How to Survive Marriage

[PHANTASM]

Since the tutorial review process is not conducive to spur-of-the-moment ideas, I put this here. I was just talking with my darling wife and I thought I could share my survival strategies for coping with marriage. It has helped me keep my sanity.

 

1) Never clean the house more than once a week. Pick a day, Saturday for example, and clean the house THOROUGHLY. Let nothing stop you. Your spouse, your children, friends, and extended family will sense that you are being productive and will subconsciously try to stop you. They will want you to go to your mother-in-law's house, or sit down with them and talk, or your children will cry because they are hungry. Ignore everyone. Ear protection should be worn to avoid them. Also turn off the celphone (you can say you forgot to charge it). Turn off the computer. Do all the laundry, all the dishes, clean the floors, change all the sheets, sweep the snow off the porch, sweep out the cars, buy the groceries, and clean the bathroom. Have a set stop time, say two in the afternoon. After that, all cleaning activity ceases for the week.

 

It's important to make your cleaning day after the weekend partying because this will encourage your lovely spouse to do some cursory cleaning, so there wil be some clean plates and cups for her guests on Friday night. Also, she may even wipe up the food left all over the house by your children if she is having guests over before your designated cleaning day.

 

Within a few hours after your designated cleaning time, the house will look as if nothing had been cleaned. People will use all the dishes, spill food and drinks on the carpet, track mud and dogshit on the furniture (not making this up), your kids will throw their toys and newly cleaned clothing all over the house, etc etc etc. RESIST THE URGE TO CLEAN ANYTHING. Your spouse and kids will never grasp that you have already cleaned everything and are not going to clean anything again until the next Saturday. The only exception should be vomit, which smells so bad it must be cleaned. You can adjust to the stench of urine, feces, and rotting food. Sometimes someone else will cave in and clean it. Just let it go. Once you start cleaning mid-week you will find yourself back in the habit of walking around cleaning all day, and you will have no time to play video games.

 

Within one day, the kitchen sink will be so full of dirty dishes that the faucet can no longer be used. If you can turn the faucet around backwards you can still get water out to make coffee and cook food. People will wait for you to notice that the sink is full, and may make funny sounds like "honey we need some forks", in an attempt to get you to do the dishes. I keep a bag of paper plates and plastic silverware just for this purpose. I pull them out and we use them. Once all the clean dishes have been used (usually a cup will be used once for one drink, tossed in the sink, and a clean one will then be grabbed), people will start to keep the last clean cups and reuse them. If they had done this in the beginning they would not run out of cups.

 

By the end of the week, the floor will be so covered with debris that you will wear your shoes everywhere. It's OK. Carpet cleaning is a thankless, grueling job, and not worth the effort under any circumstances. A quick vacuuming is all you should do. Eventually you will sell your house anyway, and the new owners can rip it all out and replace it at their cost.

 

2) Only pay certain bills. I only pay the mortgage, taxes, health insurance, life insurance, doctor visits, groceries, water bill, trash bill, cable bill, celphone bills, internet access, car insurance, car payment, and gas for the cars. Don't laugh it's true. Never pay your wife's bills. Never, ever get a joint checking account. My wife currently has 14 credit cards (not kidding) and half of them are maxed out. She gets new ones to pay the old ones off. She buys an endless variety of "essential" items, like new jewelry, with these cards.

 

3) Say "I love you" a lot. Women love it. Compliment them on their hair, or their figure, or whatever they may be self-conscious about. Do this a lot. Hug your kids a lot too.

 

4) Discipline your kids consistently, but not harshly. If they get away with things too long you will explode and traumatize them, and they won't learn anything except that you have no self-control. Don't clean their messes, make them clean up after themselves. My three-year old will wipe the floor up now after she spills stuff.

 

5) Have more than one operating system on your computers. I have two installations each on my two computers. One is for my wife and her friends. It is always infected, slow, filled with useless programs, constantly trying to auto-update three programs simultaneously - Windows, Norton, Adobe, Office, Windows Media Player, etc etc. Keep your games on another computer or operating system. Never even try to fix the screwed up operating system - it will just get focked up again within a week.

 

Once it reaches optimum slowness, the neighbors won't want to use your computer anymore to look for jobs, your wife's friends won't check their Facebook profile when they come over, and your problem has corrected itself. Meanwhile, you can play your games on the clean XP installation. Be sure to set your operating systems selection time really low (I use three seconds) when the computer boots up so they won't have time to select the clean operating system. You can change the default startup easily: go to Start/Run, type msconfig, go into the BOOT.INI tab, and select the operating system and selection time you want, then reboot.

 

Just a few ideas...

[-=Medic=-]

lovely tutorial hahahahaah I love the idea of 2 OS ^^

[hobbit]

Sounds like your pro @ this phantasm

[detoren]

I am married for 26 years now and you started off realy nice with the sentence NEVER CLEAN THE HOUSE . the rest is *^$%$#%%*&)*)(.

 

 

 

loooooooool

[!Chuck4Abuck]

NICE! LMAO

[Fb!N!nJa]

xD your life maybe very interesting lol

[Methuselah]

This is a very nice window into Phantasms life. I think josh/faded should read this as he is 17 years old and his g/f is about to have a baby.

[TASHA]

pretty good... we kind of do something like that...

it works!!!!!

[aarop2]

the only problem is your wife can read this

[Antimony]

Yo, i too liked the idea of two OS

[krAzy :)]

This is a very nice window into Phantasms life. I think josh/faded should read this as he is 17 years old and his g/f is about to have a baby.

lol...y...he should read this...

[PixeL...?!]

 

2)...My wife currently has 14 credit cards (not kidding) and half of them are maxed out. She gets new ones to pay the old ones off. She buys an endless variety of "essential" items, like new jewelry, with these cards.

 

 

I had a girlfriend a few years back who was the same...and then she started using my cards to order stuff over t'internets and got me into quite a bit of debt before I'd realized what she was up to!?! Silly twat.

 

Easiest solution is just don't bother getting married...

[PHANTASM]

So I'm sitting in my computer room playing ET an hour ago, when I hear my wife start screaming. I try to stay calm and focus on the game. Next I hear "come out here and help!". Now, if I did that every time there was a non-medical emergency, I would never get to play ET.

 

Reluctantly I ask what the problem is.

 

She says "the girls got cheese all over the couch". Who cares, I say to myself. The couch is destined for the dumpster in a couple years anyway.

 

"How did they get the cheese?" I ask, redirecting the conversation to something besides me personally becoming involved in removing smeared processed cheese from a piece of upholstery, which is a pointless waste of time. The couch will be filthy again tomorrow. It's not even Saturday anyway.

 

"I gave it to them".

 

"Oh. Did you give them slices, or did you break it up into little pieces?"

 

"Little pieces".

 

"Oh. Were you watching them?"

 

"No, I was in the bathroom getting ready to go out."

 

"Oh."

 

Needless to say, the couch is still covered with cheese.

[Thor]

RAWR! I can't make any comments other than this one on this topic as my wife goes through the forums almost as much as I do. She just likes to read and know what's going on in this alternate electronic universe. So for fear of having to cook for myself, do my own laundry and sleeping on the couch I will not mention that I agree with PHANTASM and can feel his anguish at trying to find time for ET.

[daredevil]

Always tell your wife you barely make anything My friend makes more then 110K / year and his wife believes he only makes 40K/year. He has credit card with max limit of 2K and tells his wife that no company would give him more credit line.