If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon

by Jenna McCarthy

  HIM: “Anything with kissing or a plotline or Meg Ryan.”

  HER: “I’ll see anything that’s not gory.”

  HIM: “Define ‘not gory.’ ”

  HER: “Anything with kissing or a plot line or Meg Ryan.”

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  We have this pre-date routine that is as predictable as it is infuriating. We share a tiny, one-sink bathroom that hasn’t been touched since it was built in 19-fucking-51. Usually he shaves while I shower. We bob around each other in our stifling little bathroom, ostensibly trying to primp for each other. (For the record, it is impossible to see one’s hair, much less style it, in a twice-fogged-up mirror.) After his shower, he swiftly puts on the first pair of pants and first shirt he sees, slips into shoes, and leaves the matrimonial bedroom while I have fits about what to wear—as if it really matters. He knows it takes me “a little longer” to get dressed. While he uses my fashion panic time to give dinner, bath, and bedtime instructions to the sitter and maybe have a cocktail, I am in the back of the house throwing clothes on and off, feverishly trying to figure out what to wear. Even though I just showered, I’m sweaty and frustrated and I can’t see through the foggy bathroom mirror to put on my eye makeup. The movie starts in twenty minutes. I finally get it together and rush out of the bedroom to find that my husband is nowhere to be seen. This is because he is waiting for me in the driveway IN THE IDLING CAR. Thanks to him, though, we always make it to the movie on time.

  KIM

  Even if you could actually agree on a film, then you’d have to decide which theater to see it at, which would necessitate a debate over the merits of Red Vines versus Twizzlers, because the one of you who is from the East Coast thinks Red Vines taste like those disgusting wax lips you used to pretend to like as a kid, while the West Coaster insists that the discussion is a waste of time because strawberry-flavored straws do not qualify as licorice. It is right around this point that you realize that if you go to a movie instead of out to a restaurant you will both still need to eat dinner, a reality that probably means you’ll be cooking and doing the goddamned dishes—which is no way to spend a date night seeing as you may have already shaved your legs. So you’re back to the restaurant conundrum. Bob’s Underwhelming Bistro, here you come.

  Only, not so fast. First you have to line up a babysitter. This requires a week’s worth of phone calls before you realize that no one born after 1989 actually talks on the phone anymore, so you resort to texting, which you hate but I’ ll be damned they get right back to you so at least that’s taken care of. You’re bitter that this job is yours by default—your husband can text, too, after all, and you did painstakingly create a detailed babysitter file with all of the necessary contact info and even made a copy for him—but you stuff the resentment way down by reminding yourself that your beloved probably begrudges mowing the lawn and hardly ever complains about it, so you’re mostly even.

  Finally it’s the big date night! Your legs are smooth as a newborn baby’s apricot-oiled bottom, and you even got a blow-out, which you didn’t really have the money or the time to do but the last time you went out with your girlfriends your husband got all bent out of shape because you “never make that kind of effort” for him, so you felt obligated to do it. You stuffed the girls into a push-up bra, skinnied into your Spanx, and are clanking around the house doing last-minute tasks in those goddamned heels you know make your calves look good, so it’s worth the crippling pain in eight of your ten toes. The sitter is only fifteen minutes late and your husband only rolls his eyes eleven times as you go over the details of the evening routine and only one kid latches herself barnacle-style to your leg as you try to get out the door. Relatively speaking, the night is off to a winning start.

  “Red or white?” the man you have shared thousands of cocktails with asks, perusing the wine list.

  “White, please,” you say, biting your tongue. He knows you don’t like red, doesn’t he?

  “Really?” he asks. Evidently not.

  “Let’s just each get a glass of what we want,” you say.

  “It’s much cheaper to buy a bottle,” he insists.

  “Then get a bottle of white,” you chirp. Naturally this is meant to be sarcastic, because you know that he doesn’t like white.

  You scan your menus while waiting for your individual, overpriced glasses of Chardonnay and Merlot to arrive.

  “What are you getting?” he asks nervously when you close your menu and push it to the side of the table.

  “The filet,” you respond. “You?”

  “Well, I was going to get the filet . . . ,” he says, trailing off and looking infinitely annoyed.

  Is this meant to make you feel guilty for stealing his order? You resist the urge to point out the blazingly obvious—you could both order the damned filet!—because you know how his mind works. He figures you’ll eat maybe half of your dinner, if not less. Therefore it makes more culinary sense for him to order something different, even though you’d very much like to take the uneaten portion of your meal home to have for lunch tomorrow.

  He orders the lamb chops, unquestionably out of spite because although he can’t seem to remember that you don’t like pepper on your eggs or that you take two sugars in your coffee, he has committed to memory the fact that you won’t eat any sort of animal flesh—veal, rabbit, venison, duck, and of course lamb—that once belonged to an animal that falls into the “cute and cuddly” category. Ordering the baby sheep means he won’t have to forsake even a single morsel. Bring on the mutton.

  “You want a bite?” he asks sweetly, nodding down at his gamy plate.

