What the Toilet Seat Says About Marriage
by Dr. Michael R. Mantell

I recently saw an ad for an odd gimmick. It is a little light that attaches to the toilet seat lid and shows red when the seat is up and green when the seat is down. Or is the other way around? Whichever, it doesn’t matter. The point is this thing intrigued me.

Imagine it’s the middle of the night, and you stumble your way into the bathroom, eyes half closed, following a path to this red or green glow. Who invented such a thing? Is it really necessary?

Ask your wife and she’ll tell you if you want to save your marriage, it’s necessary. “How many times do I have to tell you to put the seat down when you’re finished,” is a familiar cry. Of course it could be worse, but I’ll leave that to your imagination.

So are you a husband, or is your husband, the kind that leaves the seat up or puts it down when finished? This isn’t meant to be a survey. I’ve got my own seats to worry about. The point is if a man puts the seat down when he’s done, researchers have actually found that it is a sign of long-term marital stability.

That’s right. That little red and green gimmick could actually save marriages! You see, when a man puts the seat down, it shows he respects and understands his wife’s needs and is willing to give of himself, go out of his way and put her needs in front of his own.

This “mindless moment,” to quote Dr. John Gottman, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, actually builds love. The act of giving, after all, is singularly responsible for bringing love about.

Following 670 couples for up to 14 years, Dr. Gottman has come to emphasize a strong, positive benefit from learning how to prevent marital disharmony before it builds. While that certainly is not an earth-shattering piece of information, especially to Jewish couples for whom marriage vows are grounded in thousands of years of tradition that teaches the importance of equality, giving, compromise, communication, respect for one another and the like, the idea of marriage education before marriage is catching on.

While the “experts” pushing marriage education courses believe the time to start such education is in high school, our Jewish heritage teaches something quite different. Marriage education, we believe, begins in the cradle…and who knows, maybe even before. The marriage your children see and hear, from the time they are infants, is their marriage education. Your children will imitate you in nearly every way possible.

While there are many ways to have a stable, satisfying marriage, there are, in truth, only a small number of ways for a marriage to go bad. Whether you want to or not, you teach your children well. What they learn, however, may not be the lessons you wish you taught.

Healthy marital relations are grounded in a set of skills. Like any other skill, it must be learned and practiced. Marriage requires communication–listening and speaking– that is focused on the other person. And even here, listening accurately, without concern about one’s own position, is most important-even more important than speaking.

The Talmud teaches us, “If your wife is short, bend down to listen to her.” Who needs a toilet seat that lights up with advice like that? Unfortunately, more people are likely to purchase the toilet seat light than are likely to take the time to bother reading and learning what our Jewish texts say about how to live our lives and build our marriages. Sad. Very.

Look no further than Abraham and Sarah. While we really don’t know how they met, we do know how they interrelated. Abraham communicated his fears to Sarah. He told her that he was afraid that Egyptians would kill him and so he asked Sarah to tell them that she was his sister. (Read all about it in Bereishis 12:11-13!)

Today, men clearly have more trouble sharing and hearing negative emotions-or maybe any emotions. Yet, contemporary research, supported by thousands of years of Jewish history, much of which is detailed in the Bible, tells us that “the critical skill in successful relationships is being able to listen to a wife’s concerns and complaints about the relationship.”

When Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac was confronted with a situation in which he, too, was afraid, the Torah does not tell us anything about a conversation he had with his wife, Rivkah. Yet the Torah tells us that Isaac loved his wife, while it does not say the same thing about his father, Abraham, loving Sarah. (Read all about it in Bereishis 24:67!)

There are many paths to a successful relationship. Communication may be explicit as in the first case, or implicit, as in the second case. Children learn from parents, but certainly set their own course. The fundamental, however, is communication. And G-d knows, healthy communication is difficult. For two people, from two different backgrounds, with two different sets of parents, to come together and spend more than 50 years of life together in a happy, satisfying relationship takes hard work which depends on commitment and effort.

You can take marriage education courses and learn what Judaism has been teaching since the days of the Bible. Or you can read it in the original, translated, of course. The Talmud guides us, “…a man should honor his wife more than himself and love her more than seems necessary-following the longing of his heart and removing everything he hates.”

Marriage education courses can teach you not to react defensively, to anticipate your spouse’s wishes, and to strive to build a pleasant relationship. Or you can go to the source. In any case, don’t forget to put down the seat.