Tips for a happy marriage – free, modest tips from the best father.husband ever.

The Wall Street Journal had the audacity today to publish a piece in their Life & Style section that made this outlandish claim: children are hard on a marriage.

I find this audacious because, in my experience, the opposite seems to be the case.  All the bad parts of parenting have steeled the resolve between Jen and I, all the good parts let me see a side of her that I never knew existed, and the mediocre parts are just plain pleasant without being offensive, and if we’re lucky enough we get to occasionally sneak off into the bedroom (after the girls’ bedtime, of course, and past piles of dirty laundry and unpaid bills and stacks of to-do lists).

We used to spend crazy amounts of time together.  Now we go on a date roughly once every political election cycle (and that’s usually what we talk about on our date…we so love politics!), and therefore the appreciation factor has become ramped up.  Pre-kids, if Jen and I were out, I’d be 97% into whatever we were talking about, and 3% into anything else that might have been happening in the room.  That’s because that’s how my mind works, and 97% is a respectable number, and she should be super-proud of that.

(Right now, for instance, I’m 72% into this blog, 14% into The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, 10% into thinking about why some flowers smell like hot dogs, and 4% of my brain is constantly running “Beauty and the Beast” on a continuous loop.)

Post-kids, I’m 100% invested into my wife, because the next time we hold a meaningful conversation could be in 2027 (when President Trump will be in his 4th term and we’ll all be riding hovercars powered by his flaxen hair). 

Enjoy a life spent searching for normalcy, kid.

 Here’s one of the points the article made about how kids are poison for your marriage:

“A key source of conflict among new parents is dividing up—and keeping score of—who does what for the baby and the household.”

Source of conflict??  No.  No, not if you need to be all negative and Debbie Downer about it.  My advice is to make it a big competition.  I’m always pointing out to Jen how far ahead I am in the points, explaining how I do so much more than she does, and she laughs and laughs….I’m assuming because she knows how true it is.

In honesty, I shouldn’t keep score, of course, but I do.  But there’s a major flaw in my score-keeping: anytime I log an “event” with the kids, it’s almost universally because Jen is doing something work-related.  So the impulsive, self-serving part of my brain chalks one up for me – it’s impossible not to, if I’ve had to deal with the kids by myself for a few hours without help – but the rest of my brain knows it doesn’t really count because it’s not like Jen is spending a day at the spa.  The opposite is true of for the opposite situation.  If Jen’s watching the kids, it’s because I’m doing something absurdly stupid, like out banging on a drum set or biking my way around the seedier parts of town.  So I keep score.  But I also keep it to myself.  (hint: I’m always winning.  you can’t help but remember more about the hardships you put up with.  it’s human nature, I think)

Another issue I have with that quote above: it says ‘baby’, as in the singular tense, which is odd because if there’s anything we’ve learned from this blog, it’s that parenting single kids is laughably easy.

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Lily took all her clothes off tonight, after bedtime but before she’d succumbed to sleep.  This is unusual because it’s the sort of thing Abby usually does, not her, and because she managed to pee all over her bed in the process.

Naked girl, heart blanket, lots of urine