Book Details

	Robertson's Rules of Domestic Order: A Field Guide for Men Who Need to Know How to Live with Women By: Robertson, Trevor Published By: SynergEbooks	EBOOK OPTIONS ADD TO WISHLIST TELL A FRIEND RECEIVE ALERTS
	Robertson's Rules is a book for men, whose premise is that men always fall in love. They always begin a romantic relationship that, if successful, becomes a domestic relationship, a thing far different. They always slip under the thumb of the domestic woman. And so they always need help--advice--Robertson's Rules, if you will. Trevor Robertson, himself, is a man who has entered his seventh decade of life and who has had a great deal of experience with women. He's been married and he's been single. He has spent long hours discussing his experiences with certain friends and vice versa. He believes that it is time for him to record everything he has learned about women for the benefit of mankind. Trevor warns that the book he has written is not a guide to accumulating women. It is a survival kit that will help link the male reader's expectations about women with reality so that he may better navigate the shoal waters of his relationship with the woman of his choice. Trevor has honed his philosophy into twelve concise rules. Each rule is buttressed by anecdotes and stories of his own and his friends' experiences--with the caveat that no one story proves the wisdom of Robertson's Rules, but taken altogether they form a complete course in how to deal with the domestic woman. Every male reader will recognize himself in many of the stories. The mirror is held up to nature in a very self-referential manner. The stories are interesting on two levels--application (the rules are a genuine attempt to aid the modern man) and entertainment. This is a book of information and advice that every man--every married man, every man who is even thinking of marrying, cohabiting, or dealing with a woman--should read.

Excerpt

CENTER>RULE NUMBER ONE
They’re All Crazy

You may consider this a sweeping statement. I mean it to be. Those three little words apply to all women. What man has not had the peace and tranquility of a quiet evening crushed to powder by the sudden, inexplicable behavior of a woman near and dear to him?

It starts in youth. The things that your mother insists you do; the things she forbids. They made little sense to me then; they continue to fall short of soundness when I look back. Has any father tried successfully to reason with a daughter, a daughter of any age, who has her mind made up contrarily and will go to any extreme to get her way?

But my purpose is not to deal with mothers and daughters.

I had a friend. Call him Jeremy. He wasn't a bad looking fellow for forty-five. Average height and weight, maybe 5' 10" and 175 pounds. Some of his hair had retired from service and gone south, but all in all he wasn't a bad looking fellow. He was married, as Oscar Wilde (whom I've invited to be our regular epigrammatist) put it, in consequence of a misunderstanding between him and a young woman. He had his own business, investments and such, with a staff of some twenty-five people. When a job opening arose, one of the dozen people he interviewed for the position was Marlene, an unmarried, lovely, auburn-haired woman in her early thirties. Marlene was a bit shorter than Jeremy, had a pretty face and was very well built. During the interview, Jeremy was struck by how cheerful and open she seemed and how easily she laughed. After only a few minutes they were joking together (about garden fertilizers, of all things), and he felt as if he'd known her in some other life, and it was all coming back to him now. He hired her, but being the boss, tried to keep a professional distance.

Marlene was in the habit of giving him a hundred-watt smile whenever they met. Now this may not sound like much—a smile. Free and generally meaningless, people distribute them every day to the known and unknown alike. But when Jeremy found himself planning chance encounters with Marlene just to bask in that brief but glorious sunshine of a smile, he began to wonder what was happening to him.

As chance would have it, things were not going well at home for Jeremy at that time, and as chance would have it, Marlene, in a quiet moment as a meeting was breaking up, mentioned that Jeremy seemed a bit worn out, a bit troubled. Jeremy threw caution to the winds and gave a heavy sigh, indicating that Marlene had, indeed, uncovered some deep dark secret of his--in consequence of which, he invited her to lunch.

That began it. Marlene was so easy to talk to, so understanding, Jeremy told me. Being with her—even in all the innocence of a public lunch or a drink after work—reaffirmed for him that there were wonderful things in the world and that all of life was not an amalgam of being pestered first in the workplace and being pestered later in the home. After a few lunches and over drinks, he repeated these thoughts to Marlene, making the second "pestered" sound as if the pestering were being done by the Shrew of Manchester. Marlene felt complimented by the intimacies Jeremy was sharing with her. She responded intimately.

Marlene had her own apartment, a ten-minute walk from the office. And, yes, it took only a month for them to decide to put the lunch hour and the hour or two after work to good use.

When Jeremy was telling me his story in Scotty's, a local bar he and I frequented, he drained his Happy Hour merlot (I, myself, had specified a nice French merlot they sold by the glass), looked me in the eye and said, "I told her I loved her, and she said she loved me. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. It was puzzle pieces snapping together. It was two water drops touching and becoming one." I stopped Jeremy there and told him I'd gotten his point. He nodded and ordered another merlot.

And so for the next two months, whenever we met, Jeremy regaled me with stories of Marlene's perfection, comparing it to his wife's inexplicable and generally depressing behavior. Never a cross word issued from Marlene. She was sweet. She was beautiful. She was funny. She was sexually satisfying. She understood. She was—dare I say it—perfect.

Jeremy insists he was living in heaven for those three months. But then he announced that Sherry, an older, overweight woman, who had been with the company since its founding, was being promoted. Unfortunately, Sherry's new position would make her Marlene's immediate supervisor.

Jeremy and I were in Scotty's again. He'd ordered a Johnny Walker Red, and I nursed a Rosemount shiraz as he told his story.

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