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By SARAH SMILEY
Jennifer Lopez Keeps Dustin Happy
Dear Sarah, I just found out that my husband has a “cruise wife.” Should I be concerned?Any time a woman hears that her husband has another wife, she should be concerned. A “cruise wife,” however, is a different story.
If you overheard your husband talking about cruise wives, I can assure you it was an accident. There are some things we wives are not supposed to know, and “cruise wives” is one of them. (Do you tell your husband how many pairs of shoes you bought while he was on deployment? I didn’t think so.)
But the idea of a cruise wife isn’t as ominous as it sounds. This isn’t to say you should run and ask your husband about it (even though I know you will do just that when you’ve finished reading this).
Hearing about your husband’s cruise wife is like watching a train wreck. You know you shouldn’t look, but you can’t turn away. It’s like a hypochondriac reading the Merck Manual of Diagnosis; trust me when I say that you are going to feel sick afterwards.
By the way, and be aware that your husband may use different terminology for “cruise wife,” especially now that I’m making the name “cruise wife” public knowledge.
As far as I can tell, a cruise wife is simply a distraction. When your husband is on deployment, doesn’t it feel better to lose yourself in an episode of “The Bachelor” or “Grey’s Anatomy” (unless you are above-mentioned hypochondriac) than it does to sit around and cry about how lonely you are?
True, we women, as the more evolved and emotionally mature of the species, incorporate a healthy mix of avoidance, distraction and crying-with-our-girlfriends-while-eating-chocolate-cake into our lives. So it is hard for us to understand our husbands and their seeming simplicity. But it’s important to try.
Let’s put ourselves in their shoes – er, boots – then, shall we?
Imagine for a second that you are a man. You are on an aircraft carrier sharing a bunk room with seven other men. Resist the urge to clean up all the dirty socks on the floor and to throw the damp, soured bath towel into the laundry bag. Remember, this is only an exercise.
Now imagine pulling out a box of tissues and having a good cry with the other guys because you miss your wife. Doesn’t seem right, does it?
Try it again, only this time, imagine that you and the other guys are talking about your own wife (which is actually you, but not when you are pretending to be your husband) and how beautiful she is. This feels better, until one of the other guys agrees that your wife is pretty cool, and sexy, too.
Just when you start throwing punches (in your imaginary scene), switch gears again. Think of that same bunk room, with you and the other men discussing the backside of Jennifer Lopez (my husband’s cruise wife).
A cruise wife is like an aspirin. She dulls the pain, playing ever so cleverly right into the man’s inherent tendency to avoid any emotion that might be complex or lead into a deep conversation that causes them to shed a tear in front of another man.
We might understand the idea better if our men called these women – usually celebrities – by a name that better expressed their indulgent, distractive qualities. A name like Godiva, Ben & Jerry’s or Ann Taylor LOFT, just to name a few.
Everyone uses something to distract themselves during a deployment. The reality of the situation is far too painful not to. It’s common, after a deployment is over, for military wives to look back on the months spent alone and ask themselves, “How did I do that? How did I not go completely insane and fall apart?”
When they see all the new shoes in their closet, they remember.
Likewise, once your husband is home again, he might look back at his time away and think, “How did I not go totally crazy missing my wife?” Then he thinks about Jennifer Lopez and says, “Oh yeah. That’s how.”
So before you yell at your husband for having another “wife,” consider all the buffers you use during stressful times, and try to understand.
Once you have come to terms with your husband’s cruise wife, the next step is (naturally) to find yourself a cruise husband. Next time Dustin goes away, my cruise husband will be Stephen Colbert. How about you?
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Sarah Smiley is the wife of a Navy pilot and daughter of a retired Navy pilot. She is the author of “Going Overboard: The Misadventures of a Military Wife” (Penguin/NAL), and her syndicated column “Shore Duty” appears weekly in military and civilian newspapers across the country. Read more about Sarah at her website, www.SarahSmiley.com.
