How to train a husband

[tattwa]

Attention, frustrated wives: if you want your husband to start listening to you and stop leaving his socks on the floor, all you need is a little patience and a lot of mackerel. Such is the putative relationship advice of Amy Sutherland, a journalist who spent a year at an animal-trainer school and decided to apply the trainers' techniques to her husband's annoying habits. According to Sutherland, the key to marital bliss is to ignore negative habits and reward positive ones, the same approach animal trainers use to get killer whales to leap from their tanks and elephants to stand on their heads. So to teach her husband, Scott, to stop storming around the house when he couldn't find his keys, she practiced what trainers call Least Reinforcing Scenario, which means she ignored his outbursts, and didn't offer to help with the search. To prevent Scott from hovering over her while she tried to cook, she engineered "incompatible behaviors" by setting a bowl of chips and salsa at the other end of the room. Soon she had a key-finding, salsa-eating mate and, she says, a happier marriage.

Sutherland first wrote about her experiment in The New York Times in 2006, where it became the most e-mailed story of the year. This week her book, "What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage," comes out, and a movie is in development. Sutherland admits that her ideas are not groundbreaking: in the 1890s Ivan Pavlov experimented with dogs to study stimulus and response. In the 1930s, B. F. Skinner used rats and pigeons to develop his theory of "operant behaviors," the idea that behavior is affected by its consequences. That doesn't mean the strategy is not controversial: critics bristle at the idea that humans are as easily manipulated as dogs or marine mammals, and contend that books such as Sutherland's reinforce war-of-the-sexes stereotypes about women using their feminine wiles to manipulate simple-minded men.

The idea of women training simple men is a well-worn trope of pop culture. In the 1963 film "If a Man Answers," Sandra Dee's mother hands her a canine-training manual with the advice "If you want a perfect marriage, treat your husband like a dog." More recently, the BBC reality show "Bring Your Husband to Heel" featured a professional dog trainer teaching wives how to get their husbands to sit and stay.

While Sutherland claims that animal-training techniques work on both genders, in another new book, "Seducing the Boys Club," Nina DiSesa advocates a gender-specific approach to changing people's behavior. DiSesa, who was the first female chairman of the ad agency McCann Erickson, argues that women should use their femininity to manipulate the men they work with and advance their careers. Instead of criticizing an employee's ad proposal, she flatters him for his "brilliant" idea, then sweetly asks if he had any other inspirations. "Women use these tactics with men all the time," she says. "We're mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters. We know how to handle men, we just don't do it at work."

While DiSesa's tactics may appall feminists, the appeal of Sutherland's approach is obvious: no tearful couples-therapy sessions, no tantrums about unmet expectations. But Sutherland says it's not a quick fix. In fact, she was the one who wound up being retrained, as she taught herself not to take her husband's actions personally, and not to react when he did things that annoyed her. DiSesa also says she retrained herself to stop criticizing and confronting the men she worked with, and instead use "S and M," seduction and manipulation, to get her way.

And, she says, we shouldn't admit to our manipulations. "If people think I'm being conniving, I am," she says. "But if men see it coming, they'll duck." Sutherland's husband eventually caught on to her experiment (it didn't help that she wrote a book about the animal-trainer school), and even started using the techniques back on her. Now they use the word "shamu" as a verb, as in "Did you just shamu me?"

Shamuing might work to get your husband to stop leaving his socks on the bathroom floor, says psychotherapist Marlin Potash, author of "Hidden Agendas: What's Really Going On in Your Relationships." "In small doses, it's really a good idea," she says. But she's skeptical of the idea that the technique will work with real marital problems such as lack of communication or sexual incompatibility: "I don't really believe that changing these small behaviors is how one transforms a marriage." Sutherland makes no claims to be a relationship expert. And she's not opposed to therapy, although she says, judging from the enthusiastic response to her essay, "Psychologists might want to consider bringing more animals into the mix."

Sit, Beg, Roll Over, Stay
Animal trainers use lots of tricks to train their charges. Try the techniques below at home.

Reward positive behavior: If your mate picks up just one dirty sock without being asked, give lots of praise. Or a tasty fish.

Ignore negatives: Don't nag about the rest of the filthy laundry still piled on the floor. Trainers call this Least Reinforcing Scenario.

Don't take it personally: Laundry is just laundry, not a symbol for how much your spouse loves you or values your marriage.

© 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

[Mr Aoun]

Originally Posted by tattwa

if you want your husband to start listening to you and stop leaving his socks on the floor

man i hateeeeeeeeeeeeeeee guys with that habit, it's so annoying. Especially ones that leave their socks on the coffee table, it's so disgusting , hal 3aadet bya3teh ishaara keef il insen bi 3eesh 7ayeto wa shoo huweh shakhseeto.

