Tag Archives: marriage

Happy Valentine’s Day from the clogged lint screen

My wife thinks I’m not as romantic as I used to be.

To this, I agree.

Also, our 15-year-old clothes dryer doesn’t dry clothes as fast as it used to.

Maybe we are both clogged with lint. Or maybe our heating elements are burning out.

After 19 Valentine’s Days, 19 of her birthdays, 19 Christmases, 16 wedding anniversaries, and 15 Mothers’ Days, it can become challenging to come up with fresh bursts of romance. 

Lately, it has taken lots of time and effort to keep that old dryer limping along. It’s had its triumphs and failures. It makes more noise now than it should. So do I.

We both wore out our belts.

Cards have sure changed since my youthful days of flaming romance.

I prepared to buy a new dryer, but my wife said no. She said these new computerized dryers have too many sophisticated parts that could break down and be expensive to fix.

Sure, they look flashy and seem full of promises, but they would most likely be unreliable.

She would rather stick with the dryer she understands—the one she knows where to kick when it acts up.

The one I can keep running, imperfectly, but consistently.

She gets annoyed at the old dryer’s many flaws, but she knows eventually the clothes will come out warm and dry, and comfortable.

We both get annoyed, but we are the only two who know all the old jokes, and understand why they are still funny. We couldn’t laugh so hard at anything else.

Even after all these years of hit or miss holidays, my wife is still a very attractive woman. I have little doubt she could have much more than a new dryer if she wished.

But I have even less doubt that she cherishes warm and comfortable things that she knows exactly where to kick.

I may have slowed down, but I never moved the target.

There must be something romantic in that.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all the young lovers, young and old alike.

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Conversations with my wife: Vitamins

Back when we were first preparing for stay-at-home orders, we, like many people, scrambled to make sure we had a good supply of the family’s prescription medications. On one of her trips to the pharmacy, my wife picked up a bottle of daily vitamins for each of us. I hadn’t been in the habit of taking general vitamin pills, but it wasn’t a bad idea to keep the levels up, with pathogens potentially lurking around every corner.

A contrast between the bottle of Women’s vitamins and the bottle of Men’s vitamins was immediately apparent. I thought perhaps her pills were larger than mine, because maybe the vitamins a man needs are smaller than the vitamins a woman needs. I don’t know how big an individual vitamin is. Or maybe she needs extra supplements to give her the strength to deal with me in isolation.

A vitamin gap?

These notions were dispelled when I read the labels side by side. Her bottle had 200 daily doses, while my bottle held only 120.

I found interesting the theory that I would not need to be kept in optimal health for as long as she would.

ME: Your vitamin bottle is bigger than mine.

WIFE: So it is.

ME: Yours has 80 more pills in it that mine does.

WIFE: Yeah, I know.

ME: Why did you get me fewer pills?

WIFE: Women live longer than men. You don’t like it when I waste money on things we might not need.

 

Middle-aged man earns right to dress himself – for now

My wife hates the way I dress. The shirts and ties I wear to work are okay (just okay, nothing fantastic), but the clothes I wear in more casual circumstances will not do. The shade of my blue jeans is not right; I wear my shirt tucked in when all the hip older gentlemen are leaving theirs out; and having pants that fit just right is no excuse not to wear a belt. I didn’t know this, but holding your britches up is only one of the reasons to wear a belt, and probably not the primary one.

I’m a country boy, and I dress like it. I wear clothes to be clothed. Warmth, comfort, and hiding my shame are my concerns when it comes to wardrobe. I developed a dislike for clothes shopping early in life and have honored that dislike to this very day, which is why I tend to wear an article until it is no longer comfortable or has quit hiding the more disturbing views of my shame.

I grew up being told to tuck in my shirt. That was how you made yourself look respectable. After many years, I finally learned to do this routinely and figured I was set, as far as managing the transition between shirt and pants. I was wrong. Tucking your shirt in no longer makes you respectable, as I interpret the messages I’m getting. It makes you look like an old man who still dresses like a little boy. It also shows off that gaping faux pas where your superfluous belt should be.

I can’t help it if I become a Social Media Influencer in my Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes. (Image: Russell Lee)

My wife grew up in a completely opposite world. She came from the affluent suburbs, where people didn’t have the social freedom to dress like farmers. While I was dodging cow patties, she was dodging the societal pitfalls of matching the wrong top with her shoes. The poor girl had to spend her spare time accessorizing. The closest I ever came to that was finding a pair of matching socks. I’m not saying I did that every day, but I had my debonair moments.

Whenever my shame starts to feel a breeze I reluctantly go out and buy something modern. I don’t make a point to show my new garments to my wife, but she always notices them. I know she’s noticed when she says, “I wish you would just let me shop for you.” This doesn’t always come off sounding like the compliment she means it to be, but I can usually dig down to the loving sentiment beneath it all.

The last time I wore a new outfit, it caught her off guard. She looked at me and let out, “Oh, you look so nice!” before she realized I was wearing new clothes that I’d bought for myself. She had to concede I’d dressed myself like a grown up, but not perfectly so. “Now we just need to get you into a nice pair of Sperrys,” she added.

I think those might be shoes.

Conversations with my wife: Diversity

In the car, my wife tells me about something she read online that has her very excited.

WIFE: There’s this company that will pay you $6,000 to eat just junk food for a month.

ME: Why are they doing that?

WIFE: They want you to eat just junk food and take their herbal supplement and see how you feel after a month. I guess their supplement is supposed to give you all the nutrition you need. I wanna do it!

ME: Is it just chips and candy?

WIFE: I’m sure you can eat fried food and burgers and stuff. It sounds great. We should both do it. Then we’d get $12,000. Just think, $12,000 for eating chicken wings and mozzarella sticks. It’s perfect.

Fire up the deep fryer! It’s greasy time!

ME: I don’t know that I could eat that kind of stuff for a solid month. Besides, I bet they want more diversity in their subjects.

WIFE: What are you taking about? A young, black woman – an old, white man. What could be more diverse than that?

ME: I was thinking more about environmental diversity, but since you put it that way, I guess they’d have to take us.

I hope their supplement doesn’t interact with my senility meds.