the physics of love
by lavinia plonka

This morning, my husband Ron, obviously possessed, decided to make a stab at some of yesterday’s dirty dishes. He got as far as a wooden bowl. He picked up the obviously Asian, delicately painted bowl gingerly. His expression was reminiscent of someone who, on a casual walk through woods, stumbles upon an alien’s ray gun. Now this bowl was given to us almost a year ago, one of two with matching chopsticks, by a houseguest. Ron looks at me, holding the bowl. “Where does this go?”

I stare at him. “What?” is my incredulous reply. I heard him. Of course I heard him. And I could simply say, “It goes on the display shelf next to its mate.” But I don’t. Sadist? Masochist? You be the judge.

He’s now intently contemplating the chopsticks. He now knows, just from the timbre and nuance of my “What?” that he’s supposed to remember this bowl. He’s supposed to know its history, its place in the house. He knows that his question has triggered Irate Condescending Female Syndrome. It is painful to endure an episode, and his mind is feverishly trying to decide whether to surrender, or attempt to rescue himself. He digs himself deeper. “These chopsticks. They match the bowl, don’t they?” I can barely contain myself. “Yes, dear, they are a set.” He ponders the little notch and hole, cleverly placed there by some underpaid laborer so that the chopsticks can rest neatly on the bowl. After a couple of minutes of fiddling, he has them together. He glances, slightly desperately, around the kitchen. He does not want to ask me again, so he opens the cabinet where we keep bowls and starts to quietly put the bowl with the chopsticks in.

“Not there!” I sputter, appalled at the resemblance of my voice to Daffy Duck’s. He jumps back.

“I know!” he protests. “I was uh, I was just rearranging the shelf in there, see?” He pulls out an ancient salad bowl, given to us as part of a set for our wedding 26 years ago. “I would never put this lovely, delicate, painted bowl in with these cracked, old things.”
Now I have to prioritize my ire – how dare he call those lovingly oiled cherished walnut bowls cracked old things? But that would distract me from the more immediate game – the “you never remember anything game.” So I let go of the righteous indignation and zero in for the kill. “Well now, I think that bowl goes with the other bowl. Remember, we got two?”

His eyes panic. “Two bowls? Of course, we have two bowls.” He is now whirling around the kitchen, bowl in hand, opening cabinets.
I stop him. And lead him to the display shelves, placing the bowl next to its brother. “That’s where they’ve been all year. Remember? We decided they were too beautiful to hide away?”

He stares at them. “Display. They’re display items. Why would I think of getting food bowls from a display shelf?” As if that is an acceptable excuse.

My girlfriends smile compassionately and nod in understanding at dinner parties where Ron regales others yet again with a story of his youthful exploits as an art student in Italy….43 years ago. His friends silently raise their eyebrows and their beer glasses in homage to Ron each time he has to endure the icy sarcasm of his Baba Yaga bride. He fondly calls me his “dark angel”. I call him Mr. Hulot after a French film clown known for his hilarious and dangerous absentmindedness. Somehow we have staggered and flailed together for over 26 years of riotous adventures, several teetering brinks and countless arguments over how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Our atomic dance of positive, negative, yes and no, right and wrong, I did, you did not, has kept us spinning in complex patterns that would make John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Live dizzy. Friends often ask me how, in this age of broken marriages, Ron and I have managed to stay happily together. I sort of vaguely remember principles from physics that had to do with attraction, covalent bonds (or was that chemistry) and the absolute power of certain cosmic laws. My guess is that Ron’s and my cha-cha through time, if shrunk to subatomic size, would resemble exactly the atomic behavior of a bedroom slipper. Something cozy and familiar. An object that finds its way into unexpected places. (“Have you seen my bedroom slipper?” “Hey, how did this slipper get in the stove?”) But of exactly the atomic behavior of a bedroom slipper. Something cozy and familiar. An object that finds its way into unexpected places. (“Have you seen my bedroom slipper?” “Hey, how did this slipper get in the stove?”) But of course I have no way of proving that our relationship is a macrocosm of a slipper, so I concentrate on continuing to perfect my dance, and keep our relationship as cozy and unpredictable as I can.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned in trying to share my life with a human of the male persuasion. This is a very unscientific report, based on research with one subject. For a more exhaustive study on the vast gulf between male and female, don’t stop at books like Men are From Mars. There’s a vast literature written by professionals who are eager to help confuse us further, with titles like: Why Men Don’t Have A Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes (Barbara and Allan Pease) or 9 Secrets to Bedroom Bliss: Exploring Sexual Archetypes to Reveal Your Lover’s Passions and Discover What Turns You On (by not one, but two PhDs – James Herriot and Oona Mourier) Books are wonderful, but experience is a marvelous teacher if you just recognize the lesson.

