 o one wants to get divorced, and in the new economy, no one can afford to. So how are you and your spouse going to survive until the Dow recovers -- with all your limbs intact? Here at Naughty Bride HQ, we suggest it's time to reset the tone for gaming the relationship system, hacking your brain and finding the fun. And it's not just for the rest of your marriage... it's for the rest of your life.
Nevertheless, like a re-marriage in midlife, our midstream shift away from wedding etiquette represents an organizational challenge. We still host a mix of bridal content via the pretty pink menu on the left, but we also host The Naughty Bride's Secret Blog, below (subscribe here) which whispers naughty suggestions about how to keep your marriage hot (or turn around a cold one), with an occasional unfrilly take on the day's matrimonial matters. But don't trust us, check back often, because you never know what we might spring on you.
The Naughty Bride's
Secret Blog
(okay, it's a blog, not a secret,
so... pretend it's role play)
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It was a weird day for matrimony. First, last night The Naughty Bride caught wind of this obligatory NYT piece about Elizabeth Edwards' PR tour for her book about the much-discussed affair with Rielle Hunter that killed her husband John's candidacy. In it, Edwards refers to the resulting wee fils d'amour as "it," and says whether or not she and John still love each other is "a complicated question."
Then today the NYT's Maureen Dowd chimed in as the voice of the patriarchy, tsking that Elizabeth "doesn't seem to know much about men," after comparing the relative beauty of her better with that of the candidate's paramour and cattily wondering aloud "what [she] hopes to gain from this book."
The Naughty Bride hates to be the one to point this out, but that's a bit rich coming from a writer whose column is no stranger to salacious detail in the service of her celebrity reputation. (Ahem, no one look up in the corner at The Naughty Bride's pictures, or leaf through the blog for naughty euphemism, m'kay?) Edwards and Dowd should be sisters on this. But not so.
Why? Ask Gay Talese. According to a New York Magazine piece, he's writing a book about his marriage to publisher Nan Talese. And how does that matter? Gay Talese wrote Thy Neighbor's Wife in 1980 after exhaustive -- or perhaps exhausting -- research on the Sexual Revolution, and Nan his wife is one of the biggest deals in publishing. That their relationship has lasted fifty years (50!) is supposed to be a miracle.
As Elizabeth Edwards will tell you, it's not. The "Resilience" in her title isn't accidental. Surviving the drama that her twenty-eight year marriage (or Nan's fifty years) will bring is just simple hard work. You've got to take your ego out and iron it as thin as possible every day. And sometimes you slip, calling your husband's child "it." (The Naughty Bride hopes this is temporary, btw.) And you take your marriage "month by month," as Elizabeth is taking hers. Or if you're like Nan, you say to your husband, "You are comfortable with specifics," he writes non-fiction, "And I am comfortable in the fog" in that she publishes fiction.
How much better if these wives had torn a page out of Rielle Hunter's book (John Edwards' Other Woman) or Kirsten Garret's (Talese's) and seduced a married man -- their husbands. If only instead of "doing her Betty White number" and pretending nothing happened while Gay gallavanted, Nan had awaited him as Rielle awaited John Edwards in order to stalk up to him and say "You are hot," and [she] wanted to make videos with him. If only Elizabeth Edwards had... well, gone out and done crazy research on orgies, or met her husband unexpectedly in Rome? Well, okay, as the Wife Of a Candidate, she couldn't. But something. And that's why she wrote this book, Maureen Dowd. Because it's one way she can break out of the mold. For a political wife, telling the tale of your upper lip's stiffness is mega-hula transgressive!
Who knows? Maybe they did do these things, and Elizabeth Edward still needs to tell her tale. Or maybe Maureen Dowd's clucking is right, and it's better to deny, deny, deny, live in a Nannish fog because at the end of it you're still sitting beside the man who knows most of your life. Because like Gay Talese, as Nan has now famously said of her husband, when it comes to marriage none of us really knows anything, so writing a book to discover more? "It's probably all right." |
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The LATimes Magazine section Sunday featured an interview with Jay & Mavis Leno, who still light up when they see each other after 28 years of marriage. As both a former Hollywood Funny Merchant AND a Hollywood "Wife Of," The Naughty Bride only wishes she got along with herself that well.
