I'm an American husband, and according to Amy Sutherland, that qualifies. Sutherland, the author of Kicked, Bitten and Scratched, based on her experiences at a school for exotic animal trainers, recently published What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage in the New York Times.
My wife just emailed it to me, and it's so hysterically dead-on that I have to quote from it at length:
Like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving [my husband.] By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse...
Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers...I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard....
Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband...
After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love. I used to take his faults personally; his dirty clothes on the floor were an affront, a symbol of how he didn't care enough about me. But thinking of my husband as an exotic species gave me the distance I needed to consider our differences more objectively.
I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies... I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.
Professionals talk of animals that understand training so well they eventually use it back on the trainer. My animal did the same. When the training techniques worked so beautifully, I couldn't resist telling my husband what I was up to. He wasn't offended, just amused. As I explained the techniques and terminology, he soaked it up. Far more than I realized...He'd begun to train me, the American wife.
There's an important truth about effective communication wrapped up in Sutherland's piece, which is all the more effective because it's so damn funny. I definitely have preferred ways of receiving and giving feedback, and even though I try hard in my relationships with friends and colleagues to understand their preferences and act accordingly, I'm a lot more likely to miscommunicate with my wife. It's not for lack of caring or respect, but after 20 years together I assume that I already know her communication preferences and that she knows mine.
But that's not necessarily true, and even if we think we know each other's preferences, over time we change! I've changed and she's changed quite a bit over two decades, and our assumptions about the other haven't always kept pace with reality. Of course, another dynamic at work here is that even when you know how to communicate effectively with someone you care about, you may feel a devilish impulse to do just the opposite. Not that I've ever yielded to that passive-aggressive temptation, but I've heard about it.
We've actually worked pretty hard at communicating more effectively over the past few years, and it's yielded significant results--which isn't to say we don't howl like banshees at each other on occasion. I don't think we've ever framed the process in quite the same way that Sutherland does, but there's definitely been a recognition that despite our many similarities, we're very different in some important ways, and we have to reach across that gap and try to think like the other person on a regular basis.
The suave looking fellow above is a siamang, my favorite exotic animal at the San Francisco Zoo, although I'm not sure where this one's from.
