Men Are Like Waffles, Women Are Like Spaghetti

I don't even know where to begin with this.

I guess perhaps at the tagline on the back of the book, that simply reads, "breakfast food or dinner dish, you and your spouse are delightfully different" which feels like it was ripped straight out of a cannibal cookbook. Seriously, this tagline insinuates you are going to murder and eat your spouse. That's the first impression I got. That's...that's not really a good starting point, but perhaps you can only go up from there? Guess we'll find out.

Actually, I was wrong. The only way to go from here is down. Because not only is that tagline unnerving, but the author quote is genuinely strange as well. It states that the authors of this book, obviously a husband and wife team who may or may not want to cook and then devour eachother, have written other books as well and are regular relationship columnists. Their other book titles include "Red Hot Monogamy", "Every Marriage Is A Fixer Upper" and, oddly enough, another book titled "Single Men Are Like Waffles, Single Women Are Like Spaghetti." This sort of doesn't work when you have another book with that same title, just without the 'single' part to it. What that says to me is that there's absolutely NO difference between married or single life, and that every married woman is the same as every single woman. I get that you guys stumbled onto a cutesy title and liked it, but you liked it enough for two books that contradict eachother? That's weird.

But let's not focus on the confusing part of that, as confusing as it is, and instead focus on their other books. Red Hot Monogamy implies that these people do not care about relationships that are not monogamous, which is fine, to each their own I guess. I would imagine, as a monogamous person myself, that it'd be hard to give relationship advice for a type of relationship you're not in. So okay, it's alright, and I get it, and it's kind of a neat title. It's simplistic and it delivers the concept easily. It's fine. It's actually the next title I have a problem with. "Every Marriage Is A Fixer Upper". Do you know what a fixer upper is? It's like, you find a house that's sort of run down but you can still see the good in it, and if someone just put enough work into it, it could be a really nice, livable house. That's what a fixer upper is. To apply that to the concept of relationships implies that you're looking for people who've been broken to date so that you can fix them and maybe control them? Or it also implies just that every single marriage is fucked up right from the get go, so why get married at all if that's the case? This title really irks me.

And listen, I'm not an opponent of marriage. I know there's a lot of people who're my age who are against it, and for their own good reasons I'm sure, far be it from me to tell someone what they can believe in when it comes to that sort of thing (unless you're against gay marriage, then you're just an asshole), but even still this bothers me.

But what bothers me even more is that right under the description for this book is the "also available" section which includes a devotional study guide for the book I'm presenting you right now. This cinches it for me. These people are religious. It doesn't really say that anywhere, but that's the call I'm putting out there. And listen, there's again nothing wrong with being religious insofar that you don't use said religion to hurt other people, and it's nice that they've dedicated their lives to trying to help other people in their relationships. A noble cause, indeed. But obviously something went horribly wrong along the way. And while I'm at it, I'm not at all a fan of the stereotypical conceptualization of how men and women think differently. Like, yes, obviously we do, but there's also a lot of women who think like men and a lot of men who problem solve like women. I'm not here for this.

While the layout of the book itself isn't too bad really, and the artwork on the cover is cutesy, this whole thing strikes me with a 'holier than though' attitude and smugness about itself. There's just something inherently wrong about assuming you know how to fix someone else's problems. Even if you've had problems like theirs, you probably faced it differently, reacted differently and therefore however it worked out for you isn't going to necessarily work out for them, so in conclusion, stop trying to fucking tell people you know how to live their lives better than they do. I get it. You want to help people. I get that. It's a noble cause, like I said before, but it's only noble when you're doing it because you genuinely care about people, and that's where books like this become a problem. These aren't people who care about people. These are people who recognize others have severe issues they don't know how to handle and so instead they look for an easy fix, like in a self help book, so that when eventually everything DOES fall apart, they won't have to blame themselves. They instead can go, "Well I did everything in the book and it didn't work, so, oh well."

Self help books are the same market as so many diet fads. You don't care because you care. You care because it's profitable. Now I recognize there are those out there, genuine dieticians or health conscious people or people who do actually want to help others fix their lives or relationships, but the ones in it for the money far outweigh the ones in it for your benefit. They're in this for THEIR benefit. To continue their influx of monetary gain without actually solving any of your problems. Self help books have long been an issue for me, but the ones that are really an issue for me are the ones that don't even try to make it any less obvious that they're simply trying to rip you off. At least try and conceal your godforsaken capitalistic agenda for the readers benefit, right? Right. I could easily write a self help book. It's not hard. In fact, all it boils down to is giving, essentially, generic yet vague enough advice that everyone recognizes but hardly applies to themselves, and then telling them how to apply this advice to their lives so that it betters it.

Here's a fairly solid piece of relationship advice I'll give you right now, for free!

"If you and your significant other keep screaming at one another and think you cannot get along, despite all the years and effort put into it, perhaps try getting a divorce, because you're likely both extremely unhappy and your problems run so deep that they never could've been fixed."

Don't stay together for the kids. Don't stay together cause it's easy. Don't stay together cause your wife is fucking spaghetti, cause you were a dumb enough fuck to marry a box of Rigatoni. Just end it. This obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but I feel it's a generic enough, yet vague enough, piece of advice that could apply to enough people to be helpful. And look at that, I gave you that, and this entire post, completely for free! I'm not going to try and sell you on a seminar and I'm not going to try and get you to buy my DVD on the website.

I care about you.

You can tell I care about you because I'm telling you stop looking to self help books for help.

You're welcome, reader.