CHAPTER 10
You Can Trim Your Own Damned Nose Hairs
When Joe and I were dating, I spent hours—sometimes days—preparing for every encounter. I’d try on a dozen or more outfits before deciding on the perfect combination of stylish yet casual, sultry but not slutty. I’d take long, luxurious baths, lathering up with scented oils and shaving every inch of my body that I had deemed should be hairless with surgical precision. If I’d had time, I might have shopped for a new bra and panty set. After tidying up my apartment and making sure my nails were painted and my roots were sun-kissed perfection, I’d brush and floss and style and straighten and stock my purse with an assortment of breath mints. I wanted to delight and impress Joe, enchant and enrapture him, and no effort or inconvenience was too great. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that all of that was for the same guy I now have full-on, in-person conversations with while I am pooping.
You hear a lot about the importance of “maintaining romance” in long-term relationships, but I’m not really sure how to do it. If you’ve managed to sustain an ounce of mystery about yourself after thousands of days of living with the same person, you’ve figured out something that I very clearly haven’t.
I can prove it. On a date night recently, Joe leaned across the table, took both of my hands in his, and whispered to me in a husky voice, “Tell me something about you that I don’t know.”
Totally fucking romantic, right? I know. I thought so, too. Then I sat there looking like I’d just had my pupils dilated for several minutes or been asked to name the U.S. presidents in order, dizzy with the realization that I couldn’t think of a single semi-interesting thing about me that my husband didn’t already know.
“Have I told you about the time Pam and I met those guys, and the one guy asked her to—”
“Lick his stomach,” Joe finished my sentence. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one.”
“How about the night I went to that big boxing match with my dad—”
“And you fell off the stage, chair and all, and everyone in the entire place was staring and pointing and laughing at you?” Joe said.
“Well, did you know that when I was a little kid, I thought I was going to become a teacher?” I asked.
“Because you thought you had to,” Joe explained for me. “And you thought that the kids who were going to be doctors were at the hospital wearing tiny scrubs and learning about medicine, and the kids who were going to be farmers were out in the fields in big hats, or something like that.”
I slumped in my chair.
“I hate green peppers,” I told him. “Like, I really hate them.”
“I know,” he said. “And cantaloupe and black pepper and hard-boiled eggs and scary movies and walking on the right side of anyone.”
I slumped down even farther.
“At least I listen to you,” he said, picking up on my despair.
Of course it isn’t a bad thing that my husband knows me so well. I mean, that’s what marriage is all about, the blending of lives and the merging of souls and the completing-each-other shit you see in movies. It’s sweet and even romantic, in a weird way. But are we doomed because we have no mystery, no excitement? Why hadn’t I thought to save a sliver of secrecy, a nugget of intrigue, something that I could whip out a few decades later—when we’d been looking at each other’s faces for so long we almost forgot what they looked like—to spice things up? The man I once would have scaled a treacherous rock wall to spend a romantic evening with had seen me floss my teeth, change my tampon, dye my gray roots, struggle into pantyhose, pluck my eyebrows, pick my zits, don a nose strip and eye mask and ear plugs to sleep, and give birth to two nine-pound babies—once without a working epidural. I thought about that scene in Fried Green Tomatoes where the (impossibly young, in retrospect) Kathy Bates character attends a “put the spark back into your marriage” seminar and tries wrapping herself in six miles of cellophane as a sexy surprise for her husband (who crushes her by accusing her of going insane, which is totally what my husband would do—right before he ripped the cellophane off with his teeth). Somehow I don’t think a Saran Wrap dress could undo countless years of waking up next to the same someone’s hideous morning breath or mopping up their vomit every time they get the stomach flu or go a little overboard at the office holiday party.
“My Welcome-to-Midlife Moment Was . . .”
When I was telling my husband a story about this middle-aged woman, and he stopped me cold by saying, “Hon, you are a middle-aged woman.” Ugh.
