Who needs to be cheerful when the plane to Sydney is delayed by eight hours at midnight? Who speaks calmly when one kid starts sobbing uncontrollably? Who pretends that Doritos and almonds make a fun late-night dinner at the airport newsstand? Who manages all of the reservations and the money and the plans through a jet-lagged haze once we finally arrive in Australia? Who books the flights and the ferries and researches the eco-friendly island retreat on the Great Barrier Reef? And for years, I couldn’t remotely imagine a suitable replacement for all of those bad noises.īut then I started to use my imagination a lot more. But you can’t spend 17 years with someone as noisy as my husband and never let it get under your skin. Do you think I can’t see your left eye twitching ever so slightly, as you resolve to never let each little irritation add up and move into your conscious mind like a plastic bag floating out to sea and then joining the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? I don’t hate my husband,” one of you holier-than-thou marrieds might announce, folding your hands primly in your lap. Unless you plug a propofol drip into your arm every single night, how do you encounter those unwelcome grunts and gravelly snores as anything but oppressive? Unless you spend most of your waking hours daydreaming, how do you tolerate this meddling presence, rearranging stuff but never actually putting it away, opening bills but never actually paying them, shedding his tissues and his dirty socks all over your otherwise pristine habitat? How could it be otherwise? How is hatred not the natural outcome of sleeping so close to another human for years? A spouse is a blessing and a curse wrapped into one.
I don’t know anyone who’s been married more than seven years who flinches at this concept. There is only Bill, staring dumbly at his laptop, with no crucial proclamation forthcoming.ĭo I hate my husband? Oh for sure, yes, definitely. But when you look up from your work, there is no butler there. Because when Bill clears his throat, it’s like the fussiest butler in the mansion is about to make a very important announcement and he needs to get the attention of all of the children and wives and animals within earshot. Because the resolution on your spouse becomes clearer and clearer by the year, you must find compensatory ways to blur and pixelate them back into a soft, muted, faintly fantastical fog. This is just how it feels to be doomed to live and eat and sleep next to the same person until you’re dead. I can almost get away with being this mean about him because he has remained the same amount of smart and kind and extremely attractive that he was when I met him 17 years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever not said “Jesus Christ” out loud upon hearing one.īill also clears his throat constantly. Somehow there are two notes involved, a screechy high one and a shouty low one.
When Bill sneezes, no matter how far away he is, it’s like a blast from an air horn aimed at your face. You must do this not only so you don’t overdose on the same stultifying words and phrases within the first year, but also so your spouse’s various grunts and sneezes and snorts and throat clearings don’t serve as a magic flute that causes you to wander out the front door and into the wilderness, never to return. This is why surviving a marriage requires turning down the volume on your spouse so you can barely hear what they’re saying. I see Bill with a scorching clarity that pains me. And then our dashing hero begins to hold forth on “the learning sciences” - how I hate that term! - and he quickly wilts before my eyes into a cursed academic, a cross between a lonely nerd speaking some archaic language only five other people on earth understand and a haunted ice cream man, circling his truck through the neighborhood in the dead of winter, searching for children.
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