The American Husband

Once again, it’s that time o’ year – Labor Day. And again, you are either relegated to an interminable road trip to go spend time with family you would rather not know or you’re housebound with a series of weekend events, pool activities, children’s sports extravaganzas or somesuch. In any case, there is a good chance you are going to be involved somehow in the charring of some meat over some kind of fire source.

Labor Day is the metaphorical last gasp for barbecueing and grilling for the summer. For the more dedicated grillers among us, the three day weekend represents nothing more than another shot at grilling greatness. But, for many folks, it’s the last hurrah. Something changes in the collective mindset after Labor Day as we go from hunting to gathering – readying ourselves to cope with the coming winter months – storing nuts, hoarding beer, you know the drill.

So, while we have a chance, let’s talk about cooking some stuff. Outdoors. With beer and tongs in hand.

As a husband in America, it is expected that you will know your way around a grill. This is a stereotypical assumption, but it can serve you well sometimes – for instance, when you are at a lame party and you want to get away, you can always say “honey, I’m going to go help with the grilling” and your wife will understand that you must go do your civic duty. It can hurt sometimes too – for instance, when you end up at some function where none of the other guys knows a fuel regulator from his asshole and your wife says “Bill (or Bob, or whatever the hell your name is) knows how to grill pretty well” and you find yourself crammed behind the business end of spatula for three hours.

At any rate, you should be aware of how to grill and you should know what a fuel regulator is and how to get a grill to light when it’s being intransigent and you should be able to get charcoals lit on the first try. There is actually a pretty long list of things you should know and we are going to cover a bunch of them right here. So, let’s get started.

Equipment:
This is a gas grill:

This is a charcoal grill:

Do not confuse these. The gas grill can blow your ass to South Dakota (if you are reading this in South Dakota, it can blow your ass to North Dakota).

The gas grill requires propane and will generally not get quite as hot as the charcoal grill due to the limitations of propane to get really hot (not that this matters all that much, but it’s good to know). For some foods, the charcoal will impart a little bit of a smokey flavor – which can be desirable – but in general there isn’t that much difference in final product (this statement is bound to piss people off, but studies have shown that it blind tests, people can only tell the difference with steaks, and then only a little bit of a difference). So, which should you use? It’s a matter of choice. Gas grills are really easy to deal with and make for pretty easy clean up (no ashes to cope with, for instance). Gas grill temperatures can be regulated more easily than charcoal, but charcoal always seems somehow more, well, manly. Charcoal grills cost less to purchase, though long term, the cost starts to even out since a propane tank can go 15 hours or so on a full charge, where 15 hours of grilling would take quite a few bags of charcoal. The American Husband has both and, like cats and dogs, likes them equally, but for different reasons.

Other equipment:
This is a chimney starter. It is essential if you own a charcoal grill but want to avoid the sweet taste of lighter fluid on everything.

These are tongs. You need at least two pairs – maybe more, they’re cheap.

This is a grill brush – get a good one and don’t neglect cleaning your grill.

This is a probe thermometer. Get one. They are great for monitoring meat temp. You can get the handheld model or the one that’s meant to sit there and wait for you to come check it out – they both work well. (I know, I know, some purists insist that you can tell how done meat is using touch, smell, a divining rod, whatever. This is true, but that takes a lot of practice, experience and other things most guys don’t really have).

So, you have all this crap, now what do you do? Now it’s time to think about what you’re gonna eat. Do you dig beef, chicken, pork, fish, shellfish, veggies? Anything you can make in your kitchen, you can fuck up make on your grill as easily. Let’s hit on a few easy recipes.

Beef:
This is a cow.

This is another way to look at a cow.

The good parts include cuts from the: sirloin, tenderloin, rump and flank. Other parts are good too, but many of your most desirable parts come from here (note that ground beef often has a lot of chuck in it, that’s cool, it’s ground and has enough fat to make it desirable).

