About Husbands

 I was talking to a group of women today, and as it usually does, the conversation turned to talk of husbands.  I guess I hang out with too many guys or maybe I just have an odd marriage, because it struck me as strange that not one of these women had a single nice thing to say about the men they married.  This is a group of intelligent, attractive, successful women and apparently each and every one of them managed to marry (in their estimation) un-ambitious, inconsiderate, infantile and in some cases, down right mean men.

I suspect that this probably isn’t the case. How realistic is it to believe that every single one of these women basically married someone that they can’t stand to be around?  If that is the case, why the hell did they choose to marry these men in the first place?  Were they really that desperate for companionship?  Were they just marrying out of convenience because someone proposed?  Were they suffering from the dreaded (and in my opinion bullshit) “fear of ending up alone” syndrome?  Were they using marriage as some kind of financial security plan (i.e. the I don’t need a 401(k), I have a husband retirement plan)?  I don’t get it.

What I also don’t get is how in the hell their husbands put up with it.  How do these guys go through life being told (verbally or otherwise) that nothing they do is good enough…that they are just not good enough?  That has to be so exhausting after a while.  How do they wake up every morning and look at the woman next to them, knowing that she’s just going to start bitching and complaining about every little thing they do and not want to jab a pencil through her ear and into her brain?

Don’t get me wrong, Nick is by no means perfect, but here’s the thing…neither am I.  Sure, I bitch when he doesn’t help me around the house, and I think I’m entitled to bitch about it.  But, he bitches when I loose receipts or spend too much money and he can’t balance the checkbook and he’s completely justified in bitching about it.  Honestly, there are days that I want to kill him, but there are more days where I think he’s a saint for putting up with my crazy ass.

I never want to turn into one of those women, and I don’t think I ever will be, but if I notice myself falling into that trap there are a couple of things I need to remember:

*There’s not a day that’s gone by in the past 13 years that he hasn’t made me laugh. 

*He always lets me order the spinach dip.

*He puts up with the chaos, the uncertainty, the frustration of living with someone with depression and OCD, who can’t function without Crazy Pills.  He does this without complaint and with his whole heart.

*He thinks I’m stronger, smarter and more beautiful than I really am.

*He puts up with my dysfunctional, annoying and sometimes downright scary family.

*Even though he says it disturbs him, he secretly loves how obsessed I am with Max.

*When I crumble into a million little pieces, he knows how to put me back together again.

*He always calls me on my bullshit…and he’s almost always right about it.

*He doesn’t understand it, but accepts my need to have the right kind of stemware for different drinks, matching china, the perfect flatware.

*He Tivo’s crap about serial killers, voodoo and other insane things not because he wants to watch it, but because he knows I do, then he laughs about my “fascination with the macabre”.

*He cleans, vacuums and dusts the bedroom when my Lupus is bad because he knows I can’t stand being sick in a room that isn’t perfectly clean.

*He can’t say the word “Abominable” and this cracks me up.

*He doesn’t complain (too much) when I put my cold feet on him to warm up during the night.

*He would always defend me if I needed it, but is smart enough to know and never threatened by the fact that 99.9% of the time, I can take care of myself.

*He brings me milkshakes at inconvenient times just because I asked.

Yeah….I guess I don’t have it so bad.