MAYNARD, Mass. To Rob Quarles’ co-workers, the signs of their 48-year-old colleague’s affliction slipped up on them like dark clouds on the horizon that develop into a summer thunderstorm. “He was always going on about how great his wife was, when she wasn’t that good-looking and always had a scowl on her face,” says Mike Taurant, a fellow glue-and-plywood specialist on the assembly line at Mystar Recreational Vehicles. “When he told us he was working nights to support her Beanie Baby habit, we knew we had to do something.”
“But . . . she’s my little snuggle bunny!”
So after luring Quarles to nearby Hillcrest Lanes as a substitute for a bowler who had supposedly come down with a terminal case of athlete’s foot, Taurant and three other middle-aged men staged an intervention. “We got a pitcher of beer, and we made him stay put until we’d finished it and watched a full three hours of televised sports,” Taurant says. “It was painful filling a half-hour gap between baseball games with a Premier Soccer League ‘friendly’ match, but everyone agreed we had to put ourselves on the line for Rob.”
Crack team of world-renowned uxoriologists.
Quarles suffers from uxoria, a condition that manifests itself in a man’s excessive displays of fondness for or submission to his wife. “The number of sufferers has risen over the past decade due to commercials and sitcoms that reversed the traditional depiction of the husband as the wiser if more disgusting member of a married couple,” says Dr. Todd Oflgang of the Center for the Study of Spousally-Transmitted Diseases. “Advertisers finally realized that women make most consumer buying decisions, so why not butter the babes up and portray husbands as ignorant klutzes with no utility other than opening up particularly difficult jars of pickles.”
“100 cc’s Miller High Life–STAT!”
The term “uxoria” is derived from the Latin word “uxor” meaning wife. A uxorian allows his spouse to interrupt him, hands her the television remote on demand, and accepts her public criticism of his handy-man skills without complaint. “Our society has moved from a punitive to a therapeutic model in this as in so many other areas of human endeavor,” says sociologist Albert Tours of the University of Northern New England. “Where before such a woman would have been publicly shamed as a shrew, today she gets ‘high fives’ and encouragement from daytime talk show hosts, while men begin to crumble inwardly like a house infested with termites.”
Quarles is now believed to be in remission, but he now wears a medical alert bracelet that warns his friends and primary care physician if he begins to show signs of a relapse. “It’s hooked up to your cable TV,” says Olfgang. “If it senses a change to a ‘disease-of-the-week’ movie or anything about the British royal family, an immediate transmission of National Hockey League trade rumors is sent to an earpiece while the victim mouths the words ‘Yes, dear.’”
Hey, I’ve got that! But my wife said it was okay.