First I would like to apologize for my long absence. Many of you have urged me to bring new material as soon as possible and I highly appreciate the wonderful support. Unfortunately personal stress and turbulence around the office have kept me rather busy these last few months, and I’ll post more about that in my next blog- but right now we need to get back to the funnies, and believe me when I say the catharsis in itself should prove helpful to my own mental health as well. So here we go…

Disenchantment. Although I’m far from possessing scholarly insight on relationships, I believe that couples- whether married or not, face excruciatingly difficult moments wrapped in disenchantment. These moments are stapled to all types of personal issues, and flank us when least expected. The slightest human sigh, or even the occurrences of winds changing direction might shift one’s emotions to disenchantment. The wonderful thing about spun language and sarcasm is that even a disenchanting comment may in fact play to the contrary of a negative outcome. The problem is knowing when and when not to deliver.

For example, when you first start dating someone, manners, appearance, chivalry or intelligent humor seem to be the attractive tones both parties are concerned with. If one of the two people dating were to make a remark, even in jest, such as “if you eat all of that main course AND dessert you’ll need to hit the gym tomorrow”,  the person may have to kiss their ass goodbye due to the receiving party feeling that the remark was rude or obnoxious, especially if that person is a woman. If the same remark came from wife to husband after years of marriage the husband would agree and probably not even order dessert, knowing full well that extra effort might be required in the gym the next day. Another example may be after two young people have just begun dating and they awkwardly dance around the fact of how to engage in “getting busy” for the first time. What should they say or how should they bring it up? An experienced married couple may just get done cleaning dishes and 3 loads of laundry after a hard day’s work, put poorly behaved children to bed, look at each other and say “lets go to Mickey’s clubhouse” and start singing “come inside its fun inside”. Hence the next 3 minutes of sex until the first child walks into the room complaining about a fake belly ache or nightmare that didn’t happen just to achieve rights to sleep in Mama and Papa’s bed. We quickly do the “hi sweetie, oh we were just stretching” routine and then let them in the bed. I usually end up on the couch feeling “very blue”, if you catch my drift.

This brings me to the point of how I came to ever so eloquently call my wife a Big Pink Elephant today. Oh yes I did. She had just dressed herself in workout clothes which partially consisted of tight, pink workout pants and then she mentioned her dissatisfaction with her own weight. That’s when I chimed in. I am uncertain, but I presume that women, in general, always feel as though their own weight is unacceptable. Maybe I’m wrong but it seems like even the skinniest skeleton bitches still endeavor to look more like prisoners of war. Again, that’s just my opinion but I believe it holds some clout. That goes for my wife as well -she’s a sexy and small framed woman but still concerned about body weight as seemingly every attractive woman in the world is as well. The point is, after I had made my comment (for which I was prepared to face no sex for daddy) my wife laughed and proceeded to attack me in a playful way, sarcastically proclaiming  that I was terrible. Had I just discovered a new form complimenting my wife? –  To make a comment so extremely contrary to the facts, that it delivers a better result than the old cliche “you’re not overweight honey, you’re sexy”, with which my wife usually ensues “you’re just saying that”. After 10 years of  hearing “you’re just saying that”, I’m not inclined to answer routinely any longer, hence the elephant.

Perhaps when couples grow to become very familiar with each other they can let certain things fly, whereas fresher relationships cannot carry such a feat. It’s not that my wife and I ever held back with our comments to begin with….we are actually more like the rated “R” version of “Everybody Loves Raymond”. Instead of “idiot” she might call me a bald headed prick when angered and I might reply with equally distressing terminology, but the tone is more in passing and accepted as such. We might even laugh about what the other just blurted and never take it too seriously. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be regularly calling my wife a hippo as that’s just plain suicide, but I may be onto something different here.