If you want to cook a steak, just marinate it in something salty (think Dale’s or Worcestershire or even a little soy) and then cook it according to this handy little guide:

Burgers, made from the aforementioned ground beef, can be created according to many tastes. Some simple rules include: don’t overhandle the meat – squish it up just enough to get the shape you need and then leave it alone; don’t overcook it. Well is a little too much for a burger – shoot for mid to mid-well. Add some veggies. diced, sauteed onions and green peppers (cooled off so they don’t cook the meat themselves) are great additions to any burger. Use a weird cheese – think dill havarti or gouda or something like that. Also, ranch dressing mix added to burgers before cooking (mix it in with the meat) is really good.

Pork
This is a pig (a really big one, at that)

The pig is pretty yummy, though only certain parts are given to cooking on a standard grill. Pork chops are very easy to cook on a grill and they are really good. Generally, you can season them as you would chicken (see below). Don’t overcook them (see note far below regarding “carry over” of meats. Pork chops should be cooked to between medium and medium-well. Ribs can be cooked on a gas grill or a charcoal grill, but the process is a little more involved and they are better suited for a smoker.

This is a smoker (and the subject of a different article)

Some recipes for pig parts include:
Bobby Flay’s Cuban Style Butterflied Pork Chops (pretentious? Yep. Good? Definitely).
How to Grill Pork Ribs.com (the site name says it all)
How to cook a pork shoulder on a charcoal grill (We recommend a smoker, but it can be done and the results can be good)

Chicken
This is a chicken.

There are many like it, but this one is… (oh never mind). Chickens are good eats. There are lots of ways to cook them. Often, people like to marinate them in barbecue sauce then put them over high heat until they are black on the outside and cooked in the middle. This is a terrible shame. The right way to cook a chicken on a grill is to get them over medium heat and exercise some fucking patience. True, you could just bake them, but then you have to sit around the kitchen and drinking beer and hanging around the kitchen is not as fun as drinking beer and hanging around the grill.

The beer can chicken is the new hot thing. Essentially, you take an entire bird, cram a half full can of beer up it’s ass and stick it on the grill until it’s golden brown and delicious.

Great for you, bad for the chicken.

Keep in mind for chicken cooking that lemon pepper, thyme and salt are all friends of poultry. Soy sauce is not. Red wine and chicken can go together if you making Coq Au Vin, but generally should be kept apart. Chicken skewers with veggies are good, as are chicken satay skewers. (Note that all of the preceeding are links upon which you can click to get the recipes.

Fish
Fish and grilling have a dicey relationship. Like Whitney and Bobby they have a propensity to not get along, but when they are doing well, they seem perfectly well suited for each other. The main rule with fish and a grill is: don’t let it stick. You can avoid sticking by using non-stick spray, cedar planks, aluminum foil or a fish basket.
This is a fish (particularly, it is a black sea bass, which are pretty yummy, but a bitch to clean, so buy filets) (By the way, this joke is not getting old)

This is a fish basket for your grill. These are pretty awesome and can save you a lot of headaches.

Fish can be cooked a million ways on a grill (like chicken). Some favorites are:
Alton Brown’s Chimney Tuna (this sounds weirder than it is, but it tastes fantastic)
Fish Tacos for the grill (obviously, the fish is cooked on the grill, then placed into tacos)
Simple grilled salmon (salmon seems like it was created for the grill. Be wary of pin bones in the meat, invest in needle nose pliers to de-bone the fillets prior to cooking, don’t rely on the grocer to have done this).

Shellfish
(Shrimp and crabs fall into this pile, too.)
These are all shellfish.

So many choices, so little time. Some poor bastards are allergic to these things (though few people are actually allergic to ALL shellfish, many are allergic to quite a few of them). Sorry folks. For those of you who are not allergic to shellfish, here are some simple rules. As soon as you feel that shrimp or scallops are done on the grill, they are nuked. The problem with grilling these for many people is that we have a tendency to overcook the crap out of them. Scallops should actually be cooked to something like medium, for instance, not well-done. So, to avoid this, cook one or two as test subject and pull them off slightly before you think they are done. Wait 60 seconds and then cut them open and look and see if they are opaque through and through. Chances are, they are and they are properly done. This is a function of something called carry-over. All meats carry over almost a whole level of doneness after they are taken off the heat. This is important, so we shall shout it:

ALL MEATS CARRY OVER ALMOST A WHOLE LEVEL OF DONENESS AFTER THEY ARE TAKEN OFF OF THE HEAT SOURCE.

