Love Italian Style: Cook in the Kitchen, Chapters 8 & 9

By this point we know that Melissa aims to please. No matter how impossible the people around her are. Now she discusses another area in her life where she had to struggle to live up to someone else’s standards and refuse to give up until she was declared perfect. She writes,Hey listen, I would like to say that I was a great cook from day one, but that’s not true. It took me a while to get “Gorga-Approved”. I had a lot to live up to with Joe’s parents coming straight from Italy, cooking the most amazing, authentic Italian food. You just can’t beat that. I called my mother-in-law every single night for the first year of our marriage, asking her exactly how to make her best dishes, so I could please my man.In the beginning of chapter 8 Melissa admits, “No one cooks for a man like his mama, and I married a real mama’s boy. When we first got married, Joe missed his mother’s cooking. Anyone would.” So she dedicates herself to learning how to cook Joe’s favorite food perfectly. And when I say perfectly, I mean, perfectly.For a while there, Joe’s mother and I barely exchanged a single word that wasn’t about food and cooking. Fortunately, we could talk about that one subject for hours at a time — in particular, how I was messing it up. I did everything wrong, from slicing tomatoes to cutting the bread to boiling water. Don’t think you can screw up boiling water? Wrong.Melissa dedicates herself, tirelessly, to learn just how to cook for Joe. She describes the process,Every night, apron on, I’d copy my mother-in-laws’s recipes and hold my breath until Joe took his first bite. “Does it taste right? Like your mom’s?” I asked, eager for feedback. Everyone knows that Joe calls it like it is and is brutally honest. He would always finish meal, but usually had some constructive criticism. A little more salt. A little less oil. A lot more flavor.I would always go back and try again. After a couple years, Joe couldn’t tell the difference between my cooking and his mom’s. Victory! I’d set a goal and reached it.Yeah, after 2 years of constant cooking, she finally meets his approval. When Melissa questions her own motives, she talks herself down by writing this, I can almost hear the reaction from some of you. Really? Slave over a hot stove with your mother-in-law to please your man?You bet I did. I wanted to make him feel like he’d get the best food of his life at home, prepared by me, the woman who took a vow to make him happy. Food is so imporant to him. (It’s important to every man.) He asked me to learn to cook. If I hadn’t tried, it would have been like throwing his request back in his face. What he appreicated even more than my technique was the effort I put into the process.If you’re not prepared to put in two years of constant work for a mama’s boy, Melissa has some harsh facts for you. “If you can’t cook and are unwilling to learn, you’re not only being disrespectful to your husband, but to the entire Italian tradition that prizes the family meal as sacred.” Well, it’s only fair. Look at the huge sacrifices that Joe has made for her. Like… getting sex when he wants it and never having to diaper a baby… and no wait, never mind.Her wedding vows apparently stated that she had to make Joe happy, but while she accepts the kitchen drawers being left open and the milk being uncapped, he couldn’t accept any of her shortcomings. She had to change. He never had to. Melissa then relates her tips for cooking successfully and writes that she would feel like a slacker if she didn’t put a hot meal on the table for her husband when he comes home. Her servitude is more than just servitude, it’s a way of life and a badge of honor!Then Joe pipes up with this little gem,To be on the same level, everyone has to get off the high horse. I don’t care if the woman makes more money than the man, if he’s a janitor and she’s the president. After a fourteen-hour workday, if a man comes home and there’s no dinner on the table, and his wife is on the phone, watching TV or on the computer ignoring him, he won’t feel respected.And it’s a wife’s mission to make her husband feel respected at all times. Forget that she works, forget that she needs time to herself, forget that she’s raising his children and keeping his house, she better have that dinner hot and steaming when he gets home or else it’s disrespect.Melissa then goes on to talk about how even if she’s serving Chinese take out, she transfers the food to a nice plate and gets Joe a glass with ice. She states “–It shows I care.” Yeah, you lazy bitches that eat Chinese out of the cartoon. You clearly don’t care about your man or your marriage. How dare you be all casual and shit. Don’t you know you have to be a perfect domestic goddess at all times? Sheesh.Then comes Melissa’s rules for the dining room table. First, no cell phones or electronic devices. It’s strange, but I don’t do that at the table either. How weird. I hadn’t even read this book and I already knew that!  Bizarre. Second is to stay put. Meaning that the children have to be excused before they can leave. And third is say it. Which means to say please and thank you when passing the salt. Groundbreaking stuff. I’m sure your life is changed forever.Chapter 9 is entitled “Fightstyle [sic]” and it’s about as helpful to married couples as free income tax preparations for the family parakeet. If anyone wants to see how these two argue, there are tons of YouTube clips of them getting into it. Here’s one where Joe says that he needs to educate his wife to say appropriate things on Twitter. