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A Funny Story

October 3rd, 2006 | by Craig |

(Note: The work below is not my own, nor do I present it as such. It’s just something funny that I think is worth a read. Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow later this evening. I ask you to forbear any undue Googling, at least for now. But feel free to leave comments. I’d like to know what you think about this piece.)

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As I’m leaving the house for work, my wife paces, irritated. “Have you seen my keys?” she snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Tippy, at her heels, anxious that her favorite human’s upset.

In the past I would have been right behind Tippy. I would have turned right and joined the hunt while trying to soothe my wife with bromides like, “Don’t worry, they’ll turn up.” But that only made her angrier, and a simple case of missing keys soon would become a full-blown angst-ridden drama starring the two of us and our poor nervous dog.

Now, I focus on my own car keys in my hands. I don’t turn around. I don’t say a word. I’m using a technique I learned from a dolphin trainer.

I love my wife. She’s well read, adventurous and does a hysterical rendition of a midwestern schoolmarm that still cracks me up after 12 years of marriage.

But she also tends to be forgetful, and is often tardy and mercurial. She hovers around me when I get home asking if I read this or that piece in The New Yorker when I’m trying to unwind. She suffers from serious bouts of spousal deafness but never fails to hear me when I mutter to myself on the other side of the house. “What did you say?” she’ll shout.

These minor annoyances are not the stuff of separation and divorce, but in sum they began to dull my love for Jane. I wanted to nudge her a little closer to perfect, to make her into a mate who might annoy me a little less, who wouldn’t keep me waiting at restaurants, a mate who would be easier to love.

So, like many husbands before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving her. We went to a counselor to smooth the edges off our marriage. She didn’t understand what we were doing there and complimented us repeatedly on how well we communicated. I gave up. I guessed she was right — our union was better than most — and resigned myself to stretches of slow-boil resentment and occasional sarcasm.

Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American wife.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by lecturing. The same goes for the American wife.

Back in Maine, I began thanking Jane if she had dinner ready on time. If she managed that feat two days in a row, I’d kiss her. Meanwhile, I would not complain about being hungry, but I would grab the occasional snack. But as she basked in my appreciation, the feeding times became more consistent.

I was using what trainers call “approximations,” rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American wife to begin regularly getting the soup on the table by praising her once. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Jane the wife, I began to praise every small accomplishment: if she fixed my favorite meal, did the laundry, or was on time for anything.

I also began to analyze my wife the way a trainer considers an exotic animal. Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn’t. For example, an elephant is a herd animal, so it responds to hierarchy. It cannot jump, but can stand on its head. It is a vegetarian. The exotic animal known as Jane is a loner. She has the balance of a gymnast, but moves slowly, especially when getting dressed. Skiing comes naturally, but being on time does not.

Once I started thinking this way, I couldn’t stop. At the school in California, I’d be scribbling notes on how to walk an emu or have a wolf accept you as a pack member, but I’d be thinking, “I can’t wait to try this on Jane.”

On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an “incompatible behavior,” a simple but brilliant concept.

Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn’t alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.

At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Jane to keep her from crowding me while I tried to unwind. To lure her away from the recliner, I’d set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I’d done it: no more Jane hovering around me while I relaxed.

I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn’t respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.

In the margins of my notes I wrote, “Try on Jane!”

It was only a matter of time before she was again tearing around the house searching for her keys, at which point I said nothing and kept at what I was doing. It took a lot of discipline to maintain my calm, but results were immediate and stunning. Her temper fell far shy of its usual pitch and then waned like a fast-moving storm. I felt as if I should throw her a mackerel.

Now she’s at it again; I hear her banging a closet door shut, rustling through papers on a chest in the front hall and thumping upstairs. I hold steady. Then, sure enough, all goes quiet. A moment later, she walks into the kitchen, keys in hand, and says calmly, “Found them.”

Without turning, I call out, “Great, see you later.”

Off she goes with our much-calmed pup.

After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my wife much easier to love. I used to take her faults personally. But thinking of my wife as an exotic species gave me the distance I needed to consider our differences more objectively.

I adopted the trainers’ motto: “It’s never the animal’s fault.” When my training attempts failed, I didn’t blame Jane. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel hers. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can’t stop a badger from digging, and you can’t stop my wife from losing her keys.

Professionals talk of animals that understand training so well they eventually use it back on the trainer. My animal did the same. When the training techniques worked so beautifully, I couldn’t resist telling my wife what I was up to. She wasn’t offended, just amused. As I explained the techniques and terminology, he soaked it up. Far more than I realized.

Last fall, firmly in middle age, I learned that I needed braces. They were not only humiliating, but also excruciating. For weeks my gums, teeth, jaw and sinuses throbbed. I complained frequently and loudly. Jane assured me that I would become used to all the metal in my mouth. I did not.

One morning, as I launched into yet another tirade about how uncomfortable I was, Jane just looked at me blankly. She didn’t say a word or acknowledge my rant in any way, not even with a nod.

I quickly ran out of steam and started to walk away. Then I realized what was happening, and I turned and asked, “Are you giving me an L. R. S.?” Silence. “You are, aren’t you?”

She finally smiled, but her L. R. S. has already done the trick. She’d begun to train me, the American husband.