“One can advise comfortably from a safe port.”

- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

This has been quite the surreal week for me.

Something happened that I just have to share with you.

It began the other day when a friend and I were having lunch.

She was going on and on about how her husband, and men in general, don't listen to her. At least I think that is how the conversation got started; to be honest, I wasn't really paying that much attention.

That was until she asks me the strangest question a woman has ever asked before in my life.

I kid you not: “What do you think I should do to liven up my marriage?”

I blinked for a moment and stared around the room. To whom did she think she was talking to?

Seriously, do I look like Dr. Phil?

I would have spit out my sandwich and started to laugh real hard if not for the fact that she seemed so sincere and in desperate need of help.

I mean, really, you'd have to be desperate because coming to a 35-year-old bachelor looking for guidance in your relationship is on the same par as going to Jack Kevorkian and expecting sound medical advice.

All told, you would probably have the same results if you follow anything he or I had to say any way.

But, seeing as though it's not me that is going to be on the receiving end of this intervention, I figured I'd give it a shot.

I told her that we needed to get some things straight right off the bat. Yes, there are going to be some differences between men and women besides just the physical stuff.

But the bottom line is that we really aren't all that different from you, it's just that we show it in different ways. Here's a good starting point: Stop reading guides to romance, they only give you stereotypes anyway.

Remember that book that came out a few years ago “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus?” I told her to go to the bookstore, get herself a copy of it. Take it home; throw it into the fireplace. Then go get a book of matches and light it up. See, with the help of this book the flame is already being rekindled.

I then told her to spice things up a bit and maybe add some new ingredients to their romance (hey, I was getting all my impromptu wisdom from staring at an article on cooking that was left in the break room). I thought that I was going to get busted when I suggested something about letting her emotions simmer on low for about 15 minutes, and then season to taste, but she didn't seem to notice.

When I was done explaining how to cook up a feast of emotion she seemed delighted at my insights and I went back to work thinking that if that's all that women needed to hear I should have either become a counselor ... or a chef.

Auburn native Bradley Molloy's column appears here, each

Sunday, in The Citizen.

He can be reached at lovonian@hotmail.com