How to Win Your First Argument After Your Wife Has Heart Surgery

That's me on the left.

On the odd chance that you will have a spouse who has heart surgery, you might want to file this away.

Arguments are inevitable in any marriage, but one must be careful in arguing for the first time after heart surgery.
It can be tricky.
You can still "win" them, just like you did before surgery, when you felt good about having made your points logically, clearly, and righteously. You showed her!

You can still recapture that glorious post-argument feeling where you realize what a jerk you were, and how bad you made her feel, even though you were right, and you "won."

Here's how to recapture that magic. Post heart surgery.

Follow My 10 Tips, and you can't go wrong, and remember that they are listed in order of use:

1. Forget how worried you were when she was going in to surgery, and forget how you told God that you would take her place if you could.
2. Forget how relieved you felt when the surgeon walked in and told you that everything went fine, and how you really exhaled for the first time since about four hours earlier.
3. Forget how terrified you were when she had those two episodes in front of you in the ICU, and how, as you went down to get the CT scans of her brain, you were sure that things were going to turn out badly.
4. Forget how much all of this put things like jobs and money and neatness and order into perspective in those first few hard hours.
5. Forget how much everyone else has done for your family and you personally.
6. Forget how thankful you were that you had a good job, with good insurance, lived a mile from the hospital where it all took place, which happens to be the best place in the region to do the surgery, and that you somehow got the top cardiac surgeon on the entire staff to do your wife's surgery. Forget all of that. You must if this is going to work.

You then shift from forgetting to remembering.

7. Remember all of the little things you have had to do in the last four weeks that your wife did before the surgery, that you just assumed happened all by themselves. On the other hand, remember to forget that you never thanked her for doing them either.
8. Remember all of the personal sacrifices you have made in the last four weeks. Don't just remember, but dwell on them, and how unfair it all seems. (Important! If you haven't done a good job on step #6, you will not be able to do this very well.)
9.Let all of this stuff just brew and fester for days. It's all about forgetting and remembering the right things, at the right times, and to the right degree.

Now, this last step is one of the most important of all, and coincidentally, it works just as well if your wife hasn't just had heart surgery.

10. Pick out something really important on which to make your stand! Don't waste your energy on unimportant issues. Make sure you pick something serious. I recommend getting all bent out of shape about the rearranging of the living room to accomodate the Christmas Tree, and the temporary mess that comes out of your ten year-old daughter trying to help your wife. That's the kind of thing no real man should let pass, uncommented on and uncriticized.

So there you have it.

I'm glad I could help.

Oh, lastly, make sure you're right before you begin the argument, otherwise your rage and vehemence will not only be wasted, but you'll look like the fool you are, and will have to think of some creative way to apologize and not look like an asshole.
And that's hard to do.