Married and Bored: Understanding Gossip
Essentially you have achieved the goal of marriage, and that is to never be blindsided by anything that wasn’t planned for. A cheating spouse, an unexpected death, the loss of a job, your house catching on fire – none of that has happened, you lucky guy!
Just because you haven’t had sex in four months is no reason to fret. Your marriage is going terrific, and your wife couldn’t be happier with you (so long as you keep moving up the ladder at work). But there is one thing missing from your wife’s life, and that is drama. If your wife loves to gossip, that’s a good thing. Let me explain.
As long as your wife gets excited over gossip, there is a good chance she is not having afternoon trysts with the lawn boy and his well oiled blade. Women who are in affairs are detached from gossip because they are actually living. Gossippers take joy in hearing about other people because their own personal lives are actually deceased.
Imagine this situation: you obtain a rich piece of gossip about her brother-in-law and his skirt-chasing problem. Your wife says, “Well, his problems are really none of our business.” No doubt that statement would shock you like unregulated high-voltage because your wife loves gossip so much that her nipples naturally point toward People magazine wherever she goes in the supermarket.
This is the rule of gossip: gossip is only exciting to bored people. People who create gossip are too busy living in their own affairs to waste time talking about rumors of other people. If your wife stops asking about that cheating brother-in-law, she is definitely cheating on you.
Fans of gossip love the misery of others. Here’s a few reasons explaining your wife’s need for endless soap operas:
The joy of unhappiness: For gossips, there is no happiness like knowing that someone else’s life has fallen to pieces. However, gossips are upset when a bad marriage fails because the couple splitting up will no longer provide their quota of gossip. Your wife will be unhappy when the unhappiness of other’s comes to an end, then she will look to you to provide that unhappiness. If you are happy, she will make you unhappy so that she can be unhappy too, at least until someone else is even more unhappy.
Improve dinner with rumors: After work the last thing you want to do is come home and have a long conversation with your wife. She might want to bring up finances or dinner plans with the Wilkersons, but you can effectively trump her train of thought with a bit of juicy gossip. Once you drop some gossip on the table, she becomes Peter Pan. Her imagination runs wild. Rumors in her head divide and multiply like nuclear fission. She’s on auto-pilot now, just let her ramble.
Avoid real conversation, life in general: What gossip allows your wife to do is avoid the real issues in her own life. In reality, your stable marriage is only stable because neither of you can face your inadequacies and are afraid to be alone. Gossip lets you talk to your wife without really talking to her about anything. In other words, she will get excited about the gossip and for a few minutes you and her will have a nice chat about other people’s worst fears and failures.
Using gossip is a means of remaining completely oblivious to your own problems. To illustrate, I was once in a 7-11 store when an enormous, morbidly obese woman who was paging through US Weekly commented on how fat Jennifer Lopez had gotten. I nodded and backed away slowly, hoping not to be eaten.
Fill the void of money and success: At some point the gaping absence of success in your life will make alternatives necessary for your wife. Once she realizes that retirement in an Italian villa is as likely as cold fusion in a coffee cup, the phone becomes an inexpensive way to feel like someone important, to be someone ‘in the know.’ When she married you she had an inkling you might someday get motivated and become a congressman, giving her a foot in the door to high society. As you sit there watching the Lakers play the Bulls and scratching yourself, her gossipping on the phone is like a pacifier in a baby, soothing her as her dreams die like sunflowers in autumn.
You are a lucky man. The incessant gabbing about so-and-so sleeping with so-and-so sounds like ‘Days of Our Lives’ to you, but at least you are not arguing with your wife. Let her gossip all she wants. While she prattles away, I suggest turning up the volume of the Lakers game to drown out the noise. Turn up the bottom of a Bacardi bottle to drown out the rest of your good senses.
Laying low,
Married-n-Bored