Not heeding this will result in the destruction of good food.

So, what kind of shell fish recipes are good for Labor Day cooking? Glad you asked.

Shrimp A La Klose (from David Klose, the maker of some of the most awesome smoker grills on earth, comes this recipe for the most ridiculous shrimp ever made). Enjoy.
Grilled Scallops with Fennel (remember, it is very easy to screw up a scallop)
Emeril’s grilled dungeness crab legs (crab legs on the grill in general are good)

Veggies
Yeah, it’s not really what the grill seems like it was intended for, but it can be used to good effect. Mushrooms and the grill are well suited as they are pretty moist and can be marinated for even better results. Peppers are good too. Tomatoes can be grilled, but the results can be variable. It takes a little practice to not screw these up. Pineapple slices grilled are awesome – especially when served as a dessert with vanilla ice cream.

There aren’t a ton of recipes for grilled vegetables that we will cover here since typically the marinade is where it’s at. Vegetables should be grilled until they are a little bit blackened, but not until they have lost all moisture. Corn and the grill go hand in hand. There are a couple of ways to do corn including:
Corn in foil (this enables you to prep faster. Essentially, you shuck the corn, slather on a little butter or margarine and then wrap in foil. Cook until the corn starts to smell sweeter that it did initially. This is an indication that the corns natural sugars are caramelizing.
Corn in the husk. You can cook corn on the grill in its husk by simply peeling back the husk, removing the silk and then re-tying the husk with cooking twine (you may want to throw in some butter if you want some flavor). Cook, again, until you smell some sweetness.

So, there you have it. An, admittedly, very brief overview of grilling prior to Labor Day. There are million other resources out there, but hopefully at least one thing on here inspired you or gave you some new knowledge you didn’t have before.

As a husband or dad, your job is to bring home and cook meat for your family. This labor day, if you aren’t familiar with your grill (or, heaven forbid, you don’t even own one) get outside an acquaint yourself with some of mankind’s oldest friends and reliable companions – fire and beer. Enjoy.

TheAmerican Husband

Create Your Badge

A friend of The American Husband’s writes a blog geared toward women. She is funny, she makes a lot of good points and she provides a view of marriage that is essentially diametrically opposed to that offered by yours truly. Today’s post covered a topic that comes up again and again in marriage – husbands don’t get “it”.

What is “it”, you may ask?

“It” is the things that drive wives crazy. “It” is why she wants to kill you when you get home from a day at the office (or whatever job you have that takes you away from the tiny terrorists living in your house). “It” is the reason you don’t understand “fine”.

We, as men, don’t get “it”

Our wives sit at home and spend the whole day wondering where the fuck their adulthood went? They wonder why they are the ones being subjected to constant screaming and whining, bickering over what show to watch, flinging of various bodily substances and backtalking/disrespectful mouthiness from the midget monstrosities they are forced to tend?

That’s a fair question. And, it’s a question guys fundamentally don’t care about. We just don’t think about it. We are socialized to believe that women are just better at that stuff. It’s probably true that women are better at being caregivers without freaking out than men, but that doesn’t mean they want to do it more – especially not at 5pm after a long day when your dumb ass is still out drinking with co-workers and at least 3 hours from returning and providing some blissful relief.

But, we don’t care, because we are insensitive. It takes a lot to get a guy to realize that something is bothering our wives and that drives them crazy. It’s not something we can easily fix, but we should try (more on that later) if for no other reason than to keep her from chopping us into tiny bits.

My friend also talked about the word “fine”.

Fine.

What a simple word.

In normal conversation, if someone seems like something might be wrong with them, and you decide to try out a little humanity for a change, you will ask how they are. They may respond “fine”.

That response is like a cool breeze to a guy. It means that yes, the person is not well, but no, you don’t have to press for more information and they aren’t going to provide any. It’s a get out of jail free card.

