Frustrated Husband Losing Wife To Church

Dear Abbner,

I've been living with my wife for nearly 10 years. Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but we were always able to overcome them. Until now.

About a year ago, she was "born again" and joined a local church. Since then, she's gone completely fanatical about it, attending services twice a week, including Sunday services that run all day and into the night.

As you would expect, our sex life has gone to almost zero, and the relationship is in trouble. Now, she seems to have plenty of time for Jesus, but little for me. Also, everything I do these days is a sin against God, including my Sundays watching football, the beer I drink during the game, and the nacho farts I let loose every time she says "amen."

I feel like I've been cuckolded by Christ. What can I do to get my wife away from the church and back into our marriage?


-Heathen In Hartford


Dear Heathen,

There is nothing you can do to get your wife away from the church.

In essence, she is having an affair. And it's pretty unlikely that you're going to be able to compete with our Lord and Savior.

You have few options here.

First, you could throw away the beer, turn your back on your NFL brethren, and join her church. You will probably be completely miserable, and you may need a 12-step program for your Tom Brady withdrawals, but you'll save the marriage. Who knows, you may even come to enjoy revival meetings and pot luck suppers. That reading thing may become a bit of a bore, especially since about the only book most churches approve of is a 400-year-old tome written in weird, hard-to-decipher English called the Holy Bible. However, you'll find some of the stories to be exciting and interesting, with folks smoting, slewing and begatting each other all over the place. (Check out the Old Testament...you'll swear parts of it were written by Quentin Tarantino.) Also, you'll find more than a few passages that will make handy ammunition for the inevitable next argument with your wife.

Option two is to expand your horizons, including a few new habits of your own. I would recommend a lot of drinking and carousing on Saturday nights, including the occasional address amnesia where you forget to come home. While you're out sowing your wild oats, your wife will be home praying for crop failure. Sounds bizarre, but it will actually bring you closer together because you'll have something in common - your ruination and eternal damnation. The only thing religious zealots love more than an all-day prayer meeting is a mission to save someone's soul.

Your third option is prayer. Hit your knees every night and pray that tomorrow will be the day that the church shows its true colors, which in most organized religions is a nice, shiny shade of hypocrite. Far more churches have been destroyed by internal strife in the last 50 years than any external invasion or crusade by Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Mormons, or Amway salesmen.  If you hold out long enough, the church leadership will eventually mess up and piss off the congregation, and your wife will be back by your side by the time Peyton Manning returns to the field (following a stubborn neck injury that hasn't responded well to surgery OR prayers from Indianans), with your spouse claiming loudly at the TV that Manning's mother was a canine, that his parents were never married, and that the Colt quarterback should go begat himself.

Whatever option you choose, know that I'll be praying for you. Or drinking a cold beer in your honor this Sunday.


^Abbner



If you have a question or need advice with a "male perspective" on relationship issues, behavioral issues, dude etiquette, or the best penmanship techniques for writing your name in the snow with yellow ink, e-mail your questions to dearabbner@yahoo.com.