STRANGER THAN FICTION: MARITAL MANEUVERS SOMETIMES WORK ONLY IN THEORY, NOT PRACTICE

There's more than one husband in this country who won't ever insist on walking home again.

Grace stirred her Monday-morning coffee with devious grin. We, her co-workers, had to ask what she'd been up to over the weekend.

"Well, I taught my husband a valuable lesson," she revealed.

Grace and Jim were on their way home from a restaurant Saturday night when the topic of money came up. Apparently, Jim was spending too much on fishing gear. She was spending too much on decorating their new home.

Things escalated until Grace was forced to execute a marital maneuver that only women can do -- dredge up a painful incident from decades ago and use it to win a fight.

"Well, at least I didn't leave my prom date standing on the porch CRYING while I went out with someone else!" she screamed.

Jim had enough. He executed his own marital maneuver -- opening the door of a moving vehicle and yelling, "Pull over! I'm walking home!"

Grace and Jim were four miles from home. She pulled over. He got out. She went home without a single look over her shoulder. I'm sure Jim had expected Grace to beg him to stay in the car. Too bad, sucker!

The story has a happy ending. He was cooled off when he came home, so they apologized to each other and had a lovely evening, proving my theory that couples last longer if they care enough about each other to raise their voices.

But it also proves another thing: Some of the maneuvers we married folk use in battle work better in theory than they do in practice. I'm thinking of two others -- the Sofa Sleeper and the Drive Away.

The Sofa Sleeper also follows a big argument. To punish your spouse, you shout from the living room, "I'm just sleeping out here tonight! I don't even want to be near you!"

So your spouse, instead of begging you to come to bed as you had planned, yells, "FINE!" and slams the bedroom door.

This leaves you on a couch Hitler would have outlawed because it is too cruel and inhumane to force someone to sleep on it. When I've pulled the Sofa Sleeper maneuver in times past, I've ended up back in bed with The Other Half within five minutes of him slamming the bedroom door. And that's even when he locks it and I have to use one of those tiny screwdrivers to pop the lock.

The Drive Away is when you're SO mad, you feel you must punish your spouse by grabbing your car keys, stomping through the door and peeling out of the driveway. The trouble with that is figuring out what to do when you've peeled out. The options:

-- Go have a cup of coffee at Denny's. But too often you forget your cash and credit cards in the heat of the moment.

-- Go to a friend's house. It depends on the friend, but you can really wear out your welcome fast doing something like this. And you also have to think about how stupid a description of the argument is going to sound out loud. "He ate the last of the leftover meatloaf, and that shows he doesn't care about MY needs!" sounds pretty darn stupid.

-- Go home after driving around the block. You lose a lot of pride this way, but it beats trying to scrape a dollar out of your seat cushions for that cup of coffee.

Sure, there are many others, but they all result in the same thing -- someone ends up uncomfortable, someone ends up sad and both of you wish you were mature enough to have talked it out in the first place.

Next week: Romantic ideas that sound good on paper but haven't worked in practice.

~Heidi Nieland is a former staff writer for the Southeast Missourian who now lives in Pensacola, Fla.