—JODI
It’s a blessing and a curse, being in this place of comfortable marital security. On one hand, you’ve got someone who will come right out and tell you if you have broccoli in your teeth or if you neglected to apply enough deodorant, somebody who will lie to you and tell you that you don’t need a face-lift and that he can see the triceps muscles you’ve been working diligently to unearth, somebody who’s seen you naked on numerous occasions without laughing or cringing or running screaming into the next room. On the other hand, you also have evenings out that look like this:
[Sitting at a stoplight on the way to dinner.]
ME: What are you doing?
JOE: I’m trying to [yank] pull out [tug] this three-inch [rip] nose hair. Where did it come from, anyway? Damn it, I can’t get it. Hey, your fingers are smaller, and you have nails. Can you grab it?
ME: You want me to pull your nose hair out?
JOE: Well, I can’t sit there at dinner with it just hanging out like this. You didn’t notice it before we left?
ME: I was very busy trying to squeeze into these Spanx, thank you very much. I think I have manicure scissors in the glove box. [Finds scissors, hands them to Joe. The light turns green.]
JOE: Hold the wheel while I do this.
ME: I don’t think this is such a great idea.
[Joe sticking scissors tips up his nose and snipping randomly; Jenna gripping steering wheel with white knuckles.]
JOE: Shit, I can’t see it without my cheaters. You do it.
ME: Honey, I would rather not stick scissors up your nose while you’re driving. I’ll do it when we get to the restaurant.
And, of course, I did, because it turned out Joe forgot his reading glasses* (which always makes for a fun and romantic game of “Wait, Read Me the Entrée Specials Again” at restaurants) so he simply couldn’t.
“You’re going to write about this,” Joe accused me as I stashed my manicure scissors back in the glove box.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, offended. “Of course I’m going to write about this! This shit is comedy gold right here.”
Like I said, the man knows me inside and out.
After we ate—an activity my husband is famous for doing with incomparable thoroughness—our server came to clear our plates.
“Yeah, I hated it,” Joe told the guy, gesturing at his practically licked-clean dish.
“Hahahahaha,” I trilled on cue.
“I can see that,” our server said knowingly, whisking away the spotless evidence.
I’m going to guess that in our seventeen years together, Joe and I have eaten an average of at least one meal out a week—plus at least one or two weeks a year when we are on vacation and we get to enjoy twenty-one restaurant meals. Using this rough calculation, I have heard my husband utter that exact line approximately one thousand four hundred times. If I didn’t madly love the man, or I had years of bitter resentment born of unmet needs and unheard desires festering in me, I can see where this might make me want to stick something sharp into his eye socket and twist it around a few dozen times for good measure. But I do and I don’t, respectively, so his attempted joke is actually endearing. It’s one of his things that I’d miss tragically if it went away. It would be that “Yeah, I hated it” line—not his dashing good looks or prowess with power tools or skills on the basketball court or anything
else the rest of the world can plainly see—that I’d get most choked up on if I were delivering his eulogy today.
There was a breakthrough, pivotal scene in the epically good movie Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams plays a therapist reminiscing about his dead wife with his patient (Matt Damon). “She used to fart in her sleep,” Williams tells the clueless Damon character during an otherwise unproductive therapy session. “One night it was so loud it woke the dog up . . . She’s been dead two years, and that’s the shit I remember . . . little things like that, those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about; that’s what made her my wife. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. No, that’s the good stuff.”
That.