At home, it’s different.

When our wives respond “fine” to our request for a status update, we continue along believing that, yes, things are unwell, but I don’t need to do anything or say anything. She is not happy, things are not well, but the best course of action is to maintain status quo and move forward quietly. This too shall pass.

And it may pass. For a while.

But, sooner or later, she is going to go “kerpow”. She is going to go “kerpow” because she is continually pissed at the aforementioned transgressions that you, as a male, aren’t aware that you are making.

You are disregarding the fact that she feels like she is wasting 4 years of college and 18 years of adulthood tending to several ungrateful thugs (you are included in that menagerie). You are disregarding the fact that she is pissed that physically she feels like a shadow of her former self and you are la-di-dahing to the gym everyday working on getting back in shape and looking great. You are also disregarding that most fundamental of female needs – the need to just say “this is what’s wrong, don’t try to fix it. Shut up, listen, be empathic, nod, and then take these horrible progeny of yours and leave for a while”.

And, of course, we don’t get that. Because we are guys. And guys are insensitive clods. So, how do we address this problem? Well, we need to understand that, at home, fine means you need to spring to action. Fine means clear out the kids, give the Momma some space and then, maybe later, allow her to vent at you. As we have discussed in earlier articles, women for some reason need to talk about problems without worrying about solutions. This is ridiculous, but it also IS, so deal and move on.

We don’t get it because we don’t live it. It’s harder for men to empathize with someone when we haven’t been in their shoes. Guys generally don’t stay home all day, feeling like they haven’t done what they wanted to do with their lives. We don’t generally watch the days slipping by while our bodies go to pot and long some way out.

But (and this is a big but) we owe it to our wives to try to understand and give them a respite sometimes. Otherwise, they are going to chop us up into tiny bits.”

This has been a public service announcement from The American Husband.

“I can’t die. I got two kids and my wife doesn’t fuckin’ work, so I can’t die, I don’t get to die”
-Louis CK

There is no subject that seems to galvanize the opinion of married males more than money. Sex, religion, sports, favorite porn star, etc. None of these evoke the kind of passion, the sort of barely concealed rage that money does. We’re not talking about money in an abstract sense. It’s hard to be pissed off about a dollar bill. Yeah, it’s getting old looking at George all the time (how about someone else for a while?), but you can’t be truly mad AT money.

No, husbands are mad ABOUT money. Why are husbands so mad? There are several reasons. Husbands are mad that they don’t make enough money; husbands are pissed that “The Man” is taking too much of their money; husbands are mad that their money isn’t performing well enough in the market. These are all among the myriad of reasons why husbands are mad about money. They are not THE reason, though. No, underneath the generalized frustration with money that every husband feels, there is a deeper reason – a dark undercurrent that every husband can see, hear and viscerally feel on a daily basis. We don’t dare speak of it with one another because the mere mention of it elicits rage and discontent – a feeling of being emasculated by their inability to control this one money problem. What is this problem, you ask?

Our Wives.

They are the human embodiment of a money problem.

The American Husband would like to interject in his own rant here to point out that this is all a gross generalization. It always is, that’s what this site is about -it’s not about being fair. You want fair? Go to a fucking pro golf tournament.

Somewhere along the way – perhaps around 6th, 7th or 8th grade (hell, maybe in 12th grade) – women start to lose comprehension for how money works. It’s no surprise that there are so few women on Wall Street and in high pressure finance jobs. It’s not a fucking coincidence, folks. It’s not a result of any glass ceiling either. Nope. It’s because few women really GET money.

To women in general, it seems that money is a weird intangible that will just magically replenish itself. Like some kind of fountain of youth, money will always be there to make everything perfect again. Now, we’re not talking about bills, per se. Women are often pretty good at managing the bills. The problem comes with discretionary spending and money that is not currently apparent in a concrete fashion. Let’s give an example.

