In the little, private zoo known as marriage, it helps to remind yourself that you and your partner are just two bipedal primates trying to get along in intimate co-habitation.
The trick, it turns out, is all in the training.
That's what Amy Sutherland discovered, and she didn't even have to learn to crack a whip.
Blame it on Shamu, the killer whale. “I was inspired by watching how they teach killer whales to do incredible behaviours, to leap out of the water on command,” Ms. Sutherland says over lunch recently in Toronto. “Think about it, they are the top predators in the ocean, and trainers can ride them. They can have a good relationship with them.”
Reprimanding won't solve your marital woes. Treating him like a killer whale will, says Amy Sutherland, author of What Shamu Taught me About Life, Love, and Marriage (Rafal Gerszak for The Globe and Mail)
Which caused her to ponder the world's oldest marital issue: How to train her husband, Scott, to pick up his dirty laundry off the floor.
A former journalist who wrote about food and the arts for local papers in Vermont and Maine, Ms. Sutherland submitted a column for the popular Modern Love feature in The New York Times about how animal-training techniques improved her marriage. She did it to support her book, Kicked, Bitten and Scratched, about an exotic animal training school in California. The response was overwhelming. Within days, publishers had tracked her down. Reporters from around the world were requesting interviews. The Today show invited her to appear.
You'd think she had made an earth-shattering discovery. Maybe she had: Humans are animals, too.
She promptly wrote a new book, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage. Hollywood producers swooped in for the rights and snatched up her animal-training book as well. Actress Naomi Watts is set to star in the story about a young woman who works as an animal trainer during the day and applies her techniques on her love interest in the off-hours.
Progressive animal trainers have simple rules. Reward the behaviour you want. Ignore the behaviour you don't want. Ms. Sutherland learned that positive reinforcement – and more important, the art of saying nothing when something displeased her – worked like magic.
Her husband of 14 years, whom she met when they both worked for the Burlington Free Press in Vermont, had a few annoying habits, she explains. When he misplaced his keys, a common occurrence in their household, he would work himself up into a lather. She would often participate in his agitation, as he stomped around searching. But when she ignored him, they were both better off. No arguments erupted. Eventually, he would stride into the kitchen to announce he had located his keys. Standing at the sink, with her back to him, she would say gently over her shoulder, “Great, see you later.”
He is also an avid biker, and tends to leave a heap of stinky exercise gear on the bathroom floor. When she nagged him about the habit, he would suffer from the convenient affliction known as “spousal deafness.” She decided to take a cue from the dolphin trainers. She became more patient. He did get around to picking it up, and when he did, she thanked him.
She applied the technique to other aspects of their shared life. Instead of bugging him to shave more often, she silenced herself. When he drove too fast, she made sure her seatbelt was fastened and her lips buttoned. When he did shave, she made a point of complimenting him. When he drove slower, she expressed gratitude. “He basked in my growing appreciation” she writes. Like most animals, he tends to repeat the behaviours that prompt praise.
“It's refreshing to think simply, to boil things down to just behaviour instead of always big psychological things,” the 49-year-old says. She and her husband had briefly gone to marriage therapy at their five-year mark. “We were never in big danger. For us, it was the sort of thing that happens to a lot of people, just the general wear and tear on a relationship, all these kinds of slightly negative, squabbly interactions.”
Ms. Sutherland acknowledges that many people use such techniques without being schooled in the art of animal training. “Teachers, parents, good bosses, a lot of people didn't have to go to the zoo to figure this out, but I did,” she says.
Dressed in a business-like suit, Ms. Sutherland is highly professional, well-trained in the practice of answering questions directly and making sure that she is being clear. “Does that sound like crazy talk?” she asks after confessing that the lasting insight she had gained is that “we are part of the web of life.”
But beneath the tidy grooming, she is as enthusiastic as a golden retriever, bounding off on tangents and making jokes about her work. “I am cannibalizing my own life. There's not going to be anything left,” she says. Was she nervous about how to turn a 1,700-word article into a book? “Oh yeah,” she guffaws. “I was scared to death.”
She is not afraid to bark a few opinions. Of criticism from men that the book suggests a scary, postfeminist world in which women house-train their partners like pets, she says, “I'm disappointed by it. I would like some fresh criticism … People boil [the book] down to something it's not, and also they misunderstand. I've used these principles to improve my marriage. I did not train Scott to sit and stay. People don't get it because they are not aware that animal training has changed. Trainers use it as communication. It's not a dominant relationship; it's a respectful relationship.”
Still, I notice that she reins herself in during exchanges with the waiter, maintaining a calm, professional demeanour.
Which may be because she understands the consequences of annoying her server. She once worked as a waitress, and if a customer snapped at her, whined or drank too much, she would say nothing but, secretly, in the kitchen, she would exact her revenge. For them, she would purposely pour coffee into mugs that had dried up globs of clam chowder stuck to the bottom. “I'd be sure to keep their cups topped off, appearing extra attentive, so that they would not see what lurked at the bottom,” she writes in her book.
She may not have understood the animal-training principle at work back then. But now she does. Punishment can provoke unwanted behaviours.
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