"...you might have some advice to give
on how to be insensitive..."
—from the song "Insensitive" by Anne Loree


During the Olympic Games this past summer, I opined to my husband K— that women’s beach volleyball was getting a lot of airtime, seemingly more than was warranted for a sport that is otherwise totally absent from the airwaves.  I also offered my opinion that the obvious reason was the shapely women players in teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy bikini “uniforms.”  “Well,” said K— blithely, “if you had a body like that, wouldn’t you want to show it off?”  It took him only about two beats to catch on to his gaffe.  “I mean, you do have a body like that,” he corrected himself hastily.  “Don’t you want to show it off?”

This joins a whole inventory of other priceless remarks my dear husband has made about me.  The list includes his off-the-cuff comment about my “heavy walk,” his glib reference to my “loud laugh,” and the oh-so-romantic observation (made two weeks before our wedding) that we were meant to be together because we made up for each other’s failings so well.  I nearly swooned.

It’s comments like these that have earned men a reputation for tactlessness among women.  My name for the problem is Foot-in-Mouth Disease.  It’s hereditary and contagious and, I’m sorry to say, chronic.  That means that if your man’s got it, you might as well get used to it and consider investing in a really good pair of earplugs.

Sometimes, a man doesn’t even know when he’s put his foot in his mouth.  I know a couple, Tim and Sue, who got engaged a while back.  I heard about it first from Sue, who was understandably preoccupied with the upcoming change in her life.  A few weeks later, I had to call her about something.  Tim was at her apartment that night, and he picked up the phone.  Because I hadn’t talked to him in a long time, I said, “Hi, Tim!  Anything new with you?”  “Actually,” he replied, “there is something new—something pretty significant.”  He seemed genuinely excited, and I thought to myself, “How sweet!  He wants to tell me about the engagement.”  I decided to play dumb and not spoil his surprise.  “Really?” I said in my most dissembling voice,  “What’s that?”  “Well,” he continued, sounding as if he’d burst if he didn’t get the words out soon, “Sue got a new truck!”  After a stunned moment or two, I managed a weak “Wow!” and extricated myself from the conversation, which had turned to horsepower and hauling capacity.  At least Tim didn’t add as an afterthought, “Oh, yeah, and Sue and I are gonna get hitched.”  I can’t explain why that would have made it worse, but it would have.

Even when we wives aren’t the object of men’s verbal broadsides (intentional or not), they still make us cringe.  In fact, sometimes the outward-directed blooper is even worse, because instead of thinking to ourselves, “Why did I marry this guy?” we’re thinking, “Everyone staring at me is wondering why I married this guy.”  It’s the difference between private and public humiliation.

As an example, some years ago a couple I know attended a gigantic outdoor banquet thrown by an organization to which they belonged.  The husband was not happy with the affair.  He spied a man walking past their table and, assuming he was a busboy or some other member of the serving staff, pulled him aside and commenced complaining bitterly about everything under the sun.  As his poor, hapless wife looked on, he informed the man that their seats were unacceptable, the food stank, the flies were bothersome, the burrs stuck to his socks from walking through a field to the table were giving him hives, and who knows what else.  The man apologized for everything…and then introduced himself as the host of the event and the keynote speaker.  I never asked his wife about the incident.  I think the fact that they haven’t had any more children since then says it all.

Men, for their part, seem to feel that women put them between a rock and a hard place where there is no right answer.  Hence, the apocryphal story of the woman who models a new pair of pants in front of her husband and asks, “Does this make me look fat?”  In the real world, that has never happened.  She might ask a sister, a mother, a girlfriend.  But a husband?  Never!

What women do do is hope for a little acknowledgment of us and our feelings every now and then.  That’s why most of us are big on I-love-you’s, cards and flowers, and we’d rather not be told that we’re no Kerri Walsh.  But still, you’ve got to be grateful for what you have.  There are worse things than a husband who occasionally has to floss a boot out from between his molars.  The “Silent Treatment,” for instance, which is often the two-day aftermath of pointing out to one’s husband that he’s got shoe leather stuck in his teeth.

But the upshot of all this is that, yes, I asked for it.  I could have just let him enjoy Kerri Walsh and Misty May and their tight little buns and abs and whatall without saying a word.  After all, he lets me watch Brad Pitt movies without complaining, and he knows I’m not watching them for their intellectual content.

So from now on, I’m keeping my trap zipped as long as what he’s doing is pretty innocent.  After all, what else has a guy who’s over the hill and graying at the temples got to look forward to?  In a few years, Male Menopause will put an end to all that, and…

What?  Me?  What’d I say?  Sheesh!  You could be a little less sensitive…