Bad television commercials are plentiful. As plentiful as sand in the Sahara, losing lotto tickets or dropped calls by AT&T. Speaking of AT&T...your personal least favorite commercial may be the Head On! commercial, or the Hardee’s commercial where the lady puts her fist in her mouth or the creepy Burger King ads where you wake up to find the king in bed with you. You can take all of those, toss in every erectile dysfunction ad, feminine protection commercial and political campaign spot and there is no commercial worse than this one.
This commercial deals with a husband excitedly telling his wife about getting unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes. The wife is disgusted that he did this without discussing it with her and mumbles her regret: “My mother was right. I should have married John Clark”. The husband, crushed by his shrew of a wife, replies “It was free”. What was edited out of the ad was the expletive that should have followed, as in: “It was free, B*@#!”.
To address the commercial itself, I don’t know what AT&T was thinking. To begin with, it doesn’t project a good image for the company – you’re a cell phone company, AT&T, you need all the image help you can get. The ad is about free mobile to mobile minutes, a program targeted to families, but the wife’s response is about as anti-family as you can get. I suppose she could have said “I’m sleeping with John Clark. He works for AT&T so I already have that feature”. That would have been worse.
They have enough money to afford a large greenhouse. A greenhouse? Who has a greenhouse? Yet, she’s goes nuclear (or as George W would say “noo-coo-lur”) over a cell phone plan. Bottom line: Worst. Commercial. Ever.
What can we learn here? First, the problem this whipped ol’ boy faces could have been solved had he heeded the wisdom in the Keep A Happy Wife Guys’ first blog post. Choose the right spouse!
Second, you can also choose your focus. The “something else” always has the potential to look better to you if that is where you target your focus. George Costanza obsessed over Marisa Tomei and put at risk his engagement with Susan. In this case, the “something else” was better, so…bad example. Anyway, normal life will prove my point to be still valid.
Making a conscious effort to remember why you love your spouse will help keep the “something else” from creeping in. The Greenhouse Harpy has clearly decided to romanticize about how her life would be better with John Clark rather than focusing on the positives of her life with her husband. Am I suggesting you ignore problems in your marriage? Of course not. However, the focus of your life can’t be just the problems or the perceived short-comings. That only leads to regret. Regret leads to sadness. Sadness leads to pain. Pain leads to b*@#!-ness. I think Yoda said that.
Here’s a practical example of choosing your focus. Recently, The Wife and I pulled out some old photos. Many of these turned out to be from the late 80s – early 2000’s. Photos old enough that I was skinny. We saw me go from clean shaven to full nappy beard to clean shave to bad stache to clean shaven to full beard to clean shaven again to goatee. My purpose in this was not to reminisce about the history of facial hair, but was to see how our kids have grown up. The Tall One being in his senior year in high school is starting to sink in (“What is this salty discharge?” – Jerry). However, as we were digging through pictures it brought to mind many happy times that The Wife and I have shared. Even back in the college days (where we went from her tolerating me to not wanting to have anything to do with me to loving me forever) and the early days of our marriage we could see good times and how we made it through some tough ones. Different houses, different friends, different churches, different careers, different cities. The constant was me and The Wife.
Are there things I would do differently? Absolutely. There were some obviously poor fashion choices and I should have worked in a few more salads over the years. Is there anything I regret? Absolutely not.
I feel like the guy with the radio voice should now say: “Life…what a beautiful choice”.