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this chapter’s synopsis.Joe has a little section in the beginning where he talks about how you have to voice complaints and be specific. But then he writes, “I know it  might seem weird. But yelling at each other is really a sign of courtesy and respect.” Joe and Melissa must really respect their fellow cast mates on Real Housewives.Anyway, Melissa then goes on to detail what kinds of fights she has with Joe, calling them their “greatest hits”. The first is about fighting itself. She has to defuse the meta fight by asking him if he loves her. Then he says that he does and it call eventually blows over.The second is about sex. Here we go. Melissa writes,In the beginning, Joe wanted to have sex every single day, at least once, if not twice or three times. I was amazed by his appetite. Frankly, I couldn’t keep up. If I didn’t give it to him once a day, he’d get upset. That when he told me about his severe poison condition. He described the need to expel his junk like it’s a real physical crisis. We all know that Blue Ball Syndrome does not appear in any medical textbooks. But for Joe, not having enough sex is detrimental to his overall health. He genuinely can’t function otherwise. He gets fidgety and stressed, distracted and irritable. He can’t sleep, eat or form complete sentences — I’m kidding — well, kind of.Keep in mind that Melissa is thinking that her daughter will read this book one day. Yeah, I hope they put some cash away for therapy. Because Antonia’s going to need it after reading all of this about her mom and dad.It bugs me that Melissa just brushes off his demands for sex under the joke that he gets really bad blue balls. He would get upset with her if she didn’t give him enough sex and she doesn’t see this as a problem in the relationship. It’s just a joke.Melissa continues, “All men might not be as sexually voracious as Joe. But according to a poll of my friends, men do tend to need more sex than the women.” That sounds very scientific. She should go straight to a peer-reviewed medical journal and submit her findings.But this wouldn’t be Melissa’s book if Joe didn’t chime in. He writes, “If Melissa does one thing in this book to help women in their marriages, it should be to get them to initiate sex more often.” For as insightful as these two undoubtedly think they are, they have a very simplistic view of what can fix a relationship and what will work for other men and women.Melissa then writes a strange section about how men get insecure but don’t show it because they appear “strong and unflappable” and women will forget that their men even HAVE insecurities. So whenever Joe goes around acting like there’s nothing wrong, she get worried. Uh, yeah. That’s not going to get annoying.Joe then chimes in with this pearl of wisdom, “Refusing to initiate is a Top Three reason men cheat. The ugliest girl in the world could come on to a man in that state of mind, and he might have to go for it. He thinks, At least someone wants me.” This statement just speaks poorly of men. If his wife isn’t coming onto him like she’s a sex addict, he gets insecure and whiny and will sleep with anyone just to make himself feel better.This section baffles me. What happened to their communication? What happened to their ability to fight it out and respect each other? If Melissa doesn’t have enough sex with him, he just goes into shut down mode like a toddler holding his breath. It strikes me that the above passage about cheating is a threat. Now Melissa has been warned that if she doesn’t initiate enough sex that Joe is likely to stray and she’ll just have herself to blame.The next section is criticism, something it sounds like Melissa never stops taking. But it also seems to be something that she never will stop taking. Not while she’s married to this man. She writes,He [Joe] wanted to set a precedent of how he wanted his wife to be. He flexed his muscles. His style was to make corrections and to teach me from the beginning days of our marriage exactly how he envisioned our life together. Joe would always say, “You got to teach someone to walk straight on the knife. If you slip, you’re going to get cut.” Even if something didn’t bother him that badly, he’d bring it up. He wanted to make sure that I knew, for example, if I ran out to CVS and he came home from work to an empty house, he didn’t like it. He’d call me and say, “I don’t care if you’re out all day long. But I don’t want to come home to an empty house.”Melissa realizes that the average person might find this line of thinking ridiculous, and it is, but she soothes, “But I understood and respected his wishes. Instead of flexing my muscles and rolling my eyes, I went with it. There are the simple things I’m talking about that make our marriage what it is.” Simple things like bending to someone’s incessant, needy demands and coming completely under their control.But Melissa, always the smart one, is concerned. She writes, “My independent side wondered if he was trying to control me. I tried not to be too analytical about it.” Yeah, best not to ask uncomfortable questions about the person who’s manipulating you. She says it best herself when she writes, “”Me” has to be replaced with “we”.” To the point of losing your own identity, Melissa.Now, his wedding band. He doesn’t wear one and Melissa used to be upset about it, but of course, she never asks him to change, so she gets used to him not wearing one. He also kindly informs her that, “if he went