[scorpion]

Originally Posted by tattwa

Attention, frustrated wives: if you want your husband to start listening to you and stop leaving his socks on the floor, all you need is a little patience and a lot of mackerel. Such is the putative relationship advice of Amy Sutherland, a journalist who spent a year at an animal-trainer school and decided to apply the trainers' techniques to her husband's annoying habits. According to Sutherland, the key to marital bliss is to ignore negative habits and reward positive ones, the same approach animal trainers use to get killer whales to leap from their tanks and elephants to stand on their heads. So to teach her husband, Scott, to stop storming around the house when he couldn't find his keys, she practiced what trainers call Least Reinforcing Scenario, which means she ignored his outbursts, and didn't offer to help with the search. To prevent Scott from hovering over her while she tried to cook, she engineered "incompatible behaviors" by setting a bowl of chips and salsa at the other end of the room. Soon she had a key-finding, salsa-eating mate and, she says, a happier marriage.

Sutherland first wrote about her experiment in The New York Times in 2006, where it became the most e-mailed story of the year. This week her book, "What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage," comes out, and a movie is in development. Sutherland admits that her ideas are not groundbreaking: in the 1890s Ivan Pavlov experimented with dogs to study stimulus and response. In the 1930s, B. F. Skinner used rats and pigeons to develop his theory of "operant behaviors," the idea that behavior is affected by its consequences. That doesn't mean the strategy is not controversial: critics bristle at the idea that humans are as easily manipulated as dogs or marine mammals, and contend that books such as Sutherland's reinforce war-of-the-sexes stereotypes about women using their feminine wiles to manipulate simple-minded men.

The idea of women training simple men is a well-worn trope of pop culture. In the 1963 film "If a Man Answers," Sandra Dee's mother hands her a canine-training manual with the advice "If you want a perfect marriage, treat your husband like a dog." More recently, the BBC reality show "Bring Your Husband to Heel" featured a professional dog trainer teaching wives how to get their husbands to sit and stay.

While Sutherland claims that animal-training techniques work on both genders, in another new book, "Seducing the Boys Club," Nina DiSesa advocates a gender-specific approach to changing people's behavior. DiSesa, who was the first female chairman of the ad agency McCann Erickson, argues that women should use their femininity to manipulate the men they work with and advance their careers. Instead of criticizing an employee's ad proposal, she flatters him for his "brilliant" idea, then sweetly asks if he had any other inspirations. "Women use these tactics with men all the time," she says. "We're mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters. We know how to handle men, we just don't do it at work."

While DiSesa's tactics may appall feminists, the appeal of Sutherland's approach is obvious: no tearful couples-therapy sessions, no tantrums about unmet expectations. But Sutherland says it's not a quick fix. In fact, she was the one who wound up being retrained, as she taught herself not to take her husband's actions personally, and not to react when he did things that annoyed her. DiSesa also says she retrained herself to stop criticizing and confronting the men she worked with, and instead use "S and M," seduction and manipulation, to get her way.

And, she says, we shouldn't admit to our manipulations. "If people think I'm being conniving, I am," she says. "But if men see it coming, they'll duck." Sutherland's husband eventually caught on to her experiment (it didn't help that she wrote a book about the animal-trainer school), and even started using the techniques back on her. Now they use the word "shamu" as a verb, as in "Did you just shamu me?"

Shamuing might work to get your husband to stop leaving his socks on the bathroom floor, says psychotherapist Marlin Potash, author of "Hidden Agendas: What's Really Going On in Your Relationships." "In small doses, it's really a good idea," she says. But she's skeptical of the idea that the technique will work with real marital problems such as lack of communication or sexual incompatibility: "I don't really believe that changing these small behaviors is how one transforms a marriage." Sutherland makes no claims to be a relationship expert. And she's not opposed to therapy, although she says, judging from the enthusiastic response to her essay, "Psychologists might want to consider bringing more animals into the mix."

Sit, Beg, Roll Over, Stay
Animal trainers use lots of tricks to train their charges. Try the techniques below at home.

Reward positive behavior: If your mate picks up just one dirty sock without being asked, give lots of praise. Or a tasty fish.

Ignore negatives: Don't nag about the rest of the filthy laundry still piled on the floor. Trainers call this Least Reinforcing Scenario.

Don't take it personally: Laundry is just laundry, not a symbol for how much your spouse loves you or values your marriage.

© 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

So that's it? now women want to treat man like dogs? and write articles about it too...hayde 2ekher 2yem..

[Anna-Daisy]

So, Tattwa . You didn't share with us your own oppinion on the topic... or the results of you experimenting with it, if applicable.


