Am I Bad for Wanting to Train My Wife?

If I quietly teach my wife sign language to avoid future confrontation, am I a "Good boy!" or a "Bad boy?" I need to know, as I need to find a way out of the doghouse.

Table of Contents

1. The Story

2. The Conflict: In Haiku format

3. A great quote from a bad movie

4. My wild and/or genius idea about how Improv comedy and ASL will save my marriage.

The Story

The Players

Player One (AKA the Author)

Player One has ADHD and a compulsive need for validation. He forces his wife to listen to his wild and/or genius ideas. He could as easily share his thoughts with a plant as he only wants to speak his ideas aloud, develop them, see where they lead, and hear his own voice. (This is neither intended to insult his wife nor his plants, as he loves them all equally.)

Examples of his ridiculous and/or genius ideas

• Building a guitar from bamboo growing behind the house. He cannot play the guitar and has no experience in Luthiery.

• Building a kayak out of the pile of newspapers, old student posters, and homework submissions in his office. (He actually started this one…)

• Cooling suspenders you wear over your t-shirt but under your dress shirt. It has pockets for ice packs. He has sketches…

Player Two

The wife. A realist with little time for bullshit. She used to give up when customer support said, “Sorry, nothing we can do…” However, her husband trained her out of that, and she now pushes back and gets results. This makes her his hero when dealing with Japanese customer support, but she has learned to use it against him. He regrets this.

The Scene

(Player One is sitting at his desk and journaling aggressively as Player Two walks in to check on him.)

Player One Journals, Player Two enters the scene.

Player Two: How’s it going?

Player One: Uh, good… What if we built a dog door in the sliding screen door so the dog can get out to pee when I am too focused on my work and don’t notice her pacing around and trying to get my attention, so she pees on the carpet and I get mad at her and blame it on her when it is really my fault (inhales…), but we make it so that she can only get out and not in so like a roach hotel, hahaha, but she would figure that out and stop using it so I guess it has to open both ways. Whaddaya think? Should we…

Player Two: No. She’d never use it.

Player One stops, mid-word, mouth agape, unsure how to continue…

/End scene

The Conflict, in Haiku format

Player one plants seeds,
Player two stomps on flowers.
Player one feels sad.

The Fallout

Player One feels sad and/or angry. In his eyes, his beautiful new idea, born fresh and clean, was presented to his wife for love and nurturing, and she punted it over the fence. He reacts in one of two ways:

1. He tucks his tail like a cowed dog.

2. He Hulks out, as the stretched-out patchwork barrier keeping his anxiety suppressed has been breached, and his anxiety vents as anger.

Player Two is either mildly annoyed by the unsolicited elevator pitch or considers the social interaction completed and wants to go feed the cat. In Player One response #1, the cat gets fed. In the case of response #2, the cat goes into hiding. Player Two gets in verbal self-defense mode, and Player One Hulks out and rants about “stomping my flowers” and other ridiculous metaphors he expects her to understand.

Nobody wins.

A Great Quote from a Bad Movie

The movie is The Mexican, with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.

[Spoiler alert, but this movie is over two decades old, so…]

In this movie, there are two scenes where one person asks the other the following:

If two people love each other, but they just can’t seem to get it together. When do you get to that point of enough is enough?

The Bad Answer (Stop at around 1:20, trust me.)

The Good Answer

The Answer

Are you not going to click a YouTube link? I don’t blame you. The correct answer is “Never.” So, I will never give up on my marriage. I would rather try training my wife to respond to hand signals, like a Special Forces Commando (how I see it) or like a pet (how I am afraid she may see it.)

Proposed Solution: Improv Rules and ASL

After Hulking out a few times, I decided to teach my wife the rules of Improv Comedy. As I saw it, the fundamental problem with our communication pattern was that she always stopped me from exploring my ideas by sharing them. The obvious solution was to introduce the Improv Rules. The Complete and Unabridged Rules of Improvisational Comedy are, and please correct me if I am wrong

Alex Dobrenko`

, as follows:

The first rule of Improv is, “Yes, and…”

The second rule of Improv is, “Yes, and…”

The current problem is I keep forgetting to utter the phrase “Improv Rules” or “Yes, and” before launching into my insane/genius ideas, so we replay the scene above to the detriment of our relationship. I considered having one or both of these phrases tattooed on my arm for quick reference, but Japan…

So, my new idea is to say one of the two phrases above. (Step one really should be deciding on which phrase.) However, I will now add the visual clues of the ASL signs for “Y,” which is conveniently similar to a horizontal Hawaiian Shaka, and “A,” which is just holding up your hand like you are ready to knock on a door.

Y A in ASL, for “Yes, and…”

And, completely unrelated, but I know you are all thinking it, there is this:

I could also use the “Yes” sign for ASL, where you pretend your hand is a sock puppet nodding. And then the “and” sign, which is kind of like pretending your hand is a jellyfish swimming sideways in front of you, but that is just getting too complex. Also, as I am NOT going to learn to spell out I M P R O V R U L E S, we can just decide on “Yes, and…” right now.

As I can be energetic and forgetful, like a dog who always runs through the same screen door, I have created my own sign to pull out once I realize I forgot to use the “Y” and “A” signs. This is the “fence” sign (NOT ASL, but pretty close.)

My “Please don’t fence me in. Let my ideas spread and grow.” sign. It is also my “I am napping, so please don’t wake me up" warning when I am in the hammock. (No hands or yoga mats were harmed in the production of this image.)

This is the sign I will pull out and slowly raise to demonstrate that I feel she is “fencing in my ideas,” and I am frustrated. One great thing about this is that I can use all of these signs in public to avoid participating in spousal arguments as a spectator sport.

So, am I a bad husband for wanting to train my wife?

(Or, am I really just training myself to provide social cues to signal my emotional needs? Wow. That sudden realization hit kinda hard.)