Red Green's Beginner's Guide to Women Read online

  I wouldn’t call it a war, but it certainly is a struggle and, as with all conflicts in life, you will have days when you will lose ground, days when you will gain ground and days when you will be ground. Finely ground. But over the long haul, if you are the marine I think you are, you will prevail.

  Don’t expect rewards in the form of badges of honour or citations from the commander-in-chief. The acknowledgment of your loyalty and dedication will be expressed on a daily—or, more specifically, nightly—basis. But when it’s all said and done, when you saw the hill and took the hill and then built a four-bedroom backsplit on the hill, you’ll be able to look yourself in the eye because you are the few, you are the lucky, you are the proud, and you made it look like you were just following orders.

  THE LAUNCH SEQUENCE

  Aside from the planning and preparation for the wedding, there is a series of rituals that happen in a specific order. The common fear is that if you miss any of these steps, your marriage will be doomed. However, if you do everything perfectly, the marriage may also be doomed. So you don’t really do them for the long-term success of your marriage; you do them for the short-term success of you retaining your position as groom.

  Getting the Word Out

  You might think that the first layer of people who need to know you’re engaged are friends and family. That is not correct. It must be family and friends. If your mother finds out you’re engaged from the sister of one of your drinking buddies, you’re in trouble. So tell family first, and more specifically, tell your parents first. And don’t do it together. You tell your parents and let her do the same. You don’t want her to see the look of relief on your parents’ faces and she doesn’t want you to see the look of disappointment on hers. Once the parents have been told, you can work your way through the family in descending order of the potential value of their wedding gifts.

  Next, tell your friends, but do that together. It will hopefully prevent them from saying something insensitive. Chances are your fiancée’s parents will want to put an announcement in the local paper. Make sure they use a picture of her alone, just in case anyone in the collection or law enforcement business is looking for you.

  It’s best to get the news of your engagement out there as quickly as possible. It will limit the timeline of old boyfriends and girlfriends coming out of the woodwork and making claims they can’t prove, even though the child looks just like you.

  The Wedding Gifts

  If you’re marrying into a family that thinks it’s rude to say, “Just give us cash,” you’ll have to find creative ways to orchestrate the wedding gifts. You have certain items that you want. However, there are a lot of items you don’t want, and sure, you can turn them into quick cash, but you run the risk of the donor seeing them in the window at the pawnshop.

  Traditionally, the bride and groom register for gifts at a store they like, and they even identify the specific items they want. You can actually use this registry as a way to get cash gifts by telling guests they have the option of giving cash if they’d prefer and then not registering any gift under $1,000 in price. Sweet.

  Ask them to send the wedding gifts well ahead of the day, and imply that the generosity of the gift will affect where they’ll be sitting at the reception.

  The Bridal Shower

  In the last few years there’s been a trend to do a thing called a “stag and doe” so that the shower is attended by couples, rather than just women. This pretty much guarantees that nobody will have a good time. The men will have no appropriate jokes to tell and the women will have nothing to talk about.

  The old-school all-women shower is the way to go. It’s a mix of female family and friends with stories from their widely varied marital experiences, which they use to terrorize the bride. A lot of important intimate secrets and advice are exchanged. That’s why it needs to be all women. It’s not a party. It’s the first official meeting of your wife’s support group. In the long run it will create a safety net for her and take the heat off you. I’m thinking you’ll need it more than she will.

  The Rehearsal

  You may think rehearsals are a good thing—especially if you’ve been lucky enough to have a honeymoon rehearsal—but that will change. The wedding rehearsal is usually a day or two before the wedding, and most of the women there are already stressed out because the flowers haven’t arrived yet and the minister has a lisp and the ring bearer has pink eye and one of the bridesmaids is a guy now. And the fact that the men are relaxed and glib only adds to the exacerbation.

  So when you’re there, focus on the highest authority in the church—the mother of the bride—and do exactly what she tells you, exactly when she tells you. Otherwise, Do Not Talk or Move. It will be hard to focus because, as the groom, you have nothing to do. But you need to do it perfectly. So get there early, wait for your orders, execute and then get the hell out of there.

  The Stag

  Now you’re talking. The stag is the last rite of passage as you move away from the carefree world of your buddies into the responsibilities of a married man. And their way of not being forgotten is to make sure you have a hangover that lasts the rest of your life. But it’s still a very important component in the process.

  The purpose is to give the groom a worthy send-off while reminding him of the great life he’s giving up. When done properly, neither one of these happens. The groom is an incoherent wreck at the wedding and his memory of his buddies is gratitude just for having survived. So he’s incapable of making decisions and convinced there isn’t enough Aspirin in the world to allow him to return to his single life. In both cases, it puts him in the perfect mental state to get married.

  The entry in Buster’s Diary after his stag:

  Deer Dairy,

  Jist got hom frum stag. Head sore. Mouth dry. Pants wet.

