With more people married this week than there were last week, there are probably more sholom bayis issues in the world than ever before, Baruch Hashem.
That said, it’s nice to have some idea how things are going in other people’s homes, even though it’s frankly none of our business, but at least that way we know that it’s not just our own homes.
“At least we’re not these people.”
Take the recent story from last December, in which a guy in Italy got into a disagreement with his wife, and he decided to take a walk to cool off. And he never stopped walking. Police found him 280 miles away from his home about 7 days later at 2 in the morning.
I don’t know; most guys go around the block. They don’t just take off in a straight line. Or they catch their second Maariv for the night.
“Didn’t you already go to Maariv?”
“That was Mincha/Maariv.”
This is why there’s always someone learning in the back.
I mean what was his plan?
“Alright, I’m finally cooled off. What country am I in? Is this Spain?”
I kind of feel like at some point he said, “It’s been 3 days. Should I turn around? No, because then she’s going to be mad about the 3 days… And now it’s been 4 days. Should I turn around? Now it’s going to be worse.”
And take the story in Germany a couple of years ago in which police were called by neighbors who were concerned about “loud shouting that has been going on for some time.” When they got there, they found, in their words, “A man having a heated argument with a parrot.”
Okay, so first of all, how do you argue with a parrot? Doesn’t it just repeat what you said?
“You don’t listen to me.”
“You don’t listen to me!”
“What? I listen all the time!”
“I listen all the time!”
“No, all you do is parrot back what I say.”
“Wait, did you just use parrot as a racial slur?”
And before you say, “Is this an article about sholom bayis, or beating up birds?” I should say that this was his fiancée’s parrot. And apparently, he had a lot of resentment toward this thing, and it toward him, because the neighbors said they’d been arguing for, quote, “some time.”
And where was the fiancée in all of this? There’s no way she was home. It’s like she was out, and the guy was like, “This is my chance, right now. Just let the parrot know everything that’s been bothering me in a way that won’t disturb my kallah. Get everything out in the open, you know? Don’t keep it all in.”
And then she comes home, and the police lights are flashing, and she’s thinking, “Oh, no. What did my parrot do?”
It happens to be, though, that according to a recent poll, 1 in 3 women say that pets listen better than their husbands.
How can they tell this? Do the pets make better periodic “Uh huh,” and “She said that?” noises? Do the pets actually do whatever chores they’re asked to do? Are the pets better able to recollect what the women said to them in later conversations, without asking dumb follow-up questions that the women already answered? Are we just talking about parrots specifically? Because those guys don’t respond well to yelling. Is it just because when the women are talking, the pets aren’t staring at their phones? Is it just about lowered expectations? Because then this might be on the women.
But for example, one woman, Christina Holmdahl, says she rants all the time to her cat, her two dogs, and her three horses, and she finds that it helps. Okay, so I’m sorry it takes six pets to do the listening of one man. Three of them horses.
“A lot of times,” she says, “I’m just venting about work or complaining about the husband.”
I’m sorry the husband doesn’t want to listen to you complain about the husband.
It’s only a matter of time before the horses take a 280-mile walk to cool off. But they can’t because you get to keep them in a pen.
The one thing I might understand, though, is that the husband tries to solve her problems, while a horse just listens and agrees that they are indeed problems. It doesn’t try to solve anything. The husband is like, “You have this issue with me? I’ll try to do better.”
“No, I don’t want you to do better. I want you to listen.”
And the horse doesn’t get frustrated when she says things like that.
Also the horse doesn’t interrupt with, “Well, you should hear about my day!” and then try to one up her about which one of them should be more tired.
But the news isn’t all about disagreements. Some of it is people who are actually going to great lengths for the sake of sholom bayis.
For example, right now in Australia, there’s a groom who is on the hunt for a chicken who could walk his wife’s wedding ring down the aisle. But the chicken has to have a very specific look.
See, at some point during the engagement, the kallah’s brother made a joke about the old tradition of dowries, and the idea got stuck in the kallah’s head, so the chosson got her a chicken.
And after a bit, she had this idea that the chicken would be the ring-bearer at her wedding, which is a non-Jewish tradition usually given to a small child that is just at that age that combines a cuteness factor with a slight suspense of maybe he’ll lose the ring.
Anyway, the kallah wants to use the chicken. And the chicken has zero interest in walking down the aisle. In fact, it doesn’t like people at all.
“We can’t catch her, we can’t touch her, we can’t clean her, and she screams and pecks whenever she doesn’t need to,” he says.
And he had no idea, back when he bought the chicken, that this was going to be an issue. He just figured he got a good deal on a chicken.
But the kallah is really dead set on this, so now it’s the chosson’s job to train the chicken-slash-find another chicken that looks reasonably like the first one. All so his kallah can have a great wedding AND no one can end up getting hen-pecked.
So that’s his job now. But animals listen better than husbands, right?
So instead of getting into a whole big argument with the chicken, he’s like, “What if I pop in a second chicken and she won’t even know?” I bet the parrot guy is kicking himself for not thinking of this.
Basically, he got her a wild chicken that she’s so attached to that he has to secretly get her a second chicken to pretend it’s the first chicken. He can’t just say, “I saw how much you liked the chicken, so I got you a second one”?
Anyway, now he has people sending him headshots of chickens and he’s analyzing them by holding them up to the first chicken. And some of these people want a lot of money for their replacements, since they found out it’s for a wedding. All because of this dowry, which by the way is supposed to be provided by the bride’s family. Thanks, brother-in-law.
There has to be a cheaper option. Like maybe he can just show up at a chicken-processing plant and stand near the shochet.
“No, wait! That one!”
The shochet moves fast.
Also, every class in yeshiva has one kid who has chickens living in his basement.
And then there was the story from North Carolina this December, titled, “Groom Misses Wedding with Food Poisoning, Bride Improvises with Mannequin.”
Basically, the groom had to go to the hospital hours before the wedding, so the bride was in search of a mannequin that looked enough like the groom that she could fool all of the guests.
I would say to just take whichever mannequin was wearing the groom’s tuxedo in the store.
She ended up building the mannequin, actually, using a rolling carpet steamer, a mop, the groom’s suit flailing around off dangling off the mop, and a picture of his face.
Now that is dedication to sholom bayis. “I’m willing to get married anyway, even without you.”
The bride and the mannequin are very happy, and she says he listens better than the groom ever did.
I kid, but that’s the key to sholom bayis, right? A wife that doesn’t make you go to family simchas. And also a husband who doesn’t make you go to the hospital with him. Spending some time apart is good, no? You don’t have to be with each other 24/7. It’s just a chasunah.
The guests were a little weirded out at first, though.
“The groom has food poisoning,” she told everyone. “Not from this food.”
Anyway, the idea of the mannequin was to lighten the mood of the guests and go from being weirded out that the groom wasn’t there to being weirded out about dancing with a mop handle.
“It’s okay,” the photographer said. “We’ll insert him into the pictures later.”
My point is that plenty of people out there do not have perfect sholom bayis. But your goal, I guess, if you want to start small, is to make sure your sholom bayis stories don’t make the news.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
