An insurance company warned me about driving with my wife beside me as the tension could lead to an accident.
Quoting a study that it had undertaken, it said I get stressed and anxious every time my wife sits next to me in the car while I am driving.
It did not need research to tell me that. I know what the situation is like inside the car as my wife creates a frozen wall of tension inside the vehicle, screaming silently over my driving skills when we quietly drive to the mall.
Zipping along these roads is hazardous enough with crazies tailgating, while others happily cross lanes without signalling, but I know I can handle all that aggravation, but my wife’s panicked silence is one thing that I am unable to bear.
As soon as she gets in the car, she quickly straps herself securely and tells me to put on my seat belt. That sets me off: “I know, I know,” I tell her. “I have been driving all my life.”
We both look left and right, and left again, as we get out of the parking lot and I can see that my wife’s knuckles are bloodless white as she is holding on to the door handle tightly.
“Watch out for the green Mercedes Benz to the right,” she says. “The crazy woman is talking on her mobile.”
The insurance company study said I am the happiest and most confident with my driving when I leave my wife at home and drive alone.
It polled more than a 1,000 motorists that drive regularly and found that any passenger inside the car increases the stress levels, but that having one’s wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend or ‘partner’ alongside, reduced the chance of a hassle-free ride significantly.
The study found that men wind up women more than the other way round.
When my wife came home elated that she had passed the driving test on the first attempt, I asked her to take me round the neighbourhood.
“Finally, finally, I do not have to drive anymore,” I silently exulted as I sat in the passenger’s seat. But somehow, it didn’t seem right from this side of the vehicle. The road looked quite dangerous and the feeling that someone else was in control of the wheel was very disturbing.
“Stop slamming the brake,” laughed my wife, when I put my right foot down hard and braced myself as we approached the traffic light.
The study said that having your offspring in the car is stressful. If you are a woman driver your maternal instincts do not kick in and the study noted that men are more relaxed with the son or daughter as compared to women.
(It must be because the arguments at home with the children must be continuing in the car as well. Dads usually do not argue with their children, they just let them have their way for the sake of peace).
Motorists, the insurance study said, also felt stressed when driving other people’s children, the wife’s parents and other family members.
“Stop the car,” said my mother-in-law on a side road in Jumeirah. There were no crazy taxi drivers behind me honking, so I slowly braked and stopped. “Let the black cat pass,” she said.
At a pedestrian crossing, she told me to “blow my horn”. “That old man should not be crossing the road by himself. He’s taking too long. He should be pushed in a wheelchair by someone.”
The study said motorists are stressed when commuting to and from work, driving to a doctor’s appointment or driving the children to school.
No wonder I am like this; my life is one aggravation after another.
