Sinking the Love Boat

The only thing harder than making a relationship work is making a relationship work at sea. There are lot less outlet malls in the Caribbean, which means a woman will stay mad at you longer.

Some guests and crew refer to our ship as “The Love Boat.”  Unfortunately, one cruise isn’t going to help you if your relationship is in trouble. Because once a woman has it in her mind that you’re a selfish a-hole, nothing you do or say will convince her otherwise.

WOMAN:

“I can’t justify buying myself this Coach bag. It’s too expensive.”

MAN:

“The let me buy it for you. In fact, nothing would make me happier.”

WOMAN:

“Oh, so it’s about your happiness now, is it? Who cares if it makes me happy as long as it makes you happy, is that right?”

MAN:

“No, if I wanted to make myself happy, I’d buy you two Coach bags and fill them both with Midol.”

How would women like it if men acted this way?

WOMAN:

“Nothing would make me happier than to buy you this Craftsman tool set for your birthday.”

MAN:

“Of course it would make you happy. That way you could ask me to fix more crap around the house when I’m trying to watch the damn ballgame.”

Another challenging aspect of relationships is every woman has a knack for making her man fell “damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” She’ll say something like, “You used to be so romantic—how come you never buy me flowers anymore?”

So then he’ll come home with a dozen roses only to have her say, “Yeah? Well, you just did that because I told you to.”

Again, how would women like it if men pulled that crap?

MAN:

“Will you marry me?”

WOMAN:

“Yes.”

MAN:

“Yeah, well you’re just saying that because I asked you. If you really wanted to marry me, I wouldn’t have to propose.”

One of the biggest misconceptions about men is that we’re afraid of marriage. We aren’t afraid of marriage. We’re afraid of divorce.

MINISTER:

“Do you promise to take this woman as your lawfully wedded wife, and to love and cherish until death do you part?”

GROOM:

“I do.”

MINISTER:

“But if she stops loving and cherishing you, do you promise to continue to financially support her while she sleeps with somebody else who makes more money than you in the house you’re still paying for?”

GROOM:

“Oh, hell yeah, Reverend—slice me off a piece of that!”

How eager do you think women would be to get married if divorce laws favored men?”

MINISTER:

“Do you promise to take this man as your lawfully wedded husband?”

BRIDE:

“I do.”

MINISTER:

“And should you decide to divorce him for any reason, do you promise to do cook and clean for him—as well as do the nasty with him—once a month as party of his ‘man alimony’?”

BRIDE:

“Help!! Oprah!! Help!!

If you ask me, the biggest obstacle to a successful marriage is opposing worldviews between the sexes. Women view their wedding day as the ending to their very own fairytale, whereas men view their wedding day as the beginning of Real Life.”

WOMAN:

“I’m going to live happily ever after!”

MAN:

“I’m going to be in financial debt for the rest of my life!”

WOMAN:

“We’re going to make beautiful babies together and dress them up in adorable little outfits!”

MAN:

“The cost of raising a child to adulthood is a quarter of a million dollars!”

WOMAN:

“We’ll be living in a storybook romance!”

MAN:

“We’ll do it once a year on my birthday, if I’m lucky!”

I think both sexes would be better prepared for marriage, if were better at articulating our expectations.

MAN:

“Will you marry me?”

WOMAN:

“Of course I will!”

MAN:

“Okay, so now that I’ve proven my love by giving you what I want, I expect you to back off and give me my space so I can live my life with a minimum of emotional drama.”

WOMAN:

“Okay, but now that you’ve proven your love by giving me what I want, I expect you to give me what I want every single day of my life, even though what I want will constantly change, so you’ll have to read my mind, because I’m not going to tell you what I want, because you’re supposed to know what I want, and if you don’t know what I want, that’ll mean I married the wrong man, and then I’ll want a divorce.”

Another frustrating thing about relationships is most women expect their men to read their minds.

MAN:

“What would you like for your birthday, Sweetheart?”

WOMAN:

“I shouldn’t have to tell you what I want; you should know what I want.”

MAN:

“Okay, how about these emerald earrings?”

