Desperate housewife

A couple of months ago, my husband R. called me a lousy housewife. We were playing his least favorite game called "tell me what’s wrong with me." I figured it’s always better for a wife to know now than later, when he’s serving you papers for annulment and calling you mentally unstable, which seems to be the only ground for which the church will turn its head the other way and pretend you were never married.

He grinned and said under his breath, "You’re a lousy housewife." When he saw that I had actually heard it, his face took on an oh-shit-I’m-in-trouble-now expression.

It’s really nothing new. I know I’m a lousy housewife, my friends know it, my co-workers know it, but my husband has never said so himself.

Now that he did, I had about two seconds to react. The way I saw it, I could either be gracious and say, "Tell me how I can improve myself," or I could simply retaliate. Being me, I said, "Yeah, and you snore," thereby ending any chances of his elaborating and handing me a 12-step recovery program.

Now, I am left wondering what makes me a lousy housewife. After thinking about it for a long time, I came up with these theories and excuses:

1) I don’t cook, which seems to be the No. 1 reason why housewives are called lousy. But I have on file the numbers of all restaurants within a five-kilometer radius from our home which deliver after 8 p.m. Besides, when I hand him a bag of chips for lunch, he never complains about it lacking the cornerstone of a healthy meal.

2) I hog the remote control. But I watch with him all those late-night sports shows including – the boredom! the boredom! – baseball and cricket. (Suggestion – just one time, why don’t they switch those inebriated Irish billiard announcers with golf to make the latter more exciting?)

3) I’m anal when it comes to the mess at home and yet I keep losing things. On the other hand, I file our bills according to utility company so when he needs one, I can just hand him the folder. Unfortunately, there has never really been an occasion where he has to produce the water bill from August 1997.

4) I’m forever on his ass about his leaving wet towels on the bed. But I change bed sheets every day so he can’t criticize me for hygiene.

5) While I’ve never heard him complain, I suspect I’m not that great in the sex department either. But how does a wife really know? It doesn’t take much for a man to reach orgasm – after all, they can do it by themselves – so really, what’s good and what’s bad if they reach the same conclusion anyway?

6) I’ve been known to throw a few things at him – ashtray, pillow, food, anything within arm’s length. But I’ve managed to curb this bad habit since I have to do the cleanup afterwards.

7) I never play computer games with him anymore. I do have my reasons. I’m a recovering addict; I haven’t played a computer game in four years. After I got addicted to Sim City (up to version 3000), when I would sit at the computer the entire weekend without taking a bath or combing my hair, I decided to quit cold turkey.

Are these reasons enough to be called a lousy housewife? I keep thinking about Zsazsa Gabor. When she divorced her husband Felipe de Alba after one day of marriage, did either of them even have enough time to become a bad spouse? You wonder how that one day went – perhaps he wanted breakfast and she wouldn’t get up till 10 to make it for him, maybe she nagged him till lunchtime about his haircut, which leaves the rest of the afternoon. What can possibly happen in one afternoon for the marriage to end, short of stripping her husband naked, super-gluing his head to the toilet bowl, turning on the fire alarm, and then leaving the house to go shopping? What kind of childhood traumas did these people have? It blows my mind that anyone apart from Britney Spears could be married for only a day. At least Nicolas Cage and Lisa Marie Presley had three months to get on each other’s nerves.

On the other hand, you wonder about those matches seemingly made in heaven but end up in tabloid hell: Brad and Jen, Tom and Nicole, Ate Vi and Edu, Reichen and Chip with their $1 million from The Amazing Race 4. I mean, really, how lousy can Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston get that they’d want to divorce each other?

So, I asked my friends how a woman can become a model housewife.

Their suggestions are:

1) Press husband’s clothes.

2) Learn how to cook husband’s favorite food. It’s true that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

3) Play badminton together.

4) She should always be doing something; husbands want someone who has interesting stories to tell.

5) She should never depend on her husband’s income.

6) Get a liposuction.

7) "Lousy" is a subjective word. She could be "great" in other relationships.

8) Have lots of hot sex.

9) Do a hobby together or anything you’re both interested in.

10) She should watch Lifestyle channel to get pointers on cooking, gardening, etc.

11) Turn the TV off; talk and listen to each other’s inner feelings.

12) Surprise him with gifts. It doesn’t have to be anything expensive, can be one you made yourself, like a card.

13) Leave him alone with his mess.

14) Lose weight.

15) Be romantic.

16) She should read a lot so she knows what’s happening around her.

I should tell you that these friends are all single women, except for one whose marriage has been annulled, one who’s a widow, one who hasn’t seen her husband in five years, and another one who’s gay with an imaginary boyfriend.

I read their suggestions, tossed them in my mind for a day, and have decided that, to paraphrase Rowan Atkinson, they’re about as useful as "a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest."