A Romantic Standard of Titanic Proportions

I’m sitting at the breakfast table, hovering over the Saturday stock tables and savoring the weekend.

“Listen to this,” my wife says, reading from the front page. “Marriages that work well have one thing in common--the husband is willing to do what the wife says.”

She looks at me. Then back at the article.

“Finally, it’s official,” she says, raising the article in the air like a trophy.

There is a long moment of silence. It is perhaps the first long moment of silence in our home since 1985, some 13 years ago. At first, I don’t even know what this strange sound is. Turns out it’s silence. Lasts about seven seconds.

“You’re not listening to me,” my wife says.

“Huh?”

“What did I just say?” she asks.

“You should listen more, Dad,” says the little red-haired girl.

That’s when my lovely and patient oldest daughter glides into the room. She has a way of doing this lately, twirling into a room like Tara Lipinski.

“Dad’s not listening again?” my lovely and patient oldest daughter asks.

“Huh?” I say.

“Exactly,” my wife says.

I saw the front-page article first thing. In fact, I had seen it before it was published, here at the paper. It got a big laugh at the front-page meeting.

“What’s new about this?” one editor asked, pretty much speaking for every man in the room.

So when the paper came, I meant to hide the article at the breakfast table. I meant to slide it between the car ad sections, where my wife would never find it.

“This article says that the newest advice from psychologists is to simply do what your wife tells you,” my wife tells my oldest daughter. “It’s the secret to a marriage that works.”

“Is that why you’re so happy, Dad?” my oldest daughter teases.

“Huh?” I say.

“See?” my wife explains. “He’s still not listening.”

Truth is, I’m always listening. Like a lot of husbands, I cling to every word my wife says. Sometimes every syllable. Then I keep the words and syllables I really need and discard the ones I don’t. It’s called selective hearing. Some husband invented it a long time ago. Might have been your dad.

“This makes sense,” my wife says. “Men need to listen more.”

“Yeah, Dad,” my oldest daughter says. “Didn’t you learn anything from ‘Titanic’?”

My older daughter thinks every dad could learn a little something from Leonardo DiCaprio. She thinks he took his role in “Titanic” and turned it into something symbolic.

She loved the way he and Rose got to run around that big ship all night, ignoring their curfews and making her mother crazy. To her, it was “almost Shakespearean.”

“James Cameron is no Shakespeare,” I say.

“I said almost, Dad,” my daughter says.

Apparently “Titanic” is the new standard for great romance. My daughter saw that in “Titanic” Jack listened to everything Rose said. And if it weren’t for that stupid iceberg, they probably would’ve had a long and happy marriage.

She can even picture herself as Rose and her future husband as Jack, making a life for themselves in some nice suburb where husbands do everything their wives tell them. And when they are done with the chores, the husbands take their wives on long romantic voyages, preferably someplace warm, someplace without icebergs.

“Don’t get movies and real life confused,” I tell her.

“Why not?”

“In real life, the kisses don’t last as long,” my wife mumbles from behind the newspaper.

“And there are way fewer nude scenes,” I mumble back.

My wife scolds me with her eyes.

I then try to explain to my lovely and patient oldest daughter that in real life, Rose probably would’ve used the couple’s last moments together more usefully. As they floated together in the North Sea, she wouldn’t have talked about never letting go. She would’ve talked about what Jack needed to do once the ship docked.

“And when we get to America, I want you to go see my Uncle Phil about a job,” Rose would say.

“Huh?” Jack would say.

“And then maybe we can go look at houses,” Rose would say.

At which point Jack’s ears would’ve perked up, because even selective hearing can’t screen out such words as “go look at houses.”

“Rose, can’t we just keep running around, breaking curfew and being ridiculously romantic?”

“No, Jack. It’s time to start a family.”

And with that, Jack would slip into the sea.

* Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.