  “No, thanks,” you mutter, tucking into your steak (because you grew up in the country and know for a fact that grown cows aren’t cute or even the tiniest bit cuddly).

  “You sure?” he repeats.

  “Positive,” you grumble.

  “It’s delicious,” he adds, smacking his lips.

  You are left with no choice. You eat every last bite of your filet. You feel violently, miserably full afterward—far too full to fool around when you get home, which is the singular reason the lamb lover forked over for your filet in the first place. Serves him right, you think, rubbing your aching belly.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  After dinner—and the setting doesn’t matter; it could be a business

  meal or a wedding reception—he presses his fingertip into the crumbs

  or drops on his plate, then licks his fingertip and does it again.

  TRICIA

  When I say you in all of these instances, for the most part I mean me. In fact, if we weren’t already married, my very last date with my husband could well have been our very last date, period. We had cleared the day/time/babysitter hurdles, and I even whipped out a brand-new razor for the occasion. I was busy trying to hunt down a decent-looking pair of panties when Joe texted me midday.

  JOE: Where should we go?

  ME: I don’t really care. Somewhere fun.

  JOE: How about Chez Ornate?

  ME: I said fun. That place is a blue-hair convention.

  JOE: Well, where do you want to go?

  ME: Café B?

  JOE: That’s your idea of fun? They have like six tables.

  ME: Yeah, but it’s cozy and loud and I like the funky walls.

  JOE: You are picking a restaurant based on the walls?

  ME: No, I like the food, too.

  JOE: Any other suggestions?

  ME: What about Stinky Fish?

  JOE: I never get enough to eat when we go out for sushi.

  ME: Then order more.

  JOE: That’s it? Two suggestions?

  ME: That’s twice as many as you’ve had.

  JOE: I guess we can decide later.

  Two or three more times during the day the topic came up, with Joe repeatedly asking me if I wanted to try Chez Ornate, and me making it painfully clear that no, I did not. By the time the babysitter a
rrived—on time, no less—and innocently asked where we were going, we were both in pretty crappy moods. The man I promised to honor and cherish for all of eternity had the gall to look taken aback at her question.

  “We haven’t actually decided,” he said to her, and then turned to me. “Hey, do you want to go to Chez Ornate?”

  “No, I do not want to go to Chez Ornate!” I exploded, storming out of the room, but not before catching a glimpse of the poor sitter looking at me with that knowing What the hell is wrong with you, lady, your husband is offering to take you to the nicest place in town and that’s how you reply? look that is normally reserved exclusively for gangrenous panhandlers and unappreciative, lunatic wives.

  “You ambushed me,” I spat once we were both in the car.

  “What are you talking about?” Joe asked innocently as he backed out of the driveway.

  “I am pretty sure I made it perfectly clear that I did not want to go to Chez Ornate! And then you throw it out there just so you can look like Mister Big Spender and make me look like a miserable bitch. You know what? I don’t even want to go to dinner with you. I don’t want to sit across a table from you and pretend that I like you, because right now I do not. At all. Take me home.”

  “No,” was Joe’s reply.

  “No?” I screamed, my roadside stint in Hawaii all but forgotten. “No, you won’t take me home? I don’t believe this! Turn this car around and take me home.”

  A millennium passed.

  “So where do you want to eat?” he asked, all annoying calmness. Nothing makes me crazier when I am already on a tear than relaxed indifference. Nothing.

  “I WANT TO GO TO HOME!” I bellowed Linda Blair–like, my head spinning around in circles on my neck for emphasis.

  “Too bad,” he said. “And we’re not going to Café B, either.”

  If I had had a cup of ice in my hand, you can bet your ass an imprint of it would have been etched deeply into his temple.

  We drove without exchanging another word, and eventually Joe pulled up in front of a benign little Mexican joint. We walked inside in stony silence, a half-dozen arm lengths apart, that couple you see looking so miserable you wonder why they even considered spending an evening together, no less a lifetime. I sat across the table and made no effort to pretend that I liked him. Instead, I checked my e-mail on my iPhone out of spite, knowing that the activity infuriates him even when we’re not in the throes of an epic sparring match.

  “This is fun,” he said with a sardonic smirk.

  “I told you to take me home,” I sneered back, not looking up from my phone. If they gave out awards for the adult who can best imitate her toddler, I’d have a mantel crowded with golden trophies.

  Had we been at home, I could (and most likely would) have locked myself in my office or bedroom and made an elaborate show of avoiding any accidental eye or body contact. But when you’re a born motormouth and you’re stuck in a chair in a public venue, eventually you cave in and speak. I can’t recall who actually set the verbal ball rolling, and I can guarantee you that the first few exchanges were clipped and curt if not a tad nasty. But by midmeal (another margarita, please!) we were speaking again. When the check came we were actually sort of laughing about the whole thing. In the car, we even agreed to stop for a nightcap on the way home, as in intentionally opting to spend even more time together. Apparently, my husband understood better than I that the fastest route to reconciliation would be forced face time. It wasn’t fun or pretty, but it worked.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  My husband chews his food really loudly, no matter where we are.

