Advice

A good friend has asked me to contribute to a " book of marriage advice" she`s putting together, for a friend of hers who is about to be married. The bride-to-be is Japanese, but her father is a diplomat and she was brought up in various international schools abroad and returned to Japan only for university. She is marrying a Japanese national.

It`s funny -- lots of people have asked me for marriage advice. I don`t know if Hub and I are exactly a picture-perfect, happily married couple, and since neither of us has ever been married to anyone else, we have nothing with which to compare our relationship. But we just celebrated 15 years of marriage, so that in itself is probably worth a few points.

I think people wonder, how does this feminist American chick manage to stay married to a caveman from Kyoto? I have a secret weapon, which consists of a single phrase, which I`ve found allows me to stand my ground in every argument: "What you say is true, but our situation is different."

Let me give a few examples of this in action:

I now do the laundry in our family. That is to say, our washer and dryer do the laundry, but I`m the one who puts the dirty clothes in, and takes the clean clothes out. Hub, if he`s home at night, is usually the one to help Little Son change into his pajamas. Instead of putting the dirty clothes into the laundry basket, Hub folds them up and puts them on the floor in the corner, and he insists he does this because they`re clean enough to wear again. Pretty soon, there is a large pile of Little Son`s clean enough to wear again clothes.

"Look," I say to Hub. "That`s a blob of ketchup on this sweatshirt. And these jeans have grass stains on the knees."

Hub argues like a typical Japanese man. He will never say, "You`re right, those are dirty, and should be washed." Instead, he says something like, "Washing clothes too often wastes water and electricity. Americans wash clothes too often."

Then, for the crowning blow, he will say something like, "People a few generations ago didn`t wash clothes all the time, and they all survived."

So I say, "What you say is true, but our situation is different."

I don`t disagree with what Hub says. I just point out that, Lo, the world has changed! And our particular family has reaped the benefits of modernization and education! Moreover, we are blessed to be at a socioeconomic level that allows us to wash our clothing when it becomes stained, if we so choose!

Here`s another example. Before we bought our apartment in Tokyo, we tried to buy a teeny tiny piece of land, on which an architect friend was going to help us a build a teeny tiny house. Hub and I were mostly in agreement on what we wanted in a house, except I wanted a small bathroom next to the master bedroom, because I didn`t want to have to go all the way downstairs to pee in the middle of the night.

"That`s ridiculous! A house this tiny only needs one toilet!" said Hub, and then hit me with his best shot: "When I was growing up in our house in Kyoto, me and my parents and my brother and my sister and my aunt and my grandmother, all seven of us were just fine using a single outhouse in the yard!"

So I say, "What you say is true, but our situation is different." Lo, the world has changed! And our particular family has reaped the benefits of modernization and education! Moreover, we are blessed to be at a socioeconomic level that allows us to afford to pee in comfort and convenience in the middle of the night, if we so choose!

In short, whenever Hub falls back on any argument that says, this is the Japanese way, it's the way my people have always done things, I always remind him, "What you say is true, but our situation is different."

You might not win every argument with that line, but it`s not about winning -- it`s about achieving a state of peaceful detente, in which a happy home life can take root and thrive.

My other piece of advice is that if you ever find yourself arguing about who should clean up what, it`s cheaper to hire a cleaning person than it is to see a marriage counselor.

Remember -- arguments always go better in a clean house.