First of all, if I were a she-elephant, I wouldn't like my elephant-husband to sit on his head. I'd rather have him walk like a normal dignified elephant on his four legs. Does this sound very weird?
An elephant sitting on his head might attract some attention in a circus, but would he have any chance of even survival in the savannah - in a free habitat?
You can train a circus man, but not a free-habitat husband.


I generally resent people being considered as animals, but I once saw this very interesting Australian TV documentary on training shepherd dogs. There was this trainer, who obtained some very amazing results: it only took him 2 weeks to train very good shepherd dog, and this included just about 4 training sessions, each of 20 minutes. Training such a dog takes normally much longer than that and a lot of work.
So he explained that the mistake shepherd dogs trainers generally do is that they do not work with the natural instinct of the dog. On the contrary, they try to train the dogs out of their instincts (supposed to be primitive and useless).Then they try to train them into the "shepherd dog behaviour". Which takes long.

This trainer said that a dog's natural instinct actually is to work. A dog is happy when they can work. So what he as a trainer does is to encourage this instinct, instead of suppressing it, and help the dog do what they want: work and excel as a shepherd dog. And thus training the dog takes him about 10 time less time.

This mistake of supposing that we should be trained out of what we are is too often applied to humans, causing so many problems: in schools, in society, in family life, too.
I think the article above subscribes to this same mistake .


Can a man understand a woman? Most women would laugh and say, "Nooooo".
Then why assume that women can understand men?

This sort of articles are written from this alleged perspective: that women can understand men, and actually much better than they do. And this is such an illusion.

Women have been created with the same condition as men: not to be completely able to understand the other half.
That's why we are all supposed to treat the other gender with a special type of respect - because we can thus establish a good relationship based on this respect, insted of trying to base it on a supposed understanding, which cannot really exist. That's part of life's greatest mystery.

Peace and joy to everyone!

[Dalzi]

Originally Posted by scorpion

So that's it? now women want to treat man like dogs? and write articles about it too...hayde 2ekher 2yem..

Which creature leaves mess behind it?

Originally Posted by Mr Aoun

man i hateeeeeeeeeeeeeeee guys with that habit, it's so annoying. Especially ones that leave their socks on the coffee table, it's so disgusting , hal 3aadet bya3teh ishaara keef il insen bi 3eesh 7ayeto wa shoo huweh shakhseeto.

Yeah, on a glass table with mirrors too, so that you can see the pair two pairs.

[Salome]

There is a lot of general truth in the article, even if it may use an offending language.
We /women/ can admit that we can and we do use our feminine way to have an effect on men, to reach our goals. This is truly gender specific, and instinctly men are reacting more cooperatively to the feminine way than to a more masculine way.

Originally Posted by Anna-Daisy

Women have been created with the same condition as men: not to be completely able to understand the other half.
That's why we are all supposed to treat the other gender with a special type of respect - because we can thus establish a good relationship based on this respect, insted of trying to base it on a supposed understanding, which cannot really exist. That's part of life's greatest mystery.

Peace and joy to everyone!

Actually what tells you that men and women were created so that they dont understand completely each others?
Do you think its something destined?

Relationships can not be based on respect solely, its important but not enough. Without understanding there is no relationship. That is a real challenge to discover and understand the other. It is not impossible, it just takes a lot of patience and wisdom, and cool head:) But if you can do it, if you can reach understanding, it will have an effect like a miracle. That is the true essence.

[Observer]

The ugly side of feminism. Imagine the uproar if a man wrote this article about training women. Disgusting!!

[Salome]

Originally Posted by Observer

The ugly side of feminism. Imagine the uproar if a man wrote this article about training women. Disgusting!!

You can find all kinds of articles, like this one:

We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get? - washingtonpost.com

[coralie]

i dont want to train my man to do anything , it is either he is a gentleman and behave respectfully with a minimum or regards to the existence of his partner in the same house or i dont bother being in a relation , ma b3azib hali . khali bi beit emmo w ana bi bayti !

plus the word trainning as well as many other words in the article are very offensive discirbing a person "man" .

chou biyechko el women ? ya latifffff fi mennon ma byonta2o !

[Anny]

I dont want to put any energy on training anyone. First of all, where is the respect of being a human and not an animal in this article? None.

Have you ever wondered why the west occidental women have so many problems with their men and why many couples are seperated and divorced in the western society? Guess what, its maybe because women and men are not respecting enough the opposite sex. One proof is that they are relating them to dogs and cats. Women of today are the first cause of men's bad behavior and vice-versa (men of today are the fist cause of women's bad behavior).

What happen of communication and respect between two people. Instead of this article, I suggest an article that shows how to respect the other in a relationship and the good results of communication in a conversation or something similar on how to respect the other with his/her similarities and his/her difference.