  Going bed.

  The Ceremony

  Almost nobody has less to do than the groom. There’s a reason for that. History has taught us that giving the groom too much to do on a day when he’s second-guessing everything is not in anyone’s best interest. So your two main functions are to do exactly what the minister tells you to do, and to make your sure your zipper is done up.

  Don’t worry about anything else. Don’t even worry about the minister’s zipper. And if the minister’s zipper is in fact not done up, don’t reach over and fix it, or the bride’s mother will faint.

  You just walk out a few steps to the altar, with the best man and ushers preventing you from turning back, then you watch your bride come up the aisle. Unless you have a master’s in English, do not write your own vows. Nobody wants to hear the word horny in church. Just do the standard boilerplate vows, which you will repeat after the minister, and then put on the ring and kiss the bride. And here again, try to keep that kiss G-rated. The kiss is part of the wedding, not part of the honeymoon.

  After you leave the church, you have to keep pretending you’re enjoying this at least until the photographer is done.

  The Reception

  In the old days, receptions were very formal and stodgy, but now they tend to be informal and relaxed. This is a huge mistake. Stodge is your friend.

  When you get relaxed, you think you’re funny and everyone pays the price. Next thing you know, you’re toasting the maid of honour by calling her “a real fun girl with a great set of knockers.” You’re not supposed to say that. You’re not supposed to know that. You’re not supposed to notice that. Mainly, you’re not supposed to care.

  Keeping the reception formal is also your best chance of shutting down the other speeches. Like your brother going into great detail about your rap sheet or that time you came home from Lovers’ Lane with your pants on backwards.

  The point of the wedding reception is for your friends and family to send you off into your married life with the best possible chance of finding happiness. While occasionally speeches are touching and supportive, they have started way more wars than they have ended. And drinking makes it even worse.
Alcohol and public speaking make for an explosive mixture. I suggest you either serve your guests no alcohol or way too much. You want them either sober or incoherent.

  Another dangerous modern trend is for the bride and groom to stay at the reception until the bitter end, and it usually is. You have got to get out of there as early as possible. The whole wedding day is a ticking time bomb from the moment your eyes open. You don’t want to end the day by getting them opened even more. When the bride and groom drive off, that’s a signal to Uncle Bob that maybe that tenth beer is not a good idea. You control how volatile the party gets by how long you ask people to like each other. By the time the reception starts, you’re already four or five hours into that challenge—don’t push your luck.

  If the guests decide to take the party somewhere else or even have a fight in the parking lot, you did what you could, it’s not your fault, and you’ll still get back your deposit.

  The Honeymoon

  This is another aspect of the wedding that has changed radically over the years. In the traditional sense, the honeymoon was the consummation of the marriage, where two virgins (one virgin if the other one was the king) would unite physically. It made it a special night and added a tremendous amount of anticipation, even if the reality fell way short of the mark.

  These days, many relationships are consummated long before the wedding, in the back seat of an SUV or in the last row of the movie theatre or under the stands at the baseball stadium. On the one hand, it takes the incentive out of the honeymoon, but on the other it avoids any unpleasant surprises arriving too late for either party to easily get out of the relationship.

  It’s really up to each couple to make the call. In my opinion, sex is great, but it’s not worth getting married for.

  REGRETS ONLY

  No matter how much work and planning you put into your wedding, something is bound to go wrong. Don’t let it ruin your day. Just deal with it and move on. In the long run your marriage is much more important than your wedding. If you’re looking for a wedding that went worse than yours, check this letter that Stinky and Wanda P. sent to their guests.

  Dear Wedding Guests,

  Wanda and I would like to thank almost all of you for attending our wedding. It was a beautiful day and nobody died, so overall we think it went well. However, as you may have noticed, there were a few glitches, so we wanted to send you this letter of apology to let you know we were not pleased with everything that happened and to also remind you that wedding gifts are irrevocable.

  I’m sure many of you were as shocked as we were to find out the guy with the messy hair and the Bermuda shorts was in fact the minister. He was a last-minute replacement and had decided that it would put the guests at ease if he had a few snorts for breakfast and told everyone to just call him Bob. As for his choice of scripture, I’m not sure the excerpts about Sodom and Gomorrah were appropriate, and Wanda was particularly offended at the amount of detail Reverend Bob provided concerning the level of debauchery that existed in those two towns. As it turns out, many of Bob’s stories were not from the Bible but rather from his own personal experience as a goat herder.