  When I call him on it, he says, “Hey, I’m just enjoying my meal!” We’ve

  only been married for a year so I still think it is kind of funny and a

  little bit endearing, but I can see how it has the potential to become

  really annoying down the road.

  ELLI

  I have an amazing aunt and uncle who have been married—happily—for forty-five years. That’s sixteen thousand, four hundred twenty-five days of having to stare at the same (aging) face, negotiate control of the remote, and pretend to be interested in stories you’ve heard dozens if not hundreds of times. I asked them once what they thought their secret was. Shared goals and values? One leader and one follower? Financial compatibility? A daily shag? “You have to have fun together,” Uncle Jack told me simply; Aunt Linda squeezed his hand in agreement. I thought about their retired lives: They traveled the world together, but they also went grocery shopping and cooked dinner as a team. They rode matching snowmobiles at their winter house and went fishing at their summer house. (And although having gobshites of money probably hasn’t hurt their marital bliss, we all know plenty of rich, miserable folks, too—so that can’t be the causative factor here.) Researchers at the University of Denver recently confirmed what Aunt Linda and Uncle Jack have spent a lifetime proving to me: Couples who play together stay together.

  Of course, it’s not as easy as a weekly bowling game or a shared fondness for horseshoes, because the key is that each individual couple has to agree on what is “fun.” If her idea of a rip-roaring good time is a four-hour debate about health care reform—in French—and his get-your-rocks-off activity is pounding beers and racing remote control cars around a track, there’s not really a middle ground. She suggests badminton; he counters with mountain biking. What’s the compromise? Pinochle?Ping - Po ng?Pac - Man ?

  Perhaps you haven’t hit on your bonding hobby because it’s something unknown to you both. Studies have found that engaging in a new, exciting activity together (and tuning in to the Idol finale doesn’t count, even if neither of you has ever seen the show before) fosters closeness and ultimately strengthens the marital bond. Based on the one time Joe and I went white-water rafting together—him grinning merrily and woohoo ing at the top of his lungs, me crouched down in the raft’s muddy bowels, white-knuckling the sides and praying silently for another day on earth—I’d add that the new, exciting activity should be carefully considered.

  For Joe and me the answer turned out to be tennis. Sure, I didn’t take up the sport until I was thirty, and I basically picked it for the cute outfits, but the activity once reserved for English nobles has been life- and marriage-changing for both of us. After a few failed attempts at having Joe give me “lessons,” we were smart enough to realize that there was no way in hell he could be both my husband and my coach, so I enlisted a professional. (For some reason, comments like “Now try to get the ball over the net” and “Who glued your shoes to the court?” sting a lot less when they come from someone you are not having sex with.) Joe and I hit the courts weekly from the beginning, and it wasn’t until eight or nine years later—when I tried to “play” with a novice friend—that it occurred to me what a gift that was.

  “How could you stand going out there with me when I missed every other ball and half of the ones I did hit went clear out of the court?” I demanded of Joe.

  “I wanted us to have something we could enjoy together for the rest of our lives,” he said, adding sheepishly, “besides sex.” I was happy to hear he thought that was going to continue to be a good time several decades from now.

  Today we play at least once a week—which is sometimes more often than we have sex, so it’s a blessing we discovered this joint interest. We hardly ever fight on the twenty-minute round-trip drive to the tennis club, and I’ve gotten good enough that we can sometimes carry on a casual conversation as we play. Sure, I’ve never, ever beaten him or frankly even come close. But I don’t mind. He’s a natural athlete and I am not. It’s a damned good thing about the cute outfits, is all I can say.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It’s the Thought

  That Counts (but Thanks

  for the Blender!)

  When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping.

  Men invade another country.

  It’s a whole different way of thinking.
/>   • ELAYNE BOOSLER •

  The very first birthday I spent with Joe, we happened to be in New York City for a friend’s wedding. He had brought my gifts along to be opened in our hotel room, and I was giddy with anticipation. Was he practical or romantic? Showy or sweet? The sexy-lingerie sort (please God, no) or the plane-tickets-to-Paris type (pretty-please God, yes)? I didn’t yet know. I love giving and getting gifts equally and have proudly maintained a longstanding family tradition of blowing birthdays (or rather, birthmonths as we liked to call them growing up) ridiculously out of proportion with parties and presents and an embarrassing excess of hoopla. Knowing all of this, Joe tortured me by holding out until after an endless, decadent birthday meal to present my gifts to me. I immediately noticed and appreciated how precisely he’d wrapped them; he even knew to fold the ends over before taping them to achieve the most streamlined and professional look possible. I was already head-over-heels in love with him, but this nearly put me over eternal devotion’s farthest edge.

  I delicately worked at the wrapping (newspaper, of course) on the first package, resisting my typical urge to tear into it like a greedy, wild-eyed kid on Christmas morning. (No sense letting my hopeful future fiancé see all of my ugly habits before the deal was sealed.) It was a lovely leather journal, which he hadn’t inscribed, but I forgave him for this oversight because he’d mostly grown up without a mom and he wasn’t a writer, either. How could I expect him to realize that the inscription is more important than the book?