Separate phone lines. People are always telling us to simplify. Ironically, adding a phone line simplified our relationship. How was I to know that Ron’s father used to berate his children if they didn’t take perfect messages? This translated into such performance anxiety that I got scrambled phone numbers, messages scrawled on matchbook covers discovered months later, and Mr Cranky Crankerman every time I said, “Are you SURE he said his name was Dr. Honeycomb? Or I’d be on a business call and he’d hover for 15 minutes because he had to call the hardware store to find out if they carried white glue.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I saw a movie a while ago about a family that was so ordinary they were extraordinary. The husband so loved his wife’s cooking that no matter what she served he said, “My god! This is delicious! What is it?”

She’d answer, bemused, “Ice cream.”

“How’d you make it?”

“I bought it at the grocery store.”

“Brilliant!”

Ron does that. I can make a tuna melt and he dives in with such joy, you’d think it was chateaubriand. In fact I suspect he likes tuna melt better than Chateaubriand, which I’ve never made, but like the sound of.

Separate vacations. Nothing makes a man appreciate his wife more than sleeping on sheets he keeps forgetting to change for more than a week. Not to mention the fact that he’s lived on peanut butter and pizza all week.

Which brings me to: Let them eat pizza. I used to try to provide for Ron’s meals when I traveled. Once I tried to out-do Shirley Valentine by making and labeling meals. When I returned, the refrigerator was full of science projects and there were a pile of pizza boxes in the recycling. “Why didn’t you eat the food in the refrigerator?” I asked. “I couldn’t find anything,” Was his reply. A recently divorced friend of ours explained this as MLD. Male Looking Disorder. “If it’s not a beer bottle, we can’t recognize it,” he explained. I’ve decided that Ron just needs to go back to his roots periodically: pizza, peanut butter, turkey sandwiches. Then when I return, he is ready for risotto.

But perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned in 26 years is: Nagging gets you nowhere. Why do we think that constantly asking our husband to do something will yield results? We’re talking chromosomes here. There is undoubtedly a genetic predisposition to hearing disorders when the line, “I thought you said you were going to….(fill in the blank)” is repeated. Here is my secret weapon. Start doing whatever it is you wanted your husband to do. Loudly. Hanging a picture on the wall? Start with “Honey, I need your hammer and the picture hanger hook things.” Want a table re-finished? “So….I bought this highly toxic furniture stripper stuff and I’m going to re-do the table on the living room carpet.” Need new track lighting? “Hey, honey, I’ve got this light panel open and I’m wondering about these loose wires hanging out of the wall?” They can’t stand it. You will get instant results—guaranteed. Especially if once they jump in you say, “Gosh, thanks, honey, you are so awesome. What would you like for dinner tonight?”

In Shakespeare in Love, Geoffrey Rush’s character comments on love. “It’s a mystery.” I could list many more wonders I’ve discovered in the dance we do. But like any partner dance, there is one important rule. Pay attention to your partner. Try not to step on each other’s toes. Remember that his moves mirror your own. And that somewhere in the dance between negative and positive, electron and proton, yes and no, there is a nucleus, a center, and that third factor is called love.

 

Lavinia credits her ability to laugh and love to her patient valentine, Ron. In exchange, he gets lots of Feldenkrais® and many very late dinners. [ laviniaplonka.com ]