WOMAN:

“But I don’t like emeralds. Green isn’t my color.”

MAN:

“How was I supposed to know that?”

WOMAN:

“You could have asked.”

Men have such a hard time understanding women; it’s as if women speak their own language. The only way men are ever going to understand women is if the makers of Rosetta Stone language learning software come up with “Rosetta Stone: Female”:

I’m cooking your favorite dish for dinner tonight. Translation: “I spent a shitload of money at the mall today.”

The wallpaper in the kitchen is starting to look faded. Translation: “Your weekend is shot—Home Depot, here we come!”

“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” The proper response?“Sure, Sweetheart, I’ll gladly run to the store for you—Stay Free or Playtex?”

The weird thing about bad relationships is that they are completely avoidable. Everything we need to know about how and why a relationship will fail is staring us right in the face whenever we first start dating someone. But when we’re lonely and desperate, we choose to ignore those red flags.

WOMAN:

“Well, we could just go to your place and watch a movie. Do you have Netflix?”

MAN:

“Naw, they make you sign up for Netflix and I’m just not ready for that level of commitment. Besides, where am I going to find eight bucks a month?”

WOMAN:

“In that case, why don’t we just fool around on the couch?”

MAN:

“Okay, but we have to be careful not to wake up my parents.”

What we need is an i-Phone app that’ll catch the red flags for us. Install “Red Flags Mobile” on your i-Phone and Siri becomes our guardian angel:

WOMAN:

“Did you just flirt with our waitress?”

SIRI:

“Careful, Michael. You are having dinner with a psycho bitch.”

MAN:

“I just moved in with my sister and her family. But it’s only temporary while I get my own catering company up and running.”

SIRI:

“Careful, Debbie. This loser is looking for a sugar mama to support him while he spends his worker’s comp settlement at the Indian casino.”

When planning to get married, men have a tendency to view marriage as a business partnership. This can take the romance right out of an engagement for women.

 

MAN:

“If we want to get married, we’ll have to have a nice place to live. If we want a nice place to live, we’ll have to save money. If we want to save money, we’ll have to build solid careers. If we want to build solid careers, we’ll have to further our educations. If we want to further our educations, we’ll have to take out student loans. So if we want to get married, we’ll have to postpone the considerable expenditures of a wedding and a honeymoon until we have a nice place to live, have solid careers and have paid off our student loans. What do you think, Sweetheart?”

WOMAN:

“Well, when you put it that way, I feel like a princess in my very own fairytale. So thanks for sweeping me off my feet, Prince A-hole!”

Although women hate this goal-driven worldview, if we men viewed marriage the same way women do, they would want nothing to do with us.

WOMAN:

“Okay, you’re the man—start planning our life together.”

“What’s to plan? Let’s just go into debt by having a big fancy wedding with all of our friends and family, and then watch all of our financial problems be miraculously solved by your magical white wedding dress and drunken line dances with all your giggly bridesmaids. I’ll get a job working the Jamocha Shake machine at Arby’s and you can catsit for eight bucks an hour and we’ll live in a rented RV in the Wal-Mart -parking lot. Who needs plans when we’ve got love, Baby?”

WOMAN:

“Yeah? Well, I think I’d rather kiss Katy Perry and see if I like it.”

A friend of mine recently got divorced for the second time. First he lost his house, then he lost his car. I’m jealous: I’m 48 years old and I don’t own a house or a car and I would love to have two crazy women to blame my crappy standard of living on.

“Dude, where’s your house?”

“My first wife has it.”

“Dude, where’s your car?”

“My second wife has it?”

“Dude, where are your balls?”

“Joint custody.”

Knowing how to compromise is the most valuable relationship skill. Problem is men and women have different ideas of what it means to compromise. For a man, compromise means, “I want to do this and you want to do that so why don’t we do a little of this and then do a little of that?”

For a woman, compromise means: “I want to do this and you want to do that, so why don’t you go do that with those stupid a-hole friends of yours since you obviously love them more than you love me?!”

To which the proper response is always: “Let’s go on a cruise!”

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