Groucho Marx famously remarked, “People who agree with me tend to be right.”   That gag works great for extracting a laugh from an audience, but won’t get even a smile from your wife. It’s no wonder then that he was divorced three times.   Proving how right you are is easy. Recognizing when you are wrong, that takes talent.   Or should I say, guts.   Therefore, when you get into an argument with your spouse, who is the one person you should never ever seek advice from?

I wish I had a Bentley for every person who told me how closed minded their spouse was. And then a Ferrari for those same people who thought the opposite of their children.   If this happened rarely I would have thought people are unlucky in marriage and clever in parenting, and I would have one Bentley and one Ferrari. But that’s not what it is.   We all have windows and we all have doors.    There are things a sister can say that a parent couldn’t dream of, similarly a boss to an employee, an old man to a teenager. Everyone has a window, even your teenage son and here is the shocker: even your spouse!   The problem is, you keep knocking at the door instead of calling through the window.  

When we consider that it took the Belfast shipbuilders three years to build the Titanic, it might seem disproportionate that it sank in less than five days. However, a simple appreciation of the forces at play will change the question to, how did it last that long? In the subsequent inquiries many new maritime safety regulations were enacted, not because the Titanic was an unusual boat, but precisely because without these measures such a tragedy is almost inevitable. In other words, the Titanic, a ship of such size and sophistication was almost doomed from the moment it left Southampton in 1912. The real question: why couldn't very smart people, who had a real interest in avoiding the inevitable, see it coming? Especially when we consider that no great genius was required on the part of the later investigative teams that pointed out the Titanic’s obvious failings. Which means to say, we wouldn’t catch it either.