When the Gentle Husband Doth Praise Too Much

We are all ah-h-h-ing over Jeff Bridges' short but sweet tribute to his wife Susan at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Thanks to Judy Howard Ellis' insight and reporting, we have some good news about at least one famous husband. It felt good to believe again. But it made us nervous somehow. And some of us started wondering aloud:

Could we trust any man who praises his wife lavishly and/or makes grand public statements about how much he loves her? Or should he be automatically considered suspect?

John Edwards, of course, is the most obvious recent example of such nauseating perfidy. The news about him just keeps keeping worse, and did he ever miss a chance to tell us what a wonderful, wonderful woman Elizabeth was?

And what about Bill? He's another one. Did you see that hound's face when Hillary was speaking during the Democratic convention? Adoration. Pure adoration. Should we count adoring looks? We all remember him making like Hillary was God in a skirt right up until he begged an underling to go tell her that he'd been lying all along about "that woman."

My mother warned me of such men. She said they had to be guilty of something or they wouldn't be carrying on so. Our colleague Lizzie Skurnick calls "the too-effusive wife thank you" scary.

"Robin Williams did it. Brad Pitt did it (to Gwyneth, 'my angel'), and so did John Edwards in every speech. There's something too tempting about the opportunity to be insta-uxorious that guilt-ridden men can't resist. If my husband is ever getting an award, I think I'm going to ask him not to mention I exist at all," Lizzie wrote.

But appreciation is expected on some occasions. Omission can be just as fishy as too much hoohah. As Bonnie Goldstein pointed out during our back and forth, when Hillary Swank didn't thank her husband, Chad Lowe, "the ballots against that marriage were in."

So where's the line between sincerity and blather? Maybe only the person speaking knows. The rest of us can only hope we're not being bamboozled. That being the case, style can go a long way.

Donna Trussell had a great example of that: Raymond Carver's dedication in "A New Path to the Waterfall."

"Tess. Tess. Tess. Tess."