Trained as readers are in the expectations of PR fluff pieces, we expect an article with bromides about being able to laugh at the humanness of our conflicts. But joke is on us: the article packs a better punchline if you read between the lines.
What got us here at Naughty Bride HQ was a passage about one of the worst times in the Leno marriage, when work kept Jay away (too much work rather than too little, upon getting the Tonight Show gig), and naturally Mavis responded by overcompensating in the independence department. She says, "All of a sudden... every person on the planet was asking him for something. So I thought, I'm going to be the one who doesn't ask for anything." The next paragraphs are about how isolated she felt. And for good reason. With so many demands on his attention elsewhere, and so few at home, it would be easy for a husband in this situation to shift away.
The Naughty Bride has been there, done that, but with only twenty years under her belt. The bad news is, you don't have to be in a combat pay business like production to deal with nutty hours, time away, or terrible temptations on the job. But the good news is, the only real trick to staying cemented is to connect first, then ask for what you want with a smile.
As a comedy writer and a feminist, Mavis must have had this down. Or, ya know, had to pass through a hideous valley of pain in order to get it down.
As The Naughty Bride's Secret Guide reformats into a discussion of ways to keep a marriage going during tough times, we're using the metaphor of a second Honeymoon. The ticket to ride is that smile. May we humbly suggest... a naughty one? 
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Scuse the wait, folks. As it was when she grew up in the frozen North, the Naughty Bride's been off on Spring Break, only to find an avalanche upon her return. Luckily, this is sunny Southern California, so the white stuff is all paperwork. Bad paperwork. Mean paperwork. Buzzkill paperwork. Not naughty, not sexy, not fun. But it's the same at your house, so we won't dwell.
A couple of weeks post-break, The Naughty Bride finds that her desk is still unshoveled and the issues with our current marital climate remain. To wit, newspapers are reporting that the economy is so bad, divorces are actually down because no one can afford attorneys anymore. That's good news for realtors (keeps houses off the market) and bad news for marriage therapists (still beyond most marriages' means), so we here at Naughty Bride HQ are revamping the site. Instead of playing around with wedding etiquette and poking fun at the day's bridal news, we'll be offering tips and tricks for staying together... and poking fun at the day's bridal news.
Call it a second honeymoon at home, if you will, in the middle of a long marriage. After all, like The Naughty Bride and the man we call her First Husband, we've been together a while, us here at Naughty Brides and you out there.
And why not mix metaphors? This time, as always, but never more so than when we've just been reminded of the tax advantages to filing jointly, the trick is to make ourselves forget that the marital bed is our lifeboat. So grab a paddle and let's get busy. First ones to smooch on the beach, win.
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The Naughty Bride is swooning. Thanks to Rock N Roll Bride, she found this humdinger in her in-box and can't stop thinking about it.
But that's the charm of marriage isn't it? Being safe enough to let go? To find someone who makes you want to abandon propriety in favor of pulling a yab-yum on the beach? (Yep, that lapdance has a silly sounding sanskrit name.) To make out in a parked car just for the sheer adolescent thrill? Sure, you can get away with it for a nanosecond when you're young. Before, ya know, some jealous cop arrests you. But when you've got gray hair no one's going to stop you from grabbing a slice of samhadi with both hands, unless it's that cop again. So go forth and be naughty, people. Find someone you're going to want that bad, a couple decades from now. And groom, baby, groom (thank you Doc Sapolsky). |
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The Naughty Bride Says:
The bridal obsession is a rite of passage few brides can avoid. If you as a naughty bride find yourself tempted, it's probably best to embrace the phenomenon, stay within a budget (or more realistically, within double your budget) and console yourself that it could have been worse. If you spend too much you're in good company, and if you don't it'll be useful ammunition in all future financial arguments with your husband. Either way, you win.
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