The Marriage Files

Some people live their lives according to the principle "less is more," while others seem to believe that less is not only not more, it’s a sign of weakness. This is one of the infinite ways in which humanity can be divided into two camps, and just as with politics, there’s a gender gap involved. A disproportionate number of women belong to the former group and a disproportionate number of men to the latter. I happen to be married to a guy who fits this stereotype to a tee. It’s not that he’s a poster boy for supersizing. He’s not an over-consumer. Rather, in anything he consumes, he wants more of the active ingredient—more of whatever he’s consuming the thing for.

He’s the sort of fellow the marketing gurus had in mind when they came up with Jolt Cola and extra-strength Excedrin, and definitely not part of the target audience for O’Doul’s. He wouldn’t be caught dead eating baked potato chips, reduced sodium soup, fat-free milk or low-carb anything.

So, as you might guess, when I met him he insisted on drinking only caffeinated coffee. If I made a pot of decaf, he’d sniff disdainfully and turn it down. Nothing but full strength java would do, and not only that, but he claimed that he could detect decaf at twenty paces.

But I—a fan of the flavor of coffee, not its stimulative effects—got sick of the caffeine headache I got after a few cups of the high octane stuff. Years ago, I decided that if the chore of making the morning pot of joe fell to me (as it had), so did the choice of coffee. I began mixing it half and half. I remember very clearly the first morning I presented K— with a cup of adultered coffee. Slurp. Mmm, hot, good. More slurp. Not a word of protest. His much vaunted caffeine indicators must have been sleeping—no doubt as a result of caffeine deprivation. Kind of a win-win situation for me.

I chose to be duplicitous knowing full well that eventually there’d be some fallout. Time passed, and I debated whether and when to fess up and tell him he’d been drinking half-caff unknowingly. I didn’t want to do it without support from a neutral observer, which ruled out any time when we were alone. Finally, a perfect occasion presented itself: a Sunday when his Mom had come to spend the afternoon with us. To her very great credit, I think she actually could be objective in a dispute between me and her son.

I made a pot of half-caff early in the afternoon and served him some. He asked what kind of coffee it was because he knew that after noon I often made decaf for myself so as not to spend the night staring at the ceiling. I replied, "Would I serve you anything but regular?" It wasn’t even a lie, exactly, since by then half-caff was our "regular" brew.

Now, men are instinctively suspicious of women when we answer a question with a question. Saying "Would I serve you anything but regular?" was essentially throwing down the gauntlet. His mother, like a barfly sensing an impending fight, perked up and put on her mental referee uniform. K— looked at me accusingly and asked again: "Is this regular coffee?" We went around and around for a while doing a good impersonation of ‘Who’s On First?’ before I finally took the plunge. I hated to do it to him, but I was sick of living a lie. "Hon," I said, "you’ve been drinking half-caff coffee for years, and you never knew the difference."

He gave me a look as if I’d just told him I’d been having an affair with his best friend for a decade. It was that wounded "How could you?!" look. "My own wife! Behind my back!" Utterly crestfallen, he put down his coffee mug and barely spoke to me for the rest of the afternoon. ("Me?" he’d say later, "Overreact?") His Mom and I agreed: it was a KO in the first round.

If caffeine is the point, I wanted to ask him, why bother with the coffee? Apparently the flavorful brown liquid part of the coffee is just a carrier for what he really wants—a shock to the nervous system. In that case, I say go straight for the pills. They make a whole lot less mess when spilled on the car upholstery, which will happen when you’re hyped up from a daily overdose of caffeine.

I don’t think someone has to be a Freudian psychologist to see that guys of the "less is less" persuasion have a "thing" about substances from which something has been taken. They’re just not comfortable with "less," as if decaf coffee is somehow, well, emasculated. A man sees a cup of coffee stripped of its power to excite and imagines himself unable to arouse a reaction, too. After all, coffee is supposed to make you hyperactive! If someone’s not up to the liquid equivalent of heart defibrillation, they’re a wuss.

Instead of taking the reasonable approach of avoiding potentially harmful things, these men prefer the confrontational approach of consuming and even insisting on getting maximum doses of the deadly, the fattening, and the overstimulating. If I was the CEO of a big food conglomerate, I know how I’d capitalize on this. I’d launch a whole line of He Man food products, which would consist of my company’s regular product—low-fat frozen TV dinners, let’s say—stuck in a He Man box that screamed "Made With Real Nuclear Waste!" or "Contains Genuine TNT!" or just "Now With More Cholesterol!" I’d promote the new product line with an ad campaign built around the slogans "The Strong Will Survive!" and "Less Is For Sissies!" and I’d sponsor a nationwide series of He Man Eat-Off contests. He Men would just flock to prove that they could consume more saturated fat or sewer sludge or whatever than the next guy and live to brag about it. Of course, somewhere there’d have to be a disclaimer to the effect that the product contains no actual toxic substances whatsoever (above and beyond the normal ones the government permits), but who reads the fine print?

Well, back to reality. You might be wondering, did K— ever trust me with a coffee scoop again? We’ve achieved a workable, if tenuous, arrangement. It’s a twist on the "don’t ask, don’t tell" approach to gays in the military. He does ask, but I lie, and he knows I lie—he just can’t prove it without closed-circuit monitoring of the coffee grinder. And thanks to his reduced caffeine intake, I doubt he’ll ever be able to muster the energy to rig that up.

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