  Wanda also asked me to express her regret over what we’re now calling the wedding dress “malfunction.” Wanda bought the dress almost a year ahead of the wedding day and she had every intention of getting down to a size 8 by then. And I think we all could see she was well on her way, but only made it down to a 24. Since the dress could not be returned and we could not postpone the wedding without losing our deposit on the Legion, Wanda decided—with the help of four jars of Vaseline and a couple of warm spatulas—to put the dress on. She said she had never been that uncomfortable in her life and I know when you saw her, you shared that feeling. Some of the teenage boys in attendance were trying to identify the various body parts sticking out of the dress and, as the groom, I can assure you that you were all wrong. But then I’m sure you realized that when the dress gave way during the ceremony. I feel I am partially to blame as I didn’t realize that wearing an extremely tight dress could increase the diameter of a person’s ring finger, and I probably should just have handed her the ring rather than try to force it on there. Ultimately, it was my rapid jerking up and down of her arm that caused the dress to rip, or rather explode. Wanda also wanted me to point out that her lack of underwear was not a flirtation—it was to make her smaller. I know it was an especially traumatic moment for Old Man Sedgwick, who was sitting in the front row. They tell me he’s starting to recognize voices and will eventually regain his sight.

  As for the wedding reception, the one lesson we all came away with is that it’s good to have insurance. And next time we will. For any of you who are getting married in the future, I would suggest you don’t have an open mic. People have no sense of decorum. I don’t understand how an invited guest would use that as an opportunity to tell the world about the money you owe them. Guests are supposed to be classy, courteous and patient. Not clinking incessantly on your glasses and forcing me to kiss Wanda while she still had a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

  And for the bridal flower toss, I want to make it clear that it was Wanda’s enviro-dork sister who insisted that the bouquet be made entirely of nectarines. And maybe if Buster Hadfield had been paying attention, he would have seen it coming and it wouldn’t have bounced off his head and knocked the candelabra into the cash bar. I’m not sure why we needed that many bottles of vodka, but man, does it burn. Usually, when you describe a wedding reception by saying, “We blew the roof off,” it’s just a figure of speech.

  In closing, let me thank you again for attending and please accept our apologies and, in the interests of all of us getting along in this wonderful community of family and friends, we sincerely ask you to drop all the charges.

  As your friend and co-resident, I remain,

  Stinky

  THE HONEYMOON’S OVER

  Most guys don’t look too far ahead, which is why they find life so full of surprises. And one of the biggest of those surprises happens after the honeymoon, when you and your wife try to settle into a normal life.

  Without thinking about it or verbalizing it, you are expecting that your married life will be just like your single life, except you’ll have a helper. Unfortunately, your wife feels the same way. More unfortunately, she’s right and you’re wrong.

  Junior S. told me it was a huge adjustment for him. He didn’t expect his life to change much. Oh sure, he was fine with no more cold pizza, no more wearing the same shirt four days in a row, no more lonely nights, but otherwise he was expecting business as usual—empty beer cans on the fridge, empty underwear on the dresser, twenty-four-hour sports channel, shave every other weekend. No. Not even close.

  What Junior discovered is that his wife had no intention of allowing him to continue any part of his single life. And Junior wisely realized that his challenge was to accept how horrible that single life had been. He may have enjoyed certain parts of it, and he may, deep down in his heart of hearts, miss the freedom and the lack of decorum and personal hygiene that were the hallmarks of that lifestyle, but for the sake of the marriage, he knew he had to reject any vestige of the life he had before the marriage.

  Because for true love to last, each party must believe they have no other viable options. Junior also says it’s not enough to just pretend you feel that way. You have to absolutely convince yourself that marriage is the greatest thing that ever happened to you, even when you have lost yourself—when you’re wearing clothes you never thought you’d wear and hanging out with couples you don’t even like and thinking hard about everything before you say it.

  This is not a bad thing for you. The hardest pill for a man to swallow is that, even though she married you, she still felt there was room for improvement. She didn’t say “I do” because she thought you were the perfect man. It was more like a football scout watching a high school athlete. They see potential, but it’s going to take a lot of practice and coaching for you to be a franchise player.
That’s her job. She knows what she wants and her mother has taught her how to get it.

  Over the next several years, with hard work and coaching, you’ll continue to improve and the shared experience will cause your father-in-law to become one of your best friends.

  HOWDY, NEIGHBOUR

  After you get married, and if it’s not feasible for the two of you to live with her parents for whatever reason, you’re going to have to go out and get your own place. It may be an apartment, or a small house or a campsite. But whatever it is, you need to sit down with your wife and have a discussion about how to approach your new neighbours.

  The basic problem is that your wife is a nice person. She assumes the best in people and is friendly and open with everyone she meets. This is a fine attitude when you’re a greeter at Walmart, but it doesn’t work well when you’re the new person in the neighbourhood. The difference is the customers at Walmart don’t know where you live. Even if they really like you and would like to spend more time with you, they have no idea where to find you. Their only hope is to just keep coming back to Walmart. And they do.

  Your new neighbours, on the other hand, know exactly where you live and have a pretty good sense of when you’re there and when you’re not there. So you and your wife need to come to an agreement as to how many of these neighbours you’re going to make friends with, and how you’re going to decide which ones those are.