Why I Love Her
For our wedding anniversary, I got my wife an iPod…she too is now part of the now generation!
Tonight, though, she wanted to download some games and a movie…that would make her complete. We went out to iTunes and quickly downloaded Tetris, Sudoko, and a Casino game, and then we went to look at the movies. As we scrolled through the movies to download, she smiled at “Sleepless in Seattle”, a movie that she says is great and that I have never seen. That’s the one she got.
Once we were done downloading her movie, I went back to the iTunes store to find a movie to download to my iPod. I went straight by all the movies that are traditionally defined as “chick flicks” and I went instead to the action/drama section. I chose “Bourne Supremacy”, one that will keep me watching longer than the introductory credits, which is probably all I would watch of “Sleepless in Seattle”.
This in a nutshell points out the difference between me and my wife.Â
She plays those games that I have no coordination and no patience for. She watches those movies that make you go, “ahhh”, and she’ll sit through those types of movies from beginning to end. She’ll keep herself occupied on that little bitty iPod screen from the time we get off the runway till the time we approach for landing.
I, on the other hand, use my iPod for primarily music. Instead of playing games, I’ll occupy myself with work on my laptop or by reading the latest in business books. If I do watch a movie on the iPod, it will be a “man’s movie” with lots of action, and I’ll have no problem watching a couple minutes at a time, and I’ll watch certain scenes over and over again.
One of the things that makes our relationship work is the way we poke fun at each other with our differences.Â
Where she cries every time she watches particular movies, I laugh at her as she cries. Where she focuses intently on the sudoko puzzles or the latest crosswords, I laugh at her as she struggles to complete those daily tear off puzzles that weren’t meant in most cases to be successfully completed. Where she now reaches for her librarian glasses to be able to see those microscopically small puzzles or watch that itty bitty movie on her iPod, I laugh at her knowing that she once had better than 20-20 vision and now needs magnifiers to see things that once she could see seemingly across the room. And, where she now enters her pre-menopausal years and has the hot and cold sequences in seemingly ever decreasing intervals, I sit there and smile knowing that our home heating bill will decrease tremendously as we can now use her to heat the house during those ever so frequent hot flashes.
For me, as I fret over the latest challenge at work or focus on the latest email that arrives on my blackberry, she laughs as I focus and she distracts me when I need to concentrate the most. As I sit fat, dumb and happy in front of the weekend slate of football games, she pulls the “we need to go shopping” card, and then through her own special way of making me feel guilty, encourages me to get off my fat, dumb and happy butt and head out into the world of ridiculous shoppers. As I wake up in the morning and with my 20-400 eyes feel all over the nightstand to find my glasses, she sits there and laughs knowing exactly where they are and giving me no help at all as I ever increasingly more desperately do my search. And, as I roll out of bed and with every move creak and pop my way towards the bathroom, I sense her sitting there and smiling, listening and watching and knowing that I’m aging at a much more rapid pace than she is and thus will be completely dependent on her within just a few years (as if I’m not already)!
I often tell my wife in a very sarcastic tone how much I look forward to our upcoming time together in the rocking chairs. I’ll say something. She’ll tell me I’m wrong. I’ll pop off with a retort. She’ll call me “butthead”. And I’ll sit there quietly for a while. Then we’ll repeat this sequence again. When the discussions of the day get tiresome, I’ll change over to talk about the things I remember from our past. She’ll tell me I’m wrong. I’ll pop off with a retort. She’ll call me “butthead”. And I’ll sit there quietly again for a while.
We have lasted 26 beautiful years together for 2 reasons:
(1) we poke fun at each other for just about everything in our lives
(2) she’s always right
It’s worked perfectly thus far. I can’t imagine it won’t work for the next 26 years!