I read a survey where newlywed women were asked what were their biggest complaints in the bedroom.
In the top three was husbands who set the alarm clock to go off before they had to get up and then reset it.It's a guy thing. Don't ask me why, but there is something in the male anatomy that refuses to face the reality of a new day dawning. I call it the Fight-Back-With-David-Horowitz-Syndrome.
A person can be told when he has to be at work, when he can come home, when he has to eat dinner and when to go to bed, but give him an alarm clock and he has the homecourt advantage.
All of my husband's frustrations are wrapped up in that clock. He sits on the edge of the bed each evening fiddling with the mechanism like the mad bomber. Then he smiles his little maniacal smile as he sets it and returns it to the bedside table.
"When are we getting up this time? 4? 5?"
"I told you," he said, "you don't have to get up when the alarm goes off."
"If you had a car backfire in your ear, wouldn't you stir?"
"Just ignore it," he said.
I used to ply him with questions of, "Why do you do that when you know you have two more hours to sleep?" and he would say, "When it goes off, I know that I have to sleep fast."
For 43 years, I have been jarred awake at some ungodly hour to hear him smash the clock with his fist and mumble, "Don't tell me what to do, buddy."
One birthday, I bought him one of those tennis ball clocks that you throw against the wall to stop it from ringing. Somehow, it wasn't the same thrill for him as choking the clock with his bare hands until the alarm wound down.
The clock is symbolic of something and I'm not sure what. Maybe it goes back to his childhood when his parents didn't heat the bedrooms during an Ohio winter. Maybe it was because he had a morning paper route when he was a kid and had to haul out seven days a week. Who knows?
Newlyweds will adjust not only to husbands who play with their alarm clocks, but to those who engage in the first two complaints: hogging all the covers and falling asleep with the TV on. Is there any relief?
It's a drastic means of solving the problem, but babies help. They have their own alarm system and no one turns them off!