The Most Serious Issue Likely to Come between a Man and a Woman Living Together

(WARNING: Those of you who detest blatant and unfair but nonetheless generally true sexual stereotypes should leave the room at this time.)

Okay. The major issue facing a man and a woman who decide to live together is: Dirt. I am serious. Men and women do not feel the same way about dirt at all. Men and women don’t even see dirt the same way. Women, for some hormonal reason, can see individual dirt molecules, whereas men tend not to notice them until they join together into clumps large enough to support commercial agriculture. There are exceptions, but over 85 percent of all males are legally classifiable as Cleaning Impaired.

This can lead to serious problems in a relationship. Let’s say a couple has decided to divide up the housework absolutely even-steven. Now when it’s the woman’s turn to clean, say, the bathroom, she will go in there and actually clean it. The man, on the other hand, when it’s his turn, will look around, and, because he is incapable of seeing the dirt, will figure nothing major is called for, so he’ll maybe flush the toilet and let it go at that. Then the woman will say: “Why didn’t you clean the bathroom? It’s filthy!” And the man, whose concept of “filthy” comes from the men’s rooms in bars, where you frequently see bacteria the size of cocker spaniels frisking around, will have no idea what she’s talking about.

So what happens in most relationships is, the man learns to go through the motions of cleaning. Ask him to clean a room, and he’ll squirt Windex around seemingly at random, then run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet, totally oblivious to the question of whether or not it’s picking up any dirt.

I have a writer friend, Clint Collins, who once proposed that, as a quick “touch-up” measure, you could cut a piece of two-by-four the same width as the vacuum cleaner and drag it across the carpet to produce those little parallel tracks, which as far as Clint could tell were the major result of vacuuming. (Clint was also unaware for the first 10 or 15 years of his marriage that vacuum cleaners had little bags in them; he speculated that the dirt went through the electrical cord and into the wall.)

What this means is that, if your live-together relationship is going to work, both of you must be sensitive to the special needs of the Cleaning Impaired. Unfortunately for you women, this means you must spend many hours patiently going over basic cleaning concepts that may seem simple and obvious to you, but will be baffling mysteries to the Cleaning Impaired person, such as:

1. Where clean dishes actually come from.

2. What you can do with used pizza boxes besides stack them in the corner of the living room for upwards of two years.

3. How some people do more in the way of cleaning the bedroom than simply spray a few blasts of Right Guard deodorant on the two-foot-high mound of unlaundered jockey shorts.

And so on. The best way to avoid conflict is if you make up lists that state clearly what cleaning chores each of you will be responsible for. At first, the Cleaning Impaired person’s list should be fairly modest:

NORMAL PERSON’S WEEKLY CHORE LIST

1. Clean kitchen.

2. Clean bathroom.

3. Clean entire rest of domicile.

CLEANING IMPAIRED PERSON’S WEEKLY CHORE LIST

1. Don’t get peanut butter on sheets.

Speaking of peanut butter, another area where a first-time live-together couple can run into trouble is the kitchen. Here again we need to confront the depressing fact that, despite all the progress that has been made in other areas, such as coeducational softball, when it comes to sharing equally in food-preparation responsibilities, many men are still basically scumballs. I know I am. This was driven home to me on a recent Thanksgiving day, when my family had dinner at the home of friends named Arlene and Gene.

Picture a typical Thanksgiving scene: on the floor, three small children and a dog who long ago had her brain eaten by fleas are running as fast as they can directly into things, trying to injure themselves. On the television, the Detroit Lions are doing pretty much the same thing. In the kitchen, Arlene, a prosecuting attorney responsible for a large staff, is doing something to a turkey. Surrounding Arlene are thousands of steaming cooking containers. I would no more enter that kitchen than I would attempt to park a nuclear aircraft carrier, but my wife, who runs her own business, glides in very casually and picks up exactly the right kitchen implement and starts doing exactly the right thing without receiving any instructions whatsoever. She quickly becomes enshrouded in steam.

So Gene and I, feeling guilty, finally bumble over and ask what we can do to help, and from behind the steam comes Arlene’s patient voice asking us to please keep an eye on the children. Which we try to do. But there is a famous law of physics that goes, “You cannot watch small children and the Detroit Lions at the same time, and let’s face it, the Detroit Lions are more interesting.” So we would start out watching the children, and then one of us would sneak a peek at the TV and say, “Hey! Look at this tackle!” And then we’d have to watch the Instant Replay to find out whether the tackled person was dead or just permanently disabled. By then the children would have succeeded in injuring themselves or the dog, and this voice from behind the kitchen steam would call, very patiently, “Gene, please watch the children.”

I realize this is awful. I realize this sounds just like Ozzie and Harriet. I also realize that there are some males out there, with hyphenated last names, who have evolved much further than Gene and I have, who are not afraid to stay home full-time and get coated with baby vomit while their wives work as test pilots, and who go into the kitchen on a daily basis to prepare food for other people, as opposed to going in there primarily for beer. But I think Gene and I are more typical. I think most males rarely prepare food for others, and when they do, they have their one specialty dish (spaghetti, in my case) that they prepare maybe twice a year in a very elaborate production number, for which they expect to be praised as if they had developed, right there in the kitchen, a cure for heart disease.

What Men Have to Do about This

It’s very simple, men. If you want to have a decent and fair live-together relationship, you have to start cooking whole entire meals all by yourself on a regular basis. And by “meals,” men, I do not mean “Kraft Cheez Whiz eaten directly from the jar with a spoon.” I mean meals that somebody else would eat. That even your mom would eat.

This is not as hard as you think, men. All you need to do is learn some recipes.

Recipes for Guys

Recipe Number One: Food Heated Up

This dish has long been a specialty of women and the great chefs of Europe, who have learned that, with a few exceptions, such as grape soda, almost all food tastes better when you heat it up. In fact some foods, such as baked potatoes, are very hard to eat any other way.

TO PREPARE: Get enough units of food to feed yourself and the person you are living with. Now select a pot that you feel is the correct size. Now put this pot back and select another one, because the one you selected first was wrong. (Trust me here, guys. In 15 years, I have never once selected an initial pot that my wife did not feel, based on her vastly superior experience and hormonal instinct, was the wrong size.)

Okay. Now try to put the food unit inside the pot. (CULINARY HINT: For extra elegance, try removing the food unit from its can or wrapper first!) If it fits, cook it on top of the stove on “medium” heat until just before it overflows the top and wrecks the stove. If it doesn’t fit into the pot, it’s probably a turkey, a roast, or a ham, which you can tell by counting the number of legs and referring to this convenient chart: