COLUMN: The newlywed shame
There is nothing more irritating to married people than newlyweds are. When I say married people, I mean people who have been married long enough they’ve heard every funny story, every good joke and every slightly humorous pun their spouse can create, and laughter is something you do when you have company.
Newlyweds bug me for a plethora of reasons, first and foremost is the look. You know the there-is-nobody-else-in-the-world, I-blush-at-your-very-glance look. These makes me want to take my index finger and give it a field trip down my esophagus.
Why? Because, although I love my wife more than any other person on this earth, after seeing her day-in and day-out for years, the only time she makes me blush is when she tells me my fly is down or I forgot the children in the car.
Then there is the touching. The constant groping and kissing and endless hand holding in public. It just makes my skin crawl. I think it’s great that you dig each other so much. I may give my wife a peck on the cheek in public every couple of decades too.
The problem comes in when you and your sweetie-pie decide to play your own version of Twister in a public place, which makes the rest of us want to either give you money to go get a room or club you to death with the nearest blunt object.
I know from firsthand experience from my wife that any female who has had a baby automatically hates any newly-married woman who has not gone through child birth. They hate their tiny waists; they hate their lack of stretch marks and their perky, perfect, undefiled-by-breastfeeding chests.
My wife often says things about newly-married women like, “I can’t wait to see just how sexy she is after gaining enough weight during pregnancy to perform mitosis on herself, pass a cantaloupe between her legs and then just try to put on that thong bikini again.”
Personally, I really can’t remember what it is like to be a newlywed. I remember buying a ring, I remember signing a paper and something about being bound to my wife, and after that, it’s all kind of a haze.
But deep down inside, after a short six and one-half years of marriage, three births, two houses, three cats and literally thousands of mornings waking up to the same face, I find myself strangely more in love with my wife than I was back when we were first married. This is because, even though we don’t spend our time together gazing into each other’s eyes or whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears, we do have moments between us that are special and only we understand. We have been together long enough to have an entire conversation without talking.
And well, to tell you the truth, we still play our own version of Twister every once in a while, and I, of course, always let her win.