Imagine you’re having the worst day of your life. The relationship you’ve been in is in shambles, and you’ve just thrown your cell phone at a wall after angrily hanging up on your significant other.
Where can you turn for help? Where can you get advice to save your relationship?
No matter what your answer is, I can almost guarantee it is not the book “What Shamu Taught Me about Life, Love and Marriage,” one of hundreds of the ridiculously titled relationship advice books available on shelves around the world.
“Women Who Love Too Much.” “Make Every Man Want You.” “Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need Shoes.” The list is long and nauseating, and the shelves are crammed with brightly colored books with titles that make it seem like everything that’s wrong with your life can be solved by one oversimplified solution, like a big killer whale.
It also becomes clear who the book is aimed at purely from the title, specifically, the number of words in the title. If the book is called “Make Your Lover See You For The Real You Inside,” that’s a girl book. “Getting Chicks”? Dude book.
One of the heavy hitters of the relationship book industry is Dr. John Gray, author of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” The book’s success sparked an entire series of follow-up books with ludicrous titles like “Mars and Venus in the Workplace,” “Mars and Venus in the Bedroom,” and “Truly Mars and Venus,” whatever that means.
Reading only titles, one wonders what the books could possibly be about. Observe my totally made up dialogue from “Mars and Venus on a Date”:
Mars: “That’s a nice cloud layer you’re wearing tonight. What is that?”
Venus: “It’s sulfuric acid.”
Mars: “Well, it’s hot.”
Venus: “Yeah, 800 degrees Celsius.”
Mars: “…so, umm…nice weather today, huh?”
If you feel more like doing homework, you could pick up, “Do You Know Your Lover?”, which is a reasonable title, but the book itself is a flip-top cardboard notepad with fill-in-the-blank checklists and tips inside. Because we all know if your marriage is crumbling, the best way to fix it is to do “Mad Libs.”
But the biggest problem with these books is they try to tell you that the answers to your problems are simple, and their insight is all that’s standing between you and lifelong happiness. That’s simply not true. Relationships are hard work. It takes open, honest communication to survive, and no magic tricks or clever titles will do it for you. There really aren’t any shortcuts.
But, if worse comes to worse, you could always just ask a whale.