Phone, home

A number of people wrote in this week to object to my advice to S.G., whose wife talked on the phone during dinner. I deal with one aspect of the objection in my response, namely, that it was S.G. who wrote in, and not the wife. Folks, I'm an advice columnist, I can only dance with them as ask me.* And as I've noted before, sometimes I would give different--complementary, not contradictory--advice to both parties in a dispute. If the wife had written in saying, "I like to talk on the phone during dinner but my husband doesn't like it," I'd have advised her not to do so, but she didn't. As I often do, I advised the husband to assess his own feelings, have a conversation that focused on the positive, reward the behavior he wanted, and not be dismissive of behavior he didn't understand. That's generally my four-step process for achieving shalom bayit.

(Today's column also deals with a marital conflict, but M.C. in Brockton states "We would value your opinion," so I could be more straightforward in that one, assuming that both parties were listening. S.G. didn't say if his wife gave a toss what Miss Conduct would think or not.)

Some people (there were more letters than the ones that got published) objected to the first sentence in my response: "Manners per se aren't important in a family." I'm not happy about that one either, I admit. I could have been clearer, although I'm still not sure how. The words haven't come to me yet. But it's something to do with the notion that we don't adhere to formal etiquette in families. We may adhere to certain parts of it, but family life is too idiosyncratic to apply rules to. Tolstoy was wrong: all happy families are happy in their own way, too.

Dinnertime togetherness, for example, is often not a going concern in the Improbable/Conduct household. Often I will make dinner and Mr. Improbable and I will have "working dinners" in front of our respective computers, or while catching up with the previous night's episode of "The Daily Show" on hulu.com. Then we'll get together later in the evening for a review of our respective days over a bowl of popcorn or a glass of wine. (Or both. I find inexpensive champagne goes remarkably well with popcorn sprayed with a little olive oil Pam and sprinkled with parmesan cheese.) A good marriage is based on love and respect, but within certain obvious broad parameters, every couple will decide for themselves what actions convey love and respect and which do not.

And that's why I couldn't get too concerned about S.G.'s wife's dinnertime phone conversations. One of the letters today read in part, "S.G. feels systematically excluded during the family meal because his wife is carrying on a private conversation with someone who isn't there." But S.G. didn't say that. He didn't refer to his own feelings at all. He only said that he believed his wife's behavior was "impolite," which I find to be a weirdly antiseptic way of talking about your own spouse's behavior. This is why I probed to find out if S.G. was actually feeling hurt and ignored, or if he simply had an abstract notion of how things should be that his wife wasn't living up to.

If it was merely the latter, I think he should let it go. If it's the former, he should take action--but action that is designed to strengthen the relationship, which scolding the partner who is "in the wrong" is definitely not going to do.

*Often people will excitedly say to me in conversation, "You should do a column on [whatever it is they are excitedly conversing about]." Perhaps I agree, but you must state your suggestion in the form of a question, as Alex Trebek might say. I can only answer the questions I get!