The Marriage Files

Any married person will tell you that on occasion, husbands and wives have trouble understanding one another. I don’t mean this in some figurative, touchy-feely, psycho-spiritual sense. I mean literally—sometimes the things that come out of your spouse’s mouth will sound like phrases from a learn-a-foreign-language cassette.

One day my husband K— walked into our kitchen while I was cooking dinner and said what sounded for all the world like, “Do you use pork much?” Understand that I was cooking, so my mind was on food, but nonetheless I was puzzled as to why my husband, whose fervent disinterest in food is almost religious, would ask me such a question. “Even he,” I thought, “must be able to recognize pork.” I looked at him quizzically and replied, “Well, do you eat pork much around here?” His blank expression, coupled with the fact that he’d just come out of the office where the computer is, made me realize that what he really asked was, “Do you use Quark much?”—Quark being the maker of a computer program (as well as a sub-atomic particle and an unusual cheese, none of which I use much in my cooking).

“You know,” he said slowly, “I’m starting to understand why you seem so perplexed sometimes.”

Yep, our life is a lot like all those Sprint cell phone commercials that have been on TV the last few years. You know, the ones where bad connections lead to absurd miscommunications: a Mom asks, “How are the kids?” but the babysitter hears, “Flour the kids!” (with messy results), and a rancher’s order for “100 oxen” leads to the shipment of “100 dachshunds” to a new home on the range. We’re living one life based on two very different conversations.

There may actually be a physiological basis for this particular male/female communication problem. As they age, both men and women tend to lose their hearing, but in very different ways. Men lose the high frequencies (the range in which women speak) while women lose the lows (the range in which men speak). Coincidence? I think not. This pattern of hearing loss is just a natural sort of “tuning out” of one’s spouse as time goes on, probably an evolutionary safeguard against an epidemic of murder/suicides.

If I hadn’t been trained in audio, I wouldn’t have known this. The typical woman lacks this knowledge, so, as she and her husband advance into their golden years, she sees her mate move his lips without seeming to make a sound and concludes that he’s doing it just to annoy her. Of course, before reaching that extreme, she goes through a spell where she’s convinced her husband has begun speaking Swahili. The reason so few couples reach their Golden Anniversary, I believe, is because they abandon their marriage at the point where they conclude their partner has simply stopped talking.

My personal situation isn’t helped by two things. First, K— is a mumble-mouth. He has a low-pitched, gravelly voice and he speaks softly. The end result is that all his sentences taper off into a generic mum-mum-mum sound.

Second, his mind works faster than his lips, which is a testament to the speed of his brain, not the slowness of his lips. His brain/mouth mismatch is expressed through a tendency to utter only the first half of many sentences, leaving most of his thoughts unfinished. I find it ironic that women are often criticized for finishing their husbands’ sentences. I’ve often thought I’d like to find one of these telepathic women and employ her as a translator.

A possible solution to all these communication problems presented itself one day when I least expected it. You know how people listening to something through headphones tend to yell when they talk? Recently, I bought K— an iPod for his birthday, and he began walking around the house wearing earphones while he sorted out how to use the thing. I discovered that at those times, he spoke much more clearly and loudly than normal. Instead of his usual mumbling, for the first time ever I could hear everything he said without any trouble, and I never had to ask him to repeat anything. He even completed his sentences! It was as if having to split his attention between music and speech slowed his brain down enough for his mouth to keep pace. It was miraculous!

This still won’t help with the age-related hearing-loss problem I described, of course, but there’s a remedy for that, too. I happen to know that there's an electronic device that can raise or lower the frequency of a human voice. It could drop my voice an octave into the much-reduced hearing range K— will have as an old man, and raise his voice an octave into the oppositely compromised hearing range I’ll have as an octogenarian. Combine one of these voice processors with an iPod, and you’ve got a gadget that will keep husbands and wives communicating as long as they care to.

When K— and I are old and gray and rocking side by side on our front porch, we’ll talk to one another through our little voice processors and listen to one another through earphones. I'll be a baritone and he'll be an alto, but so what? We’ll only sound that way to one another. When we’ve had enough, we can tune each other out, tune in the Grateful Dead, and revisit our youth. “Rock on!” I’ll say. “Knock knock?!” he’ll reply. “Who’s there?” “Bare?” I’ll exclaim. “What are you talking about? I never said anyone was bare!” It’ll be just like old times.

TMF is a collective, ongoing work that is protected by relevant copyrights and registrations. You are invited to share the URL of this website for non-profit entertainment purposes, but in no other way can The Marriage Files (TMF) be used, reproduced, copied, developed, adapted, altered, or distributed without the express written permission of the author.