Twisted Sisters

I’m in a book club. One with great girls, delicious food, wine and dessert, and fantastic book choices. Here’s how it goes down at my book club: Each month, someone chooses a book. We all read the book, then meet every six weeks to talk about the book. Except we never talk about it. We talk about everything from vampires to babies to baby vampires to gossip to Gossip Girl to girls being cooler than boys. You name it, we talk about it. But the actual book?

No, we don’t usually get into that. Until last night.

This month, the ultra cool Punky-Brewster look-alike, Lacey, chose Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by John Krakauer. This book delves into the world of a branch-out sect of a certain denomination. Without going into a religious commentary, I will say that I am just not on board with these extreme fundamentalists. I’m serious, they believe in some batshit crazy things. A large component of their belief is that men are allowed to marry whoever they feel like marrying (including step-daughters and nieces), and marry as many of them as they want.

Hold up.

Pump the brakes.

As one of my book club gals put it, her husband made a comment to the tune of “I can barely handle you and the baby AND my job. Throw in more wives and more babies? No thanks.” Agreed. However, I can see why these guys want so many wives, because they are only allowed to sleep with a woman if she is in ovulation. Well, if you have tons of women in the pipeline, you don’t have to wait too long before your next sexy time. I mean, I get it. If you're a sex-craved maniac who likes to control women.

Plus, they don’t have to pay too much money for these other wives because technically they are not married, so technically they are single moms (of a billion kids), so they get a bunch of government assistance from tax dollars, such as food stamps. In light of this information, I’d like to give a shout-out to all the crazy plural wives out there: “You’re welcome.”

The men in the book all had so much in common: they are controlling, egotistical, and looking out for No. 1. Basically, they exhibit all of the personality traits that I can’t stand.

I haven’t seen the reality show Sister Wives, because I live in 1975 and do not have cable television. But we talked about this at length last night. These women (picture on left with Mr. Main Man in the center) claim to be 100% fine with their husband sleeping with the other women. Ummm, no you aren’t. I’ll go on the record right now and say that there is not one woman out there who is perfectly fine with her husband sleeping with another woman. Don’t tell me they don’t want to bitch slap each other on a daily basis.

It is "how they were raised," "God says it’s okay"… this is how they justify it. I just can’t wrap my brain around this concept.

I am not generally a jealous person. But I would be bold-faced lying if I told you that I don’t feel a twinge of some kind of jealousy if an ex-girlfriend calls or if he is chatty kathy with some girls while we are out. I think that is pretty natural to feel that way. But I am skilled at rationalizing what is cause for concern and what is not worth the emotional drain and the potential argument.

I have known some people who were insanely jealous, all the time. I always feel sorry for these people, because they are severely missing out on a happy, cool life if all they think about is what this other person is doing. Until it turns into “who” they are doing, just calm down. Give somebody the benefit of the doubt and see what happens.

If any of you jealous nellies out there read this and heed my advice, I may have just saved you a lot of stress.

Unless, of course, you are a plural wife. In which case, you probably aren’t reading this, except for the rare instance that your controlling husband is letting you read a blog about dating and relationships. The same blog that regularly tells you to grow a pair and take control of yourself and your happiness. Yeah, I didn’t think so.

(Although slow in a few places (because it goes deep into the history of the religion... zzzzz....), Under the Banner of Heaven was a very interesting book. Check it out here.)