I’d Like To Solve The Puzzle: Getting a Divorce

On most game shows, there is a pause in the action when the contestants are asked about themselves. Normally, they reply with their hometown, their job, and maybe something about their spouse. One viewer of Wheel of Fortune noticed most said something nice, but a few didn’t. He wanted to see if that mattered.

So, he reviewed all the episodes of Wheel of Fortune from 2010-2019, counting the number of male contestants and filtering for those who mentioned their wives. He found 2,855 male contestants, and of those 2,855, 2,016 mentioned their wives. Approximately 82% of those mention their wives added a complimentary adjective while describing their wives; the remaining 18% did not.

He then checked public divorce records for the male contestants who mentioned their wives to determine which of them found themselves divorced within five years of the show’s air date. Only about 5% of the men who said nice things about their spouses were divorced. But those who didn’t? More than 15% of them were no longer married.

So, you better say nice things about your wife.

Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. Colossians 3:19

Word matter. Kind words matter even more. We must be careful in all our relationships not to say things that would bring harm, but also to say the things that will strengthen and build up (Ephesians 4:29. Saying something nice is better than saying nothing at all.

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

The Other Peter Principle

Simon wasn’t very good at his job. For most folks, fishing is a hobby a good time on the lake even if you get skunked. Not so for the professional fisherman. A day without a catch means no product to sell, no money collected, and nothing to bring home to the wife and kids. Those days seemed to happen a lot to Simon. Maybe I’m wrong but all I can go by is the history we have on him and every time we have it recorded, he caught nothing, at least on his own. You would have to be hard headed to keep at it with all that failure. No wonder he got the nickname of rock. So perhaps, that’s why when he got the chance at a new career he jumped at it. Well, not so much a new career but a different form of the old one. He would still be fishing just going after a different kind of fish. This time he would have a boss, one that had shown him, even in his old job, a better way to do things. And that made all the difference. Simon didn’t al...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog