If you’re like my wife, then after you’ve been married for about two years you probably realize your decision to get married was a serious mistake. Marriage is difficult, especially if your husband is a humor writer or if you have kids. If both of those conditions apply to you, then may God have mercy on your soul. 

My wife Michele (who prefers not to be mentioned by name in my columns, so will henceforth be referred to as “the woman who prefers not to be mentioned as Michele”) and I have been married for 26 years. Like any married couple, we’ve had our ups and downs. We’ve squabbled over trivial disagreements like why I always pull all the covers over to my side of the bed at night, what was I thinking the time I taught our 9- and 8-year-old daughters how to hitchhike, and my minor lapse of judgment when I hired a police officer stripper for a surprise party for my wife’s 40^th birthday. Turns out my wife was not quite as impressed by Officer Cinnamon’s sexy pole dancing skills as my poker buddies and I were. 

So yes, we’ve endured our fair share of marital misunderstandings. But there is one issue which for years has caused more heartache and strife than any couple should have to endure. That’s right. I’m talking about the differences in how we load the dishwasher. It is still painful to talk about in public.

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Don’t believe me? Then maybe you’ll believe a study which concluded that marriages where the women do all the housework while the men retreat to the parlor to smoke cigars, read the newspaper and discuss politics with other men in top hats are happier. Okay, so that study was based on focus groups of landed gentry horse farm owners in Greenwich, CT in 1879. But now a brand new study appears to validate those previous findings.

A recently released study by Norwegian researchers reports that the divorce rate among couples who share the housework equally is 50% higher than those where the woman does most of the housework. “The more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study titled Equality in the Home.

One conclusion emerges: Norwegian researchers apparently hate women. Another theory is that Norwegian men suck at doing chores. Still another theory is that lead researcher Thomas Hansen has a serious axe to grind over the fact his ex-wife, Ingebjørg, took him to the cleaners in their divorce. But that’s just my wife’s theory, and she’s never particularly cared for Norwegian men. (I’m talking to you, Sven Jorgensen.)

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A long time ago in a university far, far away, I attended law school and passed the bar exam. Which just goes to prove that an outstanding law school education is no guarantee your life will turn out the way your parents had hoped. But I digress. My point is that if there is one thing I learned from my legal training, it’s how to create oppressively one-sided legal agreements primarily designed to obfuscate.

Therefore, as a public service to all five of my readers, I urge you, before you enter into a long-term romantic relationship like marriage or going steady with Morgan from your 11^th grade biology class, to be sure you and your very special someone have signed a legally enforceable Relationship Agreement that clearly spells out what each of you agree to do – and not do.

I am proud to say that when it comes to suing one’s spouse, America ranks #1. We’re the most litigious society in the world. The United States has as many lawyers as the next six countries combined. Where else can a woman sue a local television station for making an inaccurate weather prediction or a man can sue himself?

My point is, if we’re not careful, we’re liable to get sued for the least little hit and run car accident I failed to report. (Wait, did I just think that or did I just type that?) Sometimes our fairy tale romances take a few unexpected turns and what starts out as Happily Ever After may later descend into the War of the Roses.

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I had the best time this past weekend. You see, it was the weekend of the much hyped Royal Wedding of His Royal Highness Prince William of Wales & the newly proclaimed Catherine Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, at Westminster Abbey. Prince William – or Willy, as he prefers me to call him – is really a very down-to-earth guy (but a horrible bluffer at strip poker, I found out this weekend). Willie, Kate and I had so much fun all day long. Not wanting to steal any of their thunder, I tried to stay in the background as much as possible. After all the day was about them, not me.

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[Editor's note:This week's Guest Post was written by Travis Ross, an aspiring humor blogger who chooses to share his stories with the world rather than just a therapist.  In this post, Travis discusses how he dumped the woman who would become his wife via e-mail and two years later proposed to her out of the back of his car. He relives these special moments in his blog, and is reminded of his classlessness every Valentine's Day and anniversary by his wife. Read more of Travis' creative humor writing at The Simple Man's Survival Guide.  - TEJ ]

My wife and I have vacillated between Happy and If you say one more word I’ll *&$%#@! punch you in the throat for just over two years. I once heard a guy say, “Sometimes you hug each other to show affection and sometimes you hug each other as a way to get a better grip so you can take a better swing.” That’s us in a nutshell. It’s a functional marriage, and from what I can tell, we’re not terribly different from everyone else. However, the process leading up to marriage was quite the circus.