Take a credit card (seriously, take MY credit cards – specifically, take MY credit cards from MY wife). Anyway, take a credit card, here is a device which has in it the power to place your wife squarely into a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes. (Don’t ask what they are, if you are married, you’ve probably been forced to sit through enough Sex and the City that you know the difference between Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik. Anyway, the credit card doesn’t represent REAL money to your wife, it represents a pair of Manolo Blahniks that she doesn’t have to shell out cash for right at the moment. It also represents a bunch of mani/pedis, a few hundred blouses, some kind of crazy shit for her skin that costs $453 an ounce and God knows what the fuck else.

What a credit card doesn’t represent is real fucking money.

When The American Husband thinks of all the people he knows – or has encountered in his travels – who have spending problems, he notes a disturbing trend. They are almost invariably women. Even single women have this problem. Stereotypes are always based in reality, folks. And there is a hell of a lot of reality in this particular type of stereo.

So, we’re mad. Yeah. big deal. What’s to be done, you ask?

Well, here at The American Husband, we are always focused on giving advice (whether you want it or not, you’re going to get – think of it as “advice rape”).

The way we figure it, your wife’s inability to grasp the importance of money to you is her way of sharing that she doesn’t respect your feelings at matters of importance. Now, you may say

“But American Husband, I already know she doesn’t respect my feelings about matters of importance or else she would let me watch the Bears game on Monday instead of sitting around talking about HER goddamned feelings”.

It’s true, your wife considers you to be an emotionally immature dolt because your feelings are reflected in such superficial things as sports teams and fishing and financial security.

Silly mo-fo.’

You’re shit is not nearly as important as the beef she has with her sister over where she was forced to stand in the lineup at her wedding. THAT shit is serious, man.

Financial security. Pshaw.

Whew. Now that all that sarcasm is out of the way…In all seriousness, she probably doesn’t get why you are so concerned about it because she has never been programmed to be concerned about it. Most women are raised to not worry about the money side of things. It’s a by-product of western culture. Girls aren’t supposed to concern themselves with such heady and “manly” pursuits or concerns as money and finance. The downside of that culturization is that women grow up thinking money grows on trees OR that’s it’s an issue they don’t need to worry too much about.

Clearly, that view is incompatible with the nearly limitless ability of the modern housewife to bankrupt the household when in possession of a credit card and in “need” of a wardrobe that would make Jackie O blush. So, you have to teach her about why it’s important and you have to indicate clearly that your feelings on the subject run very deep. You can’t just expect your wife to absorb your concerns on the issue through osmosis. Despite what you think, sleeping next to, on top of, or under something does not help you divine all that the object contains. You will need to talk with her and let her know that if she respects you and your concerns, she will take this seriously and adjust spending accordingly

Before we close, we would be remiss if we didn’t address th other frequently occurring reason for mad spending syndrom –  she may be engaging in “retail therapy” – the tendency to buy things as a way to handle negative emotions or stress. If this is your problem, well, you’re fucked unless she gets happy or gets some professional therapy. May we suggest an anti-depressant? They’re much cheaper than Jimmy Choos

Great question.

No. Yes. Maybe.

How good or bad marriage is depends on a whole host of things. Like a dinner party or an orgy, how good or bad a marriage is has a lot to do with the interests, stamina and patience of the attendees.

Marriage can be good for a guy when he and the wife are on the same page. This is not to say that they need to do everything together or share the exact same interests. What is important though, is that the couple is okay with one another’s interests, recognizes that those things are important to their spouse and gives them the time they need to pursue their interests. It’s all a matter of respect. If you’re gonna’ spend the rest of your life with someone, you need to feel like they respect you or else you’re gonna’ have a really dreary time until the point that the whole thing implodes.

The American Husband knows couples who spend virtually no time together, yet they are solid and reliable because they have a high degree of respect for one another. When the wife comes home from work, the husband is interested in her day – or at least acts that way convincingly enough that she feels respected. When the husband announces he wants to go for a bike ride, the wife makes some time so that he can pursue his interest. That there is a marriage based on respect for one another’s needs.

However.

The American Husband also knows marriages where the husband doesn’t pay a bit of attention to the wife. Where the wife nags the husband anytime that he wants to go out with his buddies or do something that crashes into her free time. These are marriages built on resentment or selfishness and they aren’t usually going to last.