I’ve studied and written about relationships long enough to know that the first blush of new love—that heady, lustful, who-cares-if-we-sleep-we’ll-sleep-when-we’re-dead phase—ultimately and invariably morphs into what experts call “deep feelings of attachment.”* It’s the normal cycle of things, this progression from childish infatuation to real, mature love. It’s what separates teenagers from adults and one-night stands from life partners. And frankly, it would be next to impossible to raise children and run a household and not lose our jobs if we were still ripping each other’s clothes off at the end of every meal or sometimes in the middle of it.*
“I feel really lucky,” my friend Wendy says when talking about her husband, Todd. “Think about the things that attract you to someone when you’re dating. You’re not necessarily out there looking for a man who will be able to comfort you when your cat dies or who will be a firm-but-loving disciplinarian when you have kids. You want a fun guy, a guy who’ll take you out dancing all night and blow his rent money whisking you off on a romantic weekend getaway. You want a guy who will make you laugh and maybe one who is a little bit dangerous and even slightly damaged, because you want to be the one to tame him or fix him or change him or whatever it is you think he needs. But in reality, those aren’t necessarily the things that make for a solid lifetime partner.”
I feel pretty fucking lucky, too, I have to tell you. I never could have imagined, when I was in my twenties and dating this handsome, floppy-haired, briefcase-carrying kayak guide I’d become utterly smitten with and wanted more than anything in the world to make fall in love with me, that one day I would call him at work and ask him to pick up some hemorrhoid cream for me on his way home. I couldn’t have pictured standing naked in front of him in my aunt and uncle’s guest bedroom while he used his T-shirt to stop the menstrual blood that was pouring down my leg from hitting our gracious hosts’ beautiful, seafoam green carpet. I would have punched you in the face for suggesting that one day Joe and I might occasionally find ourselves playing Dutch Oven in bed or that I’d agree to give him a blowjob in exchange for the pleasure of popping a pimple on his back.* I might have fainted from the humiliation of the mere suggestion that one day, when I was recovering from a tendon injury, that I’d let this still-hot Adonis watch my naked middle-aged ass hobble away from the bed on crutches, wearing nothing but a boot cast and a watch. And never in my wildest fantasies would I have believed that I would allow this hunky man of my fantasies into a fluorescently lit fitting room with me to help me decide if the tankini I’m considering does or doesn’t do a good enough job of covering my stretch marks.
Even if you saw your own parents get to this midlife marriage place, there’s a good chance that now that you’re in it, it’s not exactly what you thought it would be like. When you get married—even if your husband looks exactly like his father so you have a pretty good idea where that’s going—you just don’t picture yourselves ten or thirty years older, sprawled on your faded, cat-scratched couch watching The Bachelor in matching earphones and glasses. Oh, you might try to picture your future selves, but in the image you conjure, the couch is spiffy and new, and you’re both still spry and fit and hopelessly in love. If you even bothered to consider that pesky “till death do us part” clause in your marriage contract (which you may not have, seeing as you were a bit light-headed from starving yourself so that you could be your lifetime skinniest on your wedding day), you surely didn’t pause to wonder what it looked like to slowly grow old next to somebody else who is doing the exact same thing.
Some people take one look at that shit, and they freak out and bolt. It’s happened to a bunch of my friends—they ask their husbands to pass the milk at breakfast, and the husbands pour some on their cereal and hand over the carton before casually announcing that they “just aren’t in love” anymore and want a divorce. The guys almost always go out and immediately find a young, hopelessly dumb trophy girlfriend, diddle around with that for a year or two before realizing they have nothing at all in common with this new, nubile partner besides being hopelessly dumb and come crawling back, begging for their old wives and lives back. That conversation usually looks a lot like this:
HIM: You were the best thing I ever had, and I blew it. I totally blew it. I threw it all away—you, our future, our family . . .
HER: You sure did.
HIM: Please take me back. I’ll do whatever it takes, anything you want. Anything at all. Just say the word and I’ll do it.
HER: Hmmm . . . Will you die a slow, painful death so that I can collect a fat life-insurance check? Actually, make that a fast, painful death. I could use a vacation.
HIM: How about I’ll go to therapy and buy you a Mercedes and get in really great shape and bring you flowers every single week and take an ad out in the New York Times telling the world that I’m a total asswipe?
HER: I’d prefer the check.
