The Mr. & Mrs. Happy Handbook Everything I Know About Love and Marriage (with corrections by Mrs. Doocy) Chapter One In the Beginning . . . Throughout history men have had problems dealing with women. "Do I look fat in this fig leaf?" Eve asked Adam. Adam, a born kidder, promptly puffed up his cheeks and belted out a deep-throated "Moooooooo!" Eve was puzzled. God hadn't invented cows yet--he was still working out the bugs on the passenger pigeon. She instinctively found his cringeworthy performance offensive. Adam was officially in the doghouse, which was tricky, because there were no dogs. God was only in the B's, working on birds. The world hasn't changed that much in the thousands of years since fig leaves and Adams and Eves, although now there are also plenty of Adams and Steves, just not in this book. Today's guys believe they understand girls and vice versa, but really men know as much about women as golden retrievers know about Roth IRAs. There are plenty of differences between the sexes. We are clearly wired differently. It's first noticeable when we're boys and girls. For instance, when my wife presented my daughters with their first bras, they were horrified. One daughter refused to wear it, and kept hiding it under her bed. Finally, when asked why she wouldn't wear it, the ten-year-old looked her straight in the eye and in the voice of Peter Pan said, "Think happy thoughts, Mommy." Meanwhile, when my immodest son made the high school baseball team, he came down to the dinner table to model his cup. As we mature, the differences multiply. Just look at how our brains work. Men generally have direct, basic questions: "Will this make me gassy?" "Are you sure this won't show up as porn on the hotel bill?" Women's questions are more complicated and fraught with emotional subterfuge. Like this one that is apparently programmed in all women at the factory to test the depth of a man's love and honesty. "Do I look fat in these pants?" This has nothing to do with pants, and guys don't know where to start. They'll pause half a moment to think, but during his momentary hesitation, the woman's paranoid gland secretes a trace hormone into her bloodstream that immediately translates, "He thinks I'm fat!" That leads to sheets of tears, prolonged awkward apologies, and the dreaded but inevitable "Twice yearly." It's time for men and women to realize that despite his occasional affinity for lavender soap, he is still all man. She should know she is living with a mammal that is just one cultural chromosome away from being a coyote. He doesn't get the charm of children's beauty pageants, tiny dogs in designer footwear, or a purse that costs more than the average daily bank balance. Rather than truly understand each other, they inevitably smile with gritted teeth and pretend they didn't hear the latest dumb thing their spouse just blurted out. Both sexes need to stop making the same mistakes and move on. "Insanity," the old expression goes, "is doing the same thing and expecting different results." For His Eyes Only Ladies, Please Skip This Passage When your spouse asks, "Do I look fat in these pants/dress/fig leaf?" there is but one simple answer that will lead to a long and happy marriage: " No habla ingles " (translation: "I don't speak English"). By the time she translates and realizes that she's now mad at you for not answering her question, you're off the hook. She's forgotten about her tight pants. Why Do People Get Married? 52%: "We're in love" 23%: To get pushy parents off their backs 15%: So they won't go to hell for having sex 8%: Various (financial, security, lonely, hooked on multilayered cake) 2%: Want to find out their blood type My Date With Destiny October 27, 1985 I was sitting with my sister Lisa at the bar of Stetson's, a Tex-Mex joint in Washington, D.C. We were watching our team, the Kansas City Royals, clinch the seventh game of the World Series. As the MVP was interviewed by a cute blond dugout reporter, I mentioned to my sister that the sports girl on TV had just started working in my building. "She's cute," Lisa said. "Why don't you ask her out?" "That girl? She's too fabulous for me." Actually, she was too fabulous for everybody. She was a Ford model and the first woman on ESPN to have her own magazine show. She'd never met a double black diamond she couldn't master and she'd dated or was pals with six of the ten men listed that year in People magazine's first "Sexiest Man Alive" poll. On top of that, she was painfully beautiful. "Yeah, you're right," my sister said. "You're low tide in the gene pool compared to her." Now you know why I moved away from home. A week later I saw Miss Too Fabulous for Me in the NBC commissary. She had on her tray an oozing cheeseburger, a supersized order of French fries, a salad, a cookie, and a Diet Coke. For a size 6, she ate like a Teamster. It's hard to try to make small talk with a cute girl when she's in line sandwiched between Roger Mudd and Connie Chung, so I didn't. I just stood quietly in line as if I were idling in the drive-up lane at Wendy's. She disappeared out the door. As I was at the fork, spoon, knife station, she popped back in and quickly grabbed two packets of salt, which at that time was still free at NBC (prebudget cuts). Suddenly I was walking down the hall with her toward our desks, and I knew I really should say something. A good pickup line would have been "I only have three months to live, kiss me!" Instead I asked, "What's that stuff on your fries? Plasma?" Pitiful, but it engaged her. She cracked an icy smile and responded, "We call it ketchup." As a doctor's office reader of Cosmo , I knew girls love compliments, so I quickly followed up with "You did a great job at the World Series." The Mr. & Mrs. Happy Handbook Everything I Know About Love and Marriage (with corrections by Mrs. Doocy) . Copyright © by Steve Doocy. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Mr. and Mrs. Happy Handbook: Everything I Know about Love and Marriage by Steve Doocy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
