Modern love, modern work

A little while ago, my husband sent me an article about this woman who started using animal training techniques to push her husband a little closer to perfection. I'll explain:

Mrs. Sutherland, a writer, was growing increasingly impatient with her generally lovable husband's little annoying habits. She loved him alright, she simply could not get over things like, for example, his "spousal deafness" yet never failing to hear her when muttering to herself at the other side of the house. It was just her luck, though, to start working on a book-project about the techniques used to train exotic animals. How do you train a dolphin to waltz, or a baboon to skateboard, or hyenas to pirouette on command? Mrs. Sutherland soon realized that perhaps she could make her husband a little easier to love by using some of the animal training techniques she was just learning about:

1. Reward behavior you like: she said thank you or whatever, when he picked up his shit off the floor
2. Ignore behavior you don't like: she left his stuff on the floor without saying a word about it
3. Use "approximations": as you can't expect a baboon/person to completely unlearn a bad behavior and learn a new/good one in just one step, you simply reward the little steps that lead towards the good behavior: one pair of shorts in the laundry basket is closer to perfection than none
4. Create "incompatible tasks": to get him off her back when she needed to be left alone, rather than teach him NOT to do something, she would get him to do other things that would make his undesirable behavior impossible.
5. Adopt the trainer's motto "It's never the animal's fault": whenever her attempts failed, she didn't blame it on her husband but rather re-examined her training techniques

She also shared her success stories with her husband and soon noticed that he was using some of her techniques back on her. Mrs. Sutherland insists that her marriage is "much smoother" and her husband "much easier to love".

Kyle and I laughed about this. See, we like to think of ourselves as representatives of the human kind, the species that uses speech to get by. We also hope that we will never need to revert to such desperate measures and have already promised each other we will always try asking first before creating incompatible tasks. Yet again, being the worse communicator and the less nice person of the two, I have already started to wonder whether using some of these techniques a little bit AT WORK might not be a good idea, after all. Hmmm...

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Reference: Sutherland, Amy. "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage", The New York Times, June 25, 2006. You need to have a subscription to the NY Times to access the full text of the article. Let me know if you want me to email it to you, I have it.