to a bar to hook up, he’d just take the ring off before he went in.” Which should make her feel really great about herself and completely secure in their marriage.Another one of their fights erupted over Melissa getting some kind of lip filler. She doesn’t say what procedure she had exactly just that she had her lips “done”. Apparently she ended up with a trout pout and Joe freaked out. How dare she do something to her body without his permission!! Doesn’t she know that he owns her?! He got so angry that he broke the baby’s highchair (she kindly notes that the baby wasn’t in it at the time). He didn’t talk to her until her lips were back to normal.The next section is jealousy. Melissa admits that they both get jealous and that she selects his secretaries. Then she launches into an anecdote where she and Joe were out with friends and she asked a guy if she could see his tattoo. Then, “He rolled up his sleeve. I touched the tattoo and said, “I like it.”" Joe reacts with calm patience and dignity.Oh no wait, no he doesn’t.Joe went insane, throwing back his chair, jumping up, screaming at me to get my hands off of that guy. It was so embarrassing and infuriating. We were in a crowded restaurant. I touched a guy’s arm. Big deal! We left before we finished eating, both of us in a rage.When Melissa talks to him later tonight, she realizes how wrong she was for innocently touching another man’s arm and how right Joe was for reacting violently. Of course. She says that if she would have seen her husband stroking a woman’s arm, she would have flipped a table. Which is still violent and completely overreacting. But she just accepts that and moves on.There’s a small aside about how when a guy does something wrong, women need to stay angry at him for a little while so he learns his lesson. Otherwise, if the behavior is forgiven and forgotten, he will go back to doing the behavior because his time in the dog house was so short. Er, okay. She doesn’t seem to think that anything her husband does is wrong. Ever.Then Melissa talks about what fights she DOESN’T get into with her husband. First is control of the remote. Whatever. Second is parenting and third is the in-laws.  Nothing really of note in those passages besides Melissa’s blindingly insistent delusions.Now Melissa details how to dismantle a “marriage bomb,” whatever the hell that is. First point of advice is “Don’t blink!” Which is also how you deal with Weeping Angels. Coincidence?Melissa then writes, “Although I’ve have been known to throw my phone at him (I got mad because he was mad for no reason), I usually just hurl words.” As amusing as it sounds to her in retrospect, throwing things at each other is never okay. Ever. I can’t imagine a marriage book making light of hurling objects at each other during a fight.But if you thought that was weird, this part just gets more bizarre. Melissa enlightens us,Don’t take it personallyThis is especially effective when Joe brings his work stress home with him. If someone ripped Joe off that day, he comes home a different person. If he gets one ounce of flack from me, he flips a switch and goes off. I know it’s not really about me, so I don’t get riled up. I supposed I could get angry back at him for getting the bulk end of his problems. But then again, that’s what a spouse is for. You get to release your stress on someone you trust, who you know won’t hold it against you. He’d like to yell at a colleague, client, or employee. But he yells at me and doesn’t screw up a business deal. I can take it. Men’s attitudes are determined by their work and finances. If their finances are off, look out. I’ve learned not to take it personally. It’s not me, it’s work. When I have a bad day at the “office,” my reaction is to cry on Joe’s shoulder. We have different styles of coping. We don’t expect each other to change, but just to recognize how we each deal with work and money anxiety differently.Joe sounds like he has some serious anger issues. He has to scream at his wife in order to cope with stress? That’s not healthy for anyone. Melissa doesn’t deserve to be yelled at because he had a bad day and he doesn’t need to deal with his problems through screaming and shouting.But let’s keep going. Melissa then writes about how humor helps. She writes, “–Joe sometimes slips into teacher mode when he explains how he’d like to tweak my behavior… When I’m in for a lesson, I sit back and listen. He needs to say what he has to say and for me to agree.” So where’s the part where Melissa tells him how he needs to tweak his psychotic behavior? That bit is missing from this passage. Must be an oversight.Then Melissa, independent woman, suggests to have copious amounts of makeup sex, let it go and think about the big picture. Because all of this verbal abuse, manipulation and control will be worth it when her children have their own families that can come visit and see their grandfather verbally abuse their grandmother. Excitement!The more I review this book the sadder I am for this woman. She wants to come across as a confident, independent woman who is highly loved and respected, but there is so much in her writing that contradicts this assertion. Her “happy” and “hot” relationship consists of her husband treating her like an emotional punching bag, then like a sex object. Nothing about their relationship sounds equal, balanced or happy for any woman who demands to be treated with dignity. But this book isn’t over yet…To read all review entries of Love Italian Style, click here. Blogs are in reverse chronological order.