Marriage needs lots of humor

I was starting a lesson on marriage for the priests quorum in my ward, and I asked them, "What do you think is important when you're looking for a wife?"

They sat in stony silence for a while. I think they suspected a trap.

Finally one of them said, "Well, it helps if she's good-looking."

Come on, they're teenage boys. I didn't even argue. "What else?"

The very next suggestion was: "Sense of humor."

I looked around at them and nodded. "Yeah, I guess she'd better have that."

Later, though, I kept thinking about the "sense of humor" thing. Because that also comes out at or near the top of what young women say they're looking for in a husband.

Why is a sense of humor important in a marriage? It can't just mean that your spouse has to be funny, or comedians would be the first people to get married.

My grandfather was a joke-teller, but after 50 years or so of marriage, my grandmother had heard them all. "Oh, Rega," she said, "they don't want to hear that old story."

"Oh, we do," we'd say, and Nana Lu would shake her head and leave the room so she didn't have to hear it again. She loved him dearly, but she knew all the punch lines.

Then I realized — nobody ever says they're looking for a spouse who's funny.

Nor do I think they're looking for a spouse who will laugh at them. In fact, I can't think of a surer way to irritate a spouse than to laugh at them a lot. "It's not funny," they'll say. And if you answer, "It is to me," you lose so many points.

That's because when you're laughing at something, you're detached from it. Distant. It suggests you don't care. So the last thing you want to do is laugh at things the other person considers to be serious.

It's a shared sense of humor that you want, about things outside your marriage. To laugh together about things that you're facing together.

My wife, our youngest daughter and I were walking along the largest street in Barcelona, tired out after a day of playing tourist. My wife suddenly got the hiccups. Really loud hiccups.

Now, having the hiccups isn't funny. It can hurt. And it's embarrassing. If I were a compassionate husband, I would have pretended that nothing was happening. Instead, I took my daughter's hand and said, "We'd better walk in front of her so nobody thinks we're together."

My wife reacted with mock consternation. "Oh, right, you're ashamed of me!"

I pointed across the boulevard. "Look, people over there are coming out of their houses to see if there's a terrorist incident going on."

"You always make fun of me," said my wife.

"It means we love you," I said.

"And your hiccups are scaring us," said my daughter. "Walk faster, Dad."

If my wife hadn't been laughing to start with, of course, there would have been no joking.

We went down into a subway station and got on a train. My wife was tired and sat down on one of the few available seats. (The hiccups were over.) My daughter and I stood and held on to straps near the door.

When the train stopped at our station, my daughter and I got off; my wife lagged behind a little. A man from the train, not realizing we were together, got between me and my wife on the long escalator up to the street.

All of a sudden, I heard my wife shout at the man. I turned around on the escalator as the man, in broken English, tried to explain. "My hand just goes that way," he said, cupping his fingers.

I thought he had touched my wife, and I was ready to take violent action. My wife restrained me, and the man hurried away. "He was picking your pocket," my wife explained. "He was raising the flap on your pocket and preparing to dip down and get your wallet. So I karate-chopped him and yelled."

Then she formed her fingers into that cupped shape and said, "My hand just goes that way."

Thus began a long-running family joke. I can't count how many times one of us has said, "My (whatever) just goes that way." Always good for a laugh.

And even now, whenever somebody in the family gets the hiccups, we're bound to be told that people in Barcelona are looking around to see where that sound is coming from.

The hiccups. A pickpocket. Annoying things that were turned into a family joke.

Not that jokes and wit and mockery are always appropriate. I remember when a book came out with the title "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (And It's All Small Stuff)." I guess the idea was for people not to take things so seriously. Which is fine — most of the time.

Except for that parenthetical "And It's All Small Stuff." That really got to me.

Because it's not all "small stuff." A few weeks before, our baby had died on the day she was born. I didn't think that was small stuff. Nobody in our family was joking about it. We still aren't.

It wasn't a subject for humor. But even in hard times, there's room for humor about other things.

We once got an orange monkey. Stuffed, of course. Smooth fabric. Nothing natural-looking about it. It was just plain goofy.

And on an impulse one day, as I made our bed I put the monkey under the covers, so that when my wife turned down the bedspread that night, there was the monkey, casually lying on her pillow with its hands behind its head.

She screamed. She laughed. And she got even. Because I soon found the monkey in odd places. For instance, she once tied it to the steering wheel of my car.

Soon, she found it in the fridge.

On a business trip, I found it in my suitcase when I reached my destination.

She got a surprise delivery of flowers — with the monkey worked into the bouquet by a cooperative florist.

Eventually, we ran out of fun things to do with the monkey. We forgot about it for a while.

Until we were both stunned to find it taped to the bathroom ceiling. She thought I had done it. I thought she had done it. But no, our oldest son had been watching these antics and decided we weren't done with the monkey after all.

What did all this monkey business actually mean within our marriage?

It was play. We were goofing off together, like children. Amid all the serious work we had to do, the problems we faced, the responsibilities we needed to fulfill day after day, there were these moments of laughter.

The monkey said, "I'm thinking of you. I like being silly with you."

People talk about the need to keep romance alive in a marriage. I think it's 10 times as important to keep the humor alive.

Or maybe the sense of humor is romance.