I asked my wife out on our first date to a Chinese restaurant that was promptly shut down a few months later for violating health codes and employing about 20 illegal immigrants via text message. I know what you’re thinking: “You stay classy, Travis.” I don’t remember much of the conversation, but she likes to recount how about 10 minutes into it I started doing some kind of stupid trick where I wave my hands in front of my face. My 6-month-old daughter is not amused with that trick now and her mother wasn’t amused with it then. If you were watching it happen on a reality dating show, you would have winced and said, “He isn’t going to… Oh God…oooooo” and then promptly turned off the television because you couldn’t deal with the pain of watching.

But the drinks took hold and, because of my restaurant choice and the poor magic trick, the date had nowhere to go but up and the relationship lasted a few more weeks. Eventually, because I didn’t feel comfortable dating a woman six years older than me, I sent her an e-mail breaking up with her because she was “too old” and I was also interested in someone closer to my age. Yes, I broke up with my wife via e-mail, and yes, I told her she was too old. Again, I know what you’re thinking: “You stay classy, Travis.” If I can contribute one thing to the “Man’s Guide to Relationships,” it’s this: If you think there’s a cold chance in Hell that you will ever ask a woman out again, run into her in a dark alley or find yourself alone in an elevator with her, I strongly advise against ending a relationship on those grounds via e-mail. Tell her anything else. Tell her you’re bipolar, being transferred to China, have Typhoid or all three. I figured the worst-case scenario was that we had a few more classes together, a few awkward conversations and that would be the end of it. In retrospect, we got along really well, much better than the ex-boyfriend she literally tried to run over in her driveway.

I wound up getting a job in St. Louis. Tori wrote a fantastic blog about her dating life that I continued to read and comment on, because it was so damned funny. The best story is when she got roped into a date with a midget, but that’s neither here nor there. She would occasionally note how she hated her job. I suggested that I was working for a great company in the St. Louis area and that she should apply for one of the open positions. She applied, got the job and started working a brisk two-minute walk from my desk.

Not long after she started working we started hanging out, which grew into a relationship. Eventually, things were going well enough that I threw caution to the wind and bought a ring. The day after getting the ring, I pulled one of her work friends out to the car and had her take a look at it to see what she thought. She squeaked with glee and started twitching like a weasel on speed. I said, “Erin, this is very important. You can’t tell Tori. Whatever you do, you can’t tell Tori.” I added emphasis on the second “You can’t tell Tori” to hammer the point home with Shakes McGillicutty. She asked when I planned on proposing and I told her I was working on that, but it would be some time around Valentine’s Day. I threw the ring box back in the trunk of my car, we walked back into the building and Erin skipped her way back to her desk, right next to Tori’s, brimming with excitement.

Not five minutes after Erin got back, Tori asked her a question about work to which Erin promptly responded, “You know Travis doesn’t want to get married, right?” Tori’s happy face comes with an expiration date, and once you pull the pin on the grenade, her anger has a blast radius that, if it goes off in the center of the contiguous 48 states will rattle the teeth of people in Australia. I don’t know how the rest of her work day went or how many people were killed because she didn’t say anything to me on her way out the door, but I definitely felt her wrath later.

I was scheduled to look at a house that night and Tori said she would go with me. I pulled up in front of her apartment and she walked out, looking angry as Hell. She usually gave me a chance to talk before she got pissed off, but not this time. No sooner than she got in the car her guns were drawn. She teared up and started talking about how Erin told her that I didn’t want to get married and started carrying on about how I was wasting her time. For a proper frame of reference, it’s about one week from Valentine’s Day and I still have this ring in the back of my car. By the time we get to the house I’ve made countless wrong turns, each one marked with “YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO GO THAT WAY YOU *^$%#& MORON YOU DON’T WANT TO GET MARRIED ERIN SAID SO I HATE YOU!!!!!” By this time, I’ve got a thousand different things rolling through my mind: How the *&%$ do I get to this house? Is cyanide traceable and will Erin smell it when I put it in her drink? Is this what marriage is like? And if it is, why don’t more men kill themselves? What will happen on Lost tonight? After what felt the same amount of time it took Odysseus to get to Troy or the government to solve the debt problem, we finally got to the house. I opened the car door and sucked in the sweet air of freedom. I decided then and there that I didn’t want to listen to this crap for another week, popped open the trunk, grabbed the box, poked my head around the trunk and, with her stomping in my direction, said “Marry me.” She shut up and turned white.

For the next hour I enjoyed the soothing tones of our realtor while Tori didn’t say a word. We eventually bought the house and got married in Las Vegas and had the world’s most beautiful baby. The only downside is that every argument eventually ends in her saying, “Oh yeah, well you dumped me by e-mail,” after which point I generally just shut my mouth and walk away. Everything has worked out well, we just took the long way.

- Travis Ross, The Simple Man’s Survival Guide