When I learned ten minutes into
our honeymoon that my husband thought differently than I did, I wasn’t
surprised. What does surprise me after
thirty-eight years of marriage (I was five when I said, “I do”) is how we define
the same situation. In case you’re thinking of getting married and would like
some warning . . . oops, I mean
preparedness training, here are a few examples.
- She walks into his den and her toenails curl as the surround sound blasts from his twenty-inch speakers. She calls it “noise.” He calls it “sensory participation.”
- She rises at dawn and peels out of the driveway to spend a day of shopping with her bestie. He refers to it as “debt escalation.” She refers to it as “shopping therapy.”
- If she leaves the toast in too long, it’s “burnt.” If he leaves steaks on the grill too long, they’re “blackened.”
- If she asks, “How do I look?” and he says anything other than “gorgeous,” he gets blackened toast and leftovers for supper. If he asks, “How do I look?” she takes it as an engraved invitation to point out every lint speck and wayward hair, without any argument from him.
- When she drags him to a chick flick, she calls it “sensitivity training.” When he tells his buddies about it the next day, he says it was “sappy.”
I’m thankful God made us
different, indeed I am. I just wish that four decades ago, someone had written
this article for me. It would have saved us a ton of arguments . . . ah, I mean
discussions.
Do you and someone you are close to have very different viewpoints on the same issues?
