Shouldn’t my husband have waited until I was ready?

I’m reading this delightful book with witty dialogue and wonderful characters and shared a few snippets with my husband. This morning I found him reading the book. Shouldn’t he wait until I’m finished?
L.P., Turramurra, NSW

A: This is all your fault. You were being a book tease, enticing your husband with delightful book excerpts, wooing him with witty book dialogue, driving him wild with rampant book desire. If you’re reading a book in front of your husband, you need to stay silent, keep your pleasure repressed, and stifle all facial movements. Ideally, you should put a paper bag over your head with holes poked out for your eyes. It’s only fair.

Loading

But the damage is done now. Your husband has started reading the book he can’t wait for you to finish, so you’ve got to find a way of turning a solo activity into a couple pursuit. I suppose you could read the book out loud to him, making sure your performance is well-paced and gripping, with Cate Blanchett-level accent work. Or you could buy him his own copy, which would not only make him happy but would also thrill the author, their agent, the publisher and the entire Australian bookselling industry. Or you could do what my wife and I did when we went on a romantic holiday to Thailand and she took along a 704-page book to read and I took no book at all because I didn’t think reading was going to be a major part of our bedtime agenda.

Our solution? She read a page, then ripped it out and handed it to me, which I then read before crumpling it up and throwing it in the bin. Though the truth is, I wasn’t really reading anything: I just got tremendous satisfaction from seeing all 704 pages of that romance-killing book being slowly destroyed.

[email protected]

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.