Scenes from a Marriage

As I obliquely mentioned here, by way of a picture and caption, last week the Professor and I celebrated five years of marriage.  How the heck that time flew by so quickly, I cannot tell you, but here we are.  My husband likes to keep a low internet profile, and anyway a happy marriage tends to make for kind of boring reading.  Nevertheless, I think five years merits a mention.  So here is what a five year old marriage looks like, in bullet form:

• Sometimes we engage in the battle of Who Does The Most Around Here – everybody does, of course.  But sometimes we don’t.  I like it better when we don’t.  He got up to comfort the baby the other night, and I didn’t even have to poke him.
• We got a very sweet card from relatives for our anniversary.  I read it, smiled, and displayed it on the piano with the others.  I later discovered that in the card was an anniversary gift, a check designated for us to do something special, which the Professor had pulled out and hidden from me so he could use it to pay bills or something boring.  I have written this interaction in my secret ledger that I’m keeping for the day that I am called before some sort of court and asked to provide evidence to support my assertion that I married the Cheapest Man Alive.
• For the big day, which was a Friday, we went and got some fancy food from Whole Foods and ate it at home on the couch.  It was tasty food.  Especially the little tartlets that we got for dessert.  Good enough celebration for me.
• Whenever I ask him what he wants for dinner, I already know what he’s going to say.  I don’t know why I ask.  I say “What do you feel like for dinner tonight?” and he says “Whatever’s going to spoil,” and then I make whatever I was going to make anyway.
• Every morning he makes coffee, and prepares me a cup.  I recently stopped putting sugar in my coffee, and he joined me, in solidarity.  Briefly.  This doesn’t make up for the fact that he wouldn’t quit drinking alcohol along with me when I was pregnant.  But I’ll take the gesture.
• I love to watch him wrestling with our boys.  The dog always joins in.  The dog really loves him, possibly more than I do.  But I do love him a lot.
• Eight years ago I couldn’t follow a football game.  Now I know the BCS standings, and exactly who has to lose for our team to go to the national championships (it’s not likely, but it could happen!)  I had a conversation with a 26 year old dude at a bar last week in which I knew more about college quarterbacks than he did.  For better or worse, this is all the Professor’s doing.
• I do the laundry and cooking, he does the dishes and animal care.  Straight up dividing these tasks has led to significantly fewer fights over housekeeping.  Occasionally I think I got the short end of the stick.  And then he emerges from the bathroom after bathing the dog, dripping and stinking and covered in hair, and I change my mind.

A favorite blogger recently wrote a post in celebration of marriage.  He is recently divorced, but stepped out of his fresh grief to honor his mother and stepfather’s thirtieth anniversary.  Each had been divorced twice before the marriage that lasted.  I have friends my age who have been divorced twice already.  I say, without rancor or judgment, that to me it’s an odd thought – trying on “forever,” like a pair of pants, and then deciding after a year or two that it just doesn’t fit.  At five years, I will say that some days the pants don’t fit well.  But I’m leaving them on.  And luckily for me, he’s apparently decided to leave the pants on as well, even though I’m moody and grumpy sometimes.  

I’ll let my blogger friend, bhj, say it, more eloquently than I could: “It’s no secret that everything changes; the ground is constantly shifting. Flux is the essential nature of the cosmos as such. So for two people to look the basic fact of existence—change—in the eye, only to then look each other in the eye and declare: In relation to you, I WILL NOT CHANGE, that’s pretty badass.”

Cheers, my dear.  To five years, and counting, of being badass.