Will You Be Mine If I Show Improvement?

If there are any guys out there who actually look forward to Valentine’s Day, I suspect they own stock in companies that sell candy, greeting cards or flowers. The folks over at Godiva and FTD are thrilled for good reason, but you won’t catch me fattening up their bottom lines. My wife doesn’t allow me to buy her any candy for fear of fattening the lines of her bottom, and I can never remember which flowers make her sinuses explode like sea monkeys. 

 

So I’m off one hook and firmly impaled on another – i.e., the necessity to be creative on a day when most guys take care of their obligations in two five-minute surgical strikes at the florist and drugstore. Of course, V-Day blind-sides us less than two months after Christmas, and my wife’s birthday falls between them, so that stretch can be rather stressful for a guy like me trying to keep his marriage healthy. 

 

What makes it particularly challenging, of course, is that we Martians often don’t have a clue as to what makes Venusians happy. If you thought, for example, that a Self-Lowering Toilet Seat would ignite smoldering animal desire in a Venusian, you’d be doing some typically masculine, Left-Brain, knuckle-headed thinking.  And while Chanel No. 5 is an obscenely over-priced, totally impractical gift, it’s much more likely to trigger warm expressions of gratitude than, say, a garlic press or stainless steel colander. Even top of the line. Seriously.

 

Generally speaking, my wife and I tend to celebrate our gender-based differences, but they can occasionally cause a teensy bit of friction. She doesn’t understand, for example, how I can easily go a solid week without buffing, dusting or scouring anything and not feel a void in my life. On the other hand, I can’t fathom why a sock left on the floor of a closet for less than a week should cause her consternation when not even a CIA spy satellite can detect it. 

 

Our differences have actually inspired some pretty creative projects. For example, I was working on a design for that Self-Lowering Toilet Seat when I Googled it and saw that there were about a dozen patents pending for such a device. Not that I forget to lower the seat more than 10 or 12 times a week, but she still thinks it could save her a few trillion brain cells over the life of the seat. My own in-house study has revealed that my forgetfulness has a dramatic negative impact on her romantic friskiness. 

 

There are definitely areas of my life that need improving, and I’m the first to recognize it.  Truth be told, I have been known to take an occasional break from my typical tireless and frenetic pace of doing household chores, and nothing animates her Inner Life Coach quicker than the sight of me slouching on the couch with a beer in my hand watching a game on TV.  This recently inspired her to suggest that maybe I needed to get outside for some fresh air.  Of course, 27-degree air is “fresh” to some and “debilitating” to others, like me. 

 

Still, the mortar of a good marriage is compromise and sacrifice; so the day after her suggestion, I watched a bass fishing tournament on ESPN.  We loaded the boat (I never left the couch) and I had to admit she was right – I felt a lot better. So much better that I checked the listings, and the next day I went deep sea fishing off Aruba. I think the fresh air is doing me wonders.