Marriage, like a firearm, is not an inherently bad or good thing. It is a tool, a means to theoretically improve the mental and emotional well being of two people – and also a means to keep dudes from stalking the streets snatching up women to hump (let’s face it, a significant part of the justification for marriage is to domesticate guys).

So, should you get married? Maybe. I would say though that you should look very carefully at your motivations for getting married, look at your true compatibility and make sure that you test drive the hell out of it before you pay for it – or else you may get very, very different mileage than what was advertised.

The American Husband wonders: “Do husbands really need Viagra because they can’t get it up anymore”?

Guys growing older these days have a hard time knowing if, in fact, losing the ability to get it up is something that always happened. It’s not like our fathers were all that forthcoming about stuff like that.

It’s hard to picture Ward Cleaver sitting down with Wally and the Beav saying “boys, let me tell you what’s going to happen to your penis when you get to be the same age as your old dad here”.

So, we take it as gospel that the problem of erectile dysfunction was lurking in the shadows behind middle aged men for many eons before our present day sexual openness brought it out into the light of day to stand up (or not, as the case may be) and be recognized, and dealt with.

Today, it is nearly impossible to get through a full day without hearing something about how your junk could be working better. Emails, ads, radio commercials, everywhere we are bombarded with imprecations to consider our ability to get a boner. Guys today are forced to focus constantly on whether or not their wood is sufficient to satisfy their wives, girlfriends, sheep, whatever.

By the time you are 45 – according to the latest campaign being run by SmithPfizerJohnson, your wood wil have reached wet noodle stage. “It’s okay, it happens to all men” they assure you. “It’s just a part of getting older” they tell us. “Our drug can help” they declare.

So, yeah, their drug can help. But, is it really as common a part of growing old as they say? Or, is it a function of other things? Could it be possible that the REAL reasons Viagra is becoming so common are:

• The drug companies have scared men into spending 95% of their time focused on their dicks (where before we only spent 87.2% of our time focused on our dicks ), or
• We don’t want to fuck our wives anymore.

That’s right. Maybe Viagra is needed because, after 20 years of marriage, it is goddamn near impossible to get jazzed up enough about the same piece of ass to get a serviceable hard-on.

That’s not popular. As obsessed as we are in this culture with fidelity and cheating and all that other bullshit that we have conned ourselves into believing is natural and right for humans. Let’s call a spade a spade here – monogamy is NOT the natural state of affairs for human males. We know, we know, it’s necessary to keep civil order, blah, blah, blah.

Look, The American Husband is a monogamous guy – he doesn’t cheat. But, to paraphrase Chris Rock, “I understand”.

It is very possible that in the olden days, the reason Ward Cleaver didn’t have to talk about his dork to Wally and the Beav is because he and June were sleeping in different beds. They hadn’t fucked for 13 years (or however long it had been since the Beave was born). To be fair, Hugh Beaumont was gay, so he hadn’t fucked any ladies in 13 years, so far as we know. At any rate, the point is, back then, there wasn’t an opportunity to find out if the thing worked or not, because people stopped screwing in their late 30′s (at the absolute latest).

Now, thanks to the fucking Baby Boomer generation, guys are having to keep on fucking their wives well into their 50′s and 60′s. That generation is so goddamn over-sexed that they can’t stop cranking out movies live It’s Complicated where 50-60 something couples are still screwing like bunny rabbits – it’s no wonder they consume Viagra likes its going out of style.

But, really, Jesus H. Christ, how are we supposed to keep getting it up for the exact same piece of tail for 40 years?

The thing they aren’t showing you in movies like It’s Complicated is that in real life Alec Baldwin is mainlining liquid Cialis into his dick vein to keep himself hard.

We’re not saying we don’t love our wives and We’re not saying that we don’t still find them attractive. What we ARE saying is that the ability to reliably get excited by the same woman for 4 decades is abso-fucking-lutely going to decline. A lot.