When this very scenario happened to one our closest couple friends, like everyone else we knew I put the guy—I’ll call him Rat Bastard—at the tippy top of my shit list. Then I did my very best to avoid him because I was genuinely afraid I might accidentally smile at him or kick him in the nut sack. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.
“You know,” my annoyingly wise husband pointed out, “Rat Bastard did what we’ve always said we would do if we wanted out. He didn’t go have some ridiculous affair with a teenage underwear model, and he didn’t try to slowly annoy her to death so that she’d be forced to leave him. He realized that he was unhappy, and he admitted it. Why do you hate him so much for that?”
“Because he didn’t even fucking try to fix it, that’s why,” I screamed, because I’m a screamer when I’m worked up or pissed off. “Ooh, I’m just not super-happy,” I added in a mock-baby voice. “Big fucking deal! Life is hard. Marriage is hard. He made a commitment—for better or for worse—and he has a family and a wife who sacrificed her career for his, and then all of a sudden it’s not all kittens and sunshine, so he just up and leaves? What a luxury that would be! ‘Maybe there’s something better out there. Why don’t I go check it out and see? If not, I’ll be right back.’ It’s just lame. It’s weak and stupid and immature and selfish and lame.”
“Remind me never to leave you,” Joe said.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” I told him. “If you think I’m a bitch to be married to, just wait until we’re divorced.”
I was reading just this week about a new kind of prenuptial agreement that alternately intrigued and confused me. Remember the friendly, old-fashioned “what’s mine stays mine if we ever split up so screw you if you think you’re going to bleed me dry someday, you gold-digging bitch” contract? Yeah, that’s obsolete. Today’s couples are drawing up legally vetted lists of marital demands and outlining the very specific and often costly penalties their partners will incur for not meeting them. By signing these agreements, young and in-love couples are predetermining—for the rest of ever, mind you—how often they’ll have sex, how they’ll spend their free time, what they are and aren’t allowed to do and wear, and what exactly counts as “cheating” (same-sex third base, allowed for her if he can watch; opposite-sex first base, punishable to maxim
um extent for both, etc). Specific stipulations the article highlighted that various couples have outlined in their new-fashioned prenups include:
The wife isn’t allowed to play the piano when the husband is home.
The husband has to pay the wife $50,000 each time he impregnates her.
Every time the husband is rude to the wife’s parents, he forks over ten grand.
The wife can’t wear anything green.
The husband gets $100,000 if his wife’s weight tops 170 pounds.*
The wife isn’t allowed to cut her hair.*
If the husband cheats, he must pay his wife up to $5 million.*
A marriage counselor quoted in the article urged couples to try to get their intended to agree to sex at least once or twice a week, adding “it’s nice to have a contract and say, look, we did agree to this.”
Yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if you had a promissory sex schedule written by your newlywed self twenty or thirty years later? Um, at the risk of offending any overly optimistic newlyweds out there, NO, IT FUCKING WOULD NOT. It would suck complete and total ass.
If you’ve been married for even half a decade, think back to your engagement days for a second. Of course you would have agreed to a biweekly shag! Back then you were fit and energetic and overtaken by hormones, and you could do it five times in a single night! Twice a week was for pussies, for crying out loud. You might even have been too insulted to sign such a thing. It’s worth pointing out that back then you probably didn’t have nine kids needing their asses wiped before begging for “one more book” or aging, crotchety parents living in your house with you or the stress of making your next mortgage payment, and you honestly couldn’t fathom being so exhausted that you’d pick twenty extra minutes of sleep over food, sex, shopping, a massage, or anything on TV. I’ll have sex with you all day every day, multiple times, in any room and in any position and with any props your little heart desires, you big stud muffin, you would have promised, in writing, before a notary public if it was required or requested. And you would have wholeheartedly meant it and believed you were good for it, too. Nobody could call you a liar; you just didn’t know what you didn’t know.
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 11