If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon by Jenna McCarthy Page B

the end I got what I wanted: a stupid clean sink. I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly how, but I’m just going to keep my mouth shut and my head down and appreciate it while it lasts.

“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
    For ten years my husband has not picked up a wet towel, washed
ketchup off of a dish, changed a lightbulb, or remembered trash day
without a friendly “How many times do I have to tell you?”
    JENNY
     
     
    I have a male friend who told me—in confidence and under threat of a lawsuit if I identified him by name or distinguishing characteristics, so for these purposes I’ll call him Sally—that men have figured out a foolproof way to get out of doing any dreaded housework:
    “We suck on purpose,” Sal told me, speaking without permission for his entire gender. “We know that if we do a really bad job at something, you won’t ask us to do it again. Once I actually pretended that I couldn’t fold a simple hand towel in quarters. I just sort of scrunched it up in a wad and set it on the towel pile with a flourish and a triumphant ‘There!’ My wife hasn’t asked me to fold the laundry once since then.”
    Joe is no Sally (and that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d need to write). He is an adept towel folder and knows the secret to streak-free windows (newspaper, not paper towels). He doesn’t “suck on purpose” just to get out of doing the job. He doesn’t have to, because he tells me to my face that since there’s no way he could ever do any task to my unreasonable standards, he’s just not going to do it at all. And since he’s more or less right, it’s really hard to argue the point.
    When I was in college, I preferred male roommates to female ones for several reasons: They had sex with strangers more often, which meant they were more likely to stay out all night and therefore not be at home eating my food. (And when they were home, they’d never touch my fat-free cottage cheese or homemade negative-calorie cabbage soup anyhow.) They didn’t care about décor, so I could hang whatever I wanted on the walls. They rarely borrowed, ruined, or lost my favorite skinny skirt. I am not sure if I was just a lot more blasé back then or it’s simply because I was drunk for the majority of that four-year stretch, but I don’t recall constantly being bothered by my guy roommates’ little domestic insults. You know, the never-made beds, the pile of dishes in the sink, the stinky socks on top of the washing machine (because lifting the lid or locating and then actually using a hamper would require herculean effort), the offhand admissions of oh-yeah-actually-I- did -drink-your-last-can-of-Diet-Coke-sorry. Now that I think about it, it must have been the booze, because that shit makes me mental on a daily basis.
    Apparently I have a thing that drives Joe crazy, too: I like to use the lights in the house. I know, it’s selfish and indulgent, but it’s a little luxury I sometimes like to afford myself. Because of this, my husband has nicknamed me the “light leaver-onner” and has made it his personal mission in life to circle the house whenever he is home, turning off every light in his path. The criteria he uses to determine whether a certain light should be switched off is simple: If it’s on, it should be off. Regardless of the time of day, whether the light in question is serving any sort of purpose, or who might be using it at the time.
    “I’m in here!” I shout from my perch on the throne, fumbling for the toilet paper I can almost make out in the shadows.
    “I’m in here!” I yell, head in the dryer, my voice echoing in my ears like I’m trapped in a cartoon cave with a yodeler.
    “I’m in here!” I roar from the bathtub, searching for somewhere to place my razor before I sever a critical artery in the now pitch-darkness.
    I should probably thank him for reducing our electric bill and being concerned about the environment and helping to preserve our