Empty Calories & Male Curiosity, #41 🥃

Letter To A Soon-To-Be Husband

QUICK HITTERS:

1. Football season is here! This week’s book recommendation is The Junction Boys, by Jim Dent. If you are a football fan and haven’t read this book, shame on you…read it now! Another one that’s old enough to be in your local library.

   🏈 🏈 🏈

   If you are not a huge football fan, I think you should also read this book. If only to realize what a watered down version of the game you are now watching. What happens in this book is sheer insanity.

   

   The Bear woulda loved Darla.

2. Go Birds.

3. Do you know someone who enjoys laughing and/or sports? Click below to share this newsletter with them…

   

   Darla outtake. She tries very hard.

GOING DEEP:

Last week, a young man in his 20s, a friend of our family whom I have never met, got engaged. I felt some compulsion to clue him in on marriage, but alas, I have no relationship with him. So, like any red-blooded American male, I’ve taken it upon myself to give him unsolicited advice.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Namely, his.

Letter To A Soon-To-Be Husband

Dear PJ, 

Congratulations on your engagement!! The pictures on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, and Jdate were amazing! How long did it take to get your fiancée’s¹ approval for the best ones?

I don’t know your fiancée, but undoubtedly she had some swings and misses before you. Young men your age are usually incapable of high-level thinking and being emotionally present at the same time. But she kept looking for an exception.

You are that exception PJ.

Heavy wears the crown, my young padawan.

Good luck with the wedding planning and all the things that go around that. I’m sure the wedding, honeymoon, and whatever life events follow will be wonderful. What follows below is my attempt at preparing you for when and if you guys decide to add another human to your family.

Hold on tight brother.

Stage 1: Pregnancy. No notes here. Hopefully what little attention you’ve paid to the opposite sex thus far in your life, you know the two rules you must adhere to, no questions asked: 

1. Be helpful at all times.

2. Stay out of the way.

These seem incongruous you say? 

Feel free to take it up with your pregnant wife when the time comes. Or, listen to me and remain in the land of the living.

Stage 2: Breastfeeding. You know nothing of this and surely have just as much interest in finding out. But you will indeed find out. Because even in the best of times, this is a challenging endeavor for your wife. I will spare you the gory details and just say this: when the time comes to take your turn with the 2 am feeding, you need to do so with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.²

For that breastmilk you are defrosting and feeding to your beautiful child was pumped two months ago. While your wife was hunched over in her locked office as that d-bag Steve from accounting blew up her Teams feed.

One warning about this stage: you may hear the phrase “engorged nipple” at some point and think that maybe your fortunes have changed. 

PJ my good man, they have not.

Stage 3: Parenting. I gotta be honest here PJ, this is gonna get ugly. It’s really a binary proposition: boy or girl. 

1. Boy: 

Chaos and destruction rule the day. The care and concern you received from your wife in the run-up to your wedding and pregnancy will have gone the way of the Dodo. She will no longer be concerned with trivial affairs, like helping you pick out the oh-so-perfect gift for your groomsmen. Or making sure you have a ‘guys’ night’ every week. Or what color the nursery is.

Instead, her days will entail Katrina-level disaster response with an occasional GI Joe man stuck in an orifice.

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

2. Girl:

   There is nothing as sweet as a little girl. I will talk about that later, but here’s what you need to know right now. While they are wondrous things to the rest of the world, very often they behave as if they were the offspring of Beelzebub for their own mothers. 

Your job is two-fold here as well: 

1. Stay out of the way. (Did you know more people die in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion than do in the initial blast? As in most things, let Mother Nature be your guide.)

2. At all times, take your wife’s side. (This may seem simple now. But check back in with me when you have to look into the sweet blue eyes of your angelic six-year-old daughter and tell her that yes indeed, “Mommy did put baby doll back in your room like you asked her to.” Knowing full well that mommy cut the head off of baby doll in a fit of wine-fueled rage and then didn’t have the time, or needle skills, to sew her back together. Baby doll is currently resting at the top of a landfill. Not too far from where your hopes and dreams of an idyllic life will now be residing). 

A note on being a ‘Girl Dad’

Being the father of a girl is the most amazing thing in the world. They are sweet, fun, adorable, and completely and unabashedly immersed in their world. Anytime she wants to play, just say yes. Then, sit back and enjoy.

Because PJ, these little girls are the small joint the drug dealer gives you for free. Hoping that in a few years, you’ll be hooked on 8-balls and ready to sell a kidney for cash.

Those sweet little girls eventually turn into teenage girls.

And hell hath no fury like a teenage girl.

Seriously, they are scary beings. If only the Taliban weren’t so sexist, they could be using an entire country full of 14-year-old Afghan girls to do their bidding.

Eventually though, their rough edges are smoothed like a fine diamond. Mostly by their fathers I hear.

Ava and Darla. Little girl and puppy cuteness overload.

Stage 4: Perimenopause. This is a relatively new development in the life cycle of American women. Suffice it to say, while details are still emerging, this stage also entails large swaths of minefields to become aware of. There is a silver lining, though! All advice for the subsequent stage can also be applied here. 

There is a small lesson in that: compound knowledge is your friend. Whenever possible, applying the same rule to wildly different situations is to your advantage. 

• Exhibit A: Your heavenly 7-year-old daughter asks you how she looks on the first day she dresses herself for school. After taking in her outfit (tennis shoes, a tutu, a Nick Foles jersey, and a cowboy hat), the only appropriate answer is:

  “AMAZING!”

• Exhibit B: Your heavenly wife asks you how she looks while donning the $175 top she recently purchased from a chic new boutique downtown. Even though she looks like Jerry in his puffy shirt, the answer is still the same: 

  “AMAZING!”

This actually happened in our household.

Stage 5: Menopause. PJ, here’s where shit gets real. I could give you the entire litany of things that could happen (body heat fluctuations, mood swings, libido issues, bloating, brain fog), but that would only confuse the issue.

Here is the one crucial thing you need to know: whatever she is feeling, whatever she is saying, she is right. 

That is the entire point of this letter. I don’t want you to learn that nugget of knowledge when so many other well-meaning men do…in the later stages of their relationship. 

I want you to embrace it right now: She is right.

Say it with me again, out loud:

“She is right.”

So, you have one job: support her at all times, no questions asked.

Be the Jeremy Renner to her Ben Affleck:

1. Did you know that when referring to a woman, the word fiancé is spelled with two Es?

2. If you get this reference let’s grab a beer together sometime.