First rule of marriage: Don’t say ‘no’

Several unrelated streams of thought came together last night, and they had me thinking about improv, the form of comedy where sketch acts are performed on-the-fly without scripts.

Some time ago I was watching a program about improv — why I don’t know — and they said that the first rule of improv was not to say “no.”

You see, that kills the sketch dead. There is nowhere to go from there. You have taken away all inertia.

And last evening I was thinking how well this lesson applies to all of life.

Automobiles

No one wants to be involved in an unintended crash. But least of all with a bridge piling. Your automobile has built up a great deal of inertia, and hitting a steel-reinforced concrete pier brings that all to an immediate halt.

Damage is maximal. Fatalities are likely.

Physical altercations

No sane person wants to be punched in the face. It hurts and kills.

So imagine that your face is hanging out, and all of a sudden, a giant fist is proceeding toward it with maximal velocity.

What to do?

In all cases, it is difficult to stop the fist dead in its tracks. There’s a lot of inertia behind that fist.

That’s why most martial arts teach redirection. It’s difficult to stop a flying fist, but it’s comparatively easy to redirect it.

What if it’s all about inertia and redirection?

Thinking about all of these scenarios, I wondered whether the key to life happiness simply rests in the concepts of inertia and redirection.

In a marriage–as with improv–a conversation has nowhere to go when someone says “no.”

But it’s so expedient. We all do it. A hundred times a month in little conversations that mean nothing.

Yet what if these simple inertia-killing “nos” have the same effect they do when crumpling a car, concaving a face, or draining the humor from a previously funny improv sketch?

‘Til death do us part

A marriage is yoked at the most crucial part of a person, the essence, or “soul,” if you will. So these little refutations might have far more damage that colliding with a bridge in the most protected “crumple designed front impact zone.”

Instead they come at your heart, where you’re most vulnerable.

And what if it’s just as simple as taking the story in a new, related direction, as in improv?

As a side note, we were watching the comedy It’s Kind of a Funny Story last night, and one character jokes that he heard that Zach Galifianakis’ character was psychologically committed because he tried to rape a penguin at the zoo.

So I’m not saying that if your partner suggests going to the zoo to violate a penguin, you suggest violating a flamingo instead.

Clearly I’m talking about less substantial — legal and ethical — situations

I’m merely saying that if you replaced your goto “no” with some improv style redirection, your life might be markedly higher.

A non-example

My wife and I have a running joke about one day buying a motorcycle with a sidecar.

To be clear, neither of us has any desire to actually do this.

But on a somewhat often basis, I make the joke about buying a sidecar with an eject lever in case she gets too lippy.

At which time she protest that she’s not riding in a sidecar, and it’s funny and we both know it’s serious

Better example

To my knowledge, I have been on a sailboat once in my life, and I generally liked it despite the fact that I knocked my pre-teen head on one of the large poles, whose name I don’t event know … that’s how serious I am about sailing.

But in my heart, I long to retire and sail the world.

And for a really long time, this elicited the same reaction as the sidecar. But this time it hurt a little. Sometimes a lot.

Again, we’re yoked at our dreams.

Then one day that changed. One day she said something akin to:

“Instead of just buying an expensive sailboat someday, why don’t we go on a sailing trip or take lessons to see whether we even liked it.”

And that changed everything.

So does that make me Gilligan or the Skipper?

Now it’s something that we both share. Not a point of separation but a point of unification.

More than a year ago, Emily was at a conference in Corpus Christi, Texas, and she brought me back a small wooden sailboat.

It’s one of my most prized possessions — it’s about four feet from me as I type.

With a simple act, she turned an inertia killing “no” into something we share and something that continually reminds me how much I love her and how glad I am that out 6.5 billion people on the planet, how very happy I am that my dreams are yoked to her.

So, I say to you, what if it really is just that simple?