, you are given a challenge: write a story a week, for six weeks. This would be difficult under the best of circumstances, but Clarion is not the best of circumstances: your fellow students, all seventeen of them, are *also* attempting to write a story a week, and if they complete their story then you must read and critique it for them.
The problem is that your classmates are all brilliant.
Clarion’s a lot like Juilliard in that even getting admitted into the program means you have great skill, so everyone there is a helluva writer. And you could be excused for thinking that we were all in some reality show competition, trying to outwrite each other to devise ZOMG THE BEST STORY THAT WINS THIS WEEK.
…that didn’t really happen, though.
And when Neil Gaiman came for his week to teach us, he sent us off with words that summed up why this head-to-head conflict had never emerged.
“There’s eighteen of you,” he said, amazed, “And none of you are even fishing in the same pond.”
Which was true. I liked writing comic-booky melodramas, which I think I did pretty well when I wrote my books Flex and The Flux. But Kat Howard was far more influenced by Shakespeare and Tam Lin, and her precise prose sits quite at home in her upcoming novel Roses and Rot. And Monica Byrne had this madly vibrant mash of world cultures and sex-positive fucking which she distilled into The Girl In The Road.
What Neil was pointing out was how we all had different writing styles – and if we perfected them, we’d never be in competition with each other. What we’d have to say would be such a unique experience that we would be the only provider.
Now, it’s common to think that, say, STAR WARS is somehow in competition with THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION – and on some accountant’s balance sheet somewhere, yes, I suppose that’s true. But the real competition is “Can I tell a story that’s better than falling asleep in a warm bed on an autumn night? Can I tell a story that’s unique enough that you need to go back to it again and again?”
And if you tell the story that’s yours, and tell it right, people will make time to listen.
So many movies failed because they thought they were competing with STAR WARS, and they weren’t – they were competing with themselves to find something interesting that a thousand other movies weren’t already saying.
I can’t best Monica’s grasp of melting-pot cultures – and it’d be foolish for me to try, she travels to Iran and other foreign countries, that’s her strength. I can’t beat Kat’s grasp of poetry; she bathes in fine words on a daily basis, you can see her whole body light up when she fits the correct word into place.
But I can be me. I can unearth my quirky humor and my deep love of weird characters, and I can make something so uniquely a function of me that you can’t get anything like this anywhere else. Maybe you like Flex, maybe you don’t, but what’s there is unlike any other author.
And that’s the way polyamory works, too. You see people getting concerned about what their lovers’ lovers do – is he better in bed? Does she like more outdoorsy activities than I do? They’re smarter, they know more about politics, I don’t read the New York Times.
Like Neil said: none of you are even fishing in the same pond. Yes, what your lover often likes about their other paramours are qualities that you do not possess. This is standard. Your lovers are stocked full of you, in all your you-ness abundance; if they dated a partner who was exactly like you, that might be more of a problem, because apparently you weren’t providing enough of this you experience.
So yeah, they’ll find partners who do things that you don’t. But this isn’t a competition. You should not run out and start reading the Times or take up bodybuilding just to make sure you’re still in the game.
I know, because it’s scary sometimes for me to look at other writers with their novels and think They’ve got more PR, they got better blurbs, this person I like is a fan of theirs and they’re not a fan of me. I worry that somehow I sabotaged my own success by writing about donut psychology and videogamemancy instead of, I dunno, whatever the person I’m envious this week wrote.
That’s all the usual writer-insecurity burbling to the surface. Then I remember: if I do things right, their success will not crush my own. I’m my own damn unique voice, and I’ll appeal to different segments.
This is my pond, and I am learning to fish in it to appeal to the sorts of people who want someone like me. I won’t accomplish that by making clumsy attempts to be someone I’m not, nor will I accomplish that by looking over at the other ponds and moaning about how much bigger they are.
What you’ve got is you. In fact, all you’ve really got is you. So find what you like about yourself, and make more of that. And trust that people can like both what other people can provide and also you, in all your delightful youness.
There’s a lot of ponds. There’s a lot of possibilities in fiction, and in love, and in life.
You don’t have to be all of them. You just have to be something that’s not in the other ponds.