So, we have the little blue pill. This is not to knock the little blue pill. This is all to say that perhaps the culprit behind this epidemic of limp-dickedness is in fact not the physiology of the husband, but the simple psychological reality that attraction wanes. We would wager that if you took a random sample of 100 men using Viagra to get it up with their wives and you stuck them in a seedy motel room with some nubile young tramp who can put both her feet behind her head at one time you would find that the little blue pill was all of a sudden not so necessary.

We’re not sayin’, we’re just sayin’.

The American Husband has noticed a disturbing trend – divorce.

Yeah, we know, that seems a little counterintuitive given the tenor of this site. But, it is important to note that the American Husband is not anti-marriage. Nor is the American Husband misogynistic or anti-wife. In fact, the American Husband is all about the wives and totally cool with marriage – presuming that the marriage is one of equals where the husband isn’t treated like a combination Mr. Fixit/Paycheck Generator/Butt of Jokes.

You may wonder, what then is so “disturbing” about divorce? It’s not divorce per se’ that is disturbing. It’s the trend of couples who are seemingly happy suddenly going tits up in a matter of weeks.

This post was motivated by, of course, Facebook. The crazy thing about Facebook is that you get to watch people’s lives unfold continuously. It provides a voyeuristic look inside the inner workings of people’s everyday comings and goings and many people are more than happy to air their dirty laundry all over the place. Because of this, you get accustomed to people telling you all manner of seemingly private details about their lives – “Bob is: recovering from an anal exam”, “Suzie is: lamenting that my husband’s dick isn’t big enough”, etc. – the point is, you come to expect this kind of behavior from all of the denizens of Facebook.

For this reason, it is doubly crazy when someone suddenly changes their status from “married” or “in a relationship” to “single” with no warning at all. You have to wonder if they even warn the person who was once the other half of the relationship or marriage.
Is this the new way to break up with someone?

Even more strange, is that it often seems that it’s the women who initiate these changes of status.

A friend recounted that, in their church, when there is infidelity, the most common cause is Facebook – and the most common instigator of the relationship is the woman. How crazy is that? Facebook has become for women what the office was for men in the old days. A place to interact with people of the opposite sex who find you mentally or physically attractive and who are waiting for some chink in the armor to reveal itself so that they can pounce.

So, back to divorce. What’s truly disconcerting is that it seems all too often that everything is peachy keen in la-la land and then suddenly couples are taking the A train to Splitsville. And, as mentioned earlier, Facebook seems to have conditioned us to believe that if anything is even remotely wrong with a couple, they will air it out in public for all to see and consume.

All of this makes you wonder, are there some kind of indicators that you can look for? Is there some kind of distant early warning system that will let you know when things are amiss?

We think there are a couple of clues. Perusing the “friends” who have had problems, you notice a trend where there is a significant lack of photos of the person’s significant other. If a man or woman only posts pictures of their kids and none of their spouse, there is trouble in paradise. Secondly, look at the ratio of same sex to opposite sex friends and look at the comments made by opposite sex friends (as well as the responses by the recipient). This will give a lot of clues as to what kind of individual you are dealing with. If a person is even close to parity between men and women friends and they have no pictures of their significant other, watch out.
Importantly, you must remember that these are only clues and the absence or presence of either indicator is not dispositive. There are certainly cases where everything really looks totally hunky-dory and it proves to all have been a sham.

What are we to make of this, as men? Well, the American Husband thinks we should probably make damn sure that things are in order at our own homes. In today’s age, there is no question that women are very much empowered to make big lifestyle changes without the reservations that once held them back.

It’s important to keep in mind that women actually stew a lot more than men too – that means that women will let the pressure build way up, they won’t say a word and then – kerpow – you get served with papers while you’re on the back 9 with your buddies. It is also important to remember that women are often far more decisive than men when it comes to things like divorce – once they have made up their minds, it is very difficult to sway them.

And, remember, Facebook can be deceiving, but it can also provide tell-tale clues about the health of your relationship. Watch it closely for changes in your wife (or girlfriend’s) demeanor.

This is another subject which will have more posts about it, so watch this space for updates. In the meantime, watch your six.

TheAmerican Husband

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