A small bet leads to a big commitment
(Originally published November 2019)
It started like a meet-cute setup you might see in any romantic comedy: Twenty-seven years ago, a lonely young man named Mark and his big brother Fred had a beer after work at the bar their construction crew had been renovating.
Fred dared Mark to ask out their waitress, betting five dollars that she, a young Middlebury College graduate, was too snooty to go out with him, a recently divorced local with two little boys.
Reader, that snooty waitress was me.
December 10, 1994
I bring up the incident because in a couple of weeks Mark and I will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.
It seems like only yesterday we were starry-eyed and giddy, willing to make all kinds of impulsive decisions—getting married, for instance—based mostly on the fact that we were both tan and fit and that spending the rest of our lives together sounded kind of fun.
I never imagined where we’d be 25 years down the road, because at the time it didn’t seem relevant, and also because I didn’t actually believe we would get older. That seemed like something only older people did.
Suddenly, here we are.
Getting married was, of course, a thrill. But I used to look at couples who had been together a long time and wonder whether they still liked each other. Did they feel lasting affection, just as they would for their children or their dogs? Or did they find themselves tiring of the union, the way they might the geese-wearing-bonnets wallpaper border in the guest bathroom?
Let’s face it: A lot of things that seemed like good ideas in the early ’90s didn’t stand the test of time.
It turns out, however, as our kids have grown up and we’ve learned to live with each other’s most annoying habits (if you’ve heard Mark sing, you’d understand), we haven’t gotten bored.
This is not to say, however, that he’s an easy man to be married to.
“Call me a hopeless romantic, but I can honestly say I feel no more contempt for Mark now than I did on our wedding day.”
For starters, he cannot find anything—from a jar of mayonnaise to his favorite pair of socks—if it’s not in plain sight. At least once a week for the past 25 years, I have had to respond to his distress call from the bedroom closet: “Where did you put my good jeans?”
“They’re in there,” I yell up the stairs.
“I’ve looked everywhere.”
Throwing down my very important knitting, I stomp upstairs, push him out of the way, move a couple of hangers and reveal the jeans, dead ahead. I then give him my best withering “told-you-so” glare (I practice it in my spare time).
“Well,” he says, “it’s not my fault you hid them behind other stuff.”
Also in the Bad Husband category: He hates giving backrubs. When I’m tense and need a good shoulder massage, he’ll reluctantly comply, using a technique he learned from watching National Geographic videos in which bald eagles snatch fish out of the water with their talons.
I can’t prove it, but I think this is his payback for my overuse of the withering “told-you-so” glare.
Shall I go on?
When he rolls over in bed, he takes the blankets with him. He often eats the last piece of pie without first offering it to me. And, in three separate incidents between 2014 and 2018, he pretended to be asleep when the cat barfed on the bedroom rug in the middle of the night.
Really, in some ways, it’s amazing I’ve been able to tough it out all these years.
Then again, I’m a very forgiving person. And, in spite of all his faults, I still love the big jerk.
It’s impossible to look back 25 years and compare our relationship then to how it is today; so many things have changed. But I once read in People magazine, in a profile of then happy couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, that a sign of a troubled marriage is when spouses start treating each other with increasing contempt.
Call me a hopeless romantic, but I can honestly say I feel no more contempt for Mark now than I did on our wedding day. And I’m pretty sure he feels the same way about me.
With each anniversary, I find myself more amazed that everything Mark and I have—our shared experiences, our home, our family—was set in motion long ago by a stupid bar bet.
So Fred, if you’re reading this, thanks. Also, you still owe Mark five bucks.
