You know how, when you are looking forward to going to your very favourite restaurant for weeks, and you pore over the online menu and decide what you are going to order, in extreme detail, and you think about that amazing meal and you think about it and – after all you go out for dinner only a few times a year – you obsess over it and then the day is finally here and you dress up in an actual dress, the very one you bought for your husband’s company Christmas party that you sadly did not attend and you get to the restaurant, starving and drooling a little, practically crazed with anticipation, you open the actual non-online menu and the item you have been dreaming about is no longer available? And for a few minutes you just feel completely bereft, like there are no more important issues in the world than the fact that you cannot order linguine with sundried tomatoes and olives?
But then you find that, regardless of the printed menu, the chef can accommodate you and you get exactly what you want?
It’s wonderful.
All of which is to say that our anniversary dinner was a lovely success. “Can you believe we’ve been married eight years?” I said dreamily, sipping my second cosmopolitan. “It seems longer” my husband replied somewhat less romantically. “But in a good way” he amended.
When you’ve been married a while, it’s easy to take certain things for granted: like who is going to take out the recycling or who is going to wash the dishes. When you have babies or small children your relationship can be not unlike that of fellow zookeepers or perhaps roommates with particularly difficult pets, where you cease to talk about anything not related to your shared responsibilities and their food and toileting preferences. Another thing about being married for a while is that you become predictable to each other. I can, for example, predict perfectly the two things my husband finds most irritating about me: my fondness for going to sleep before 9:30 pm, and my eating preferences. “It’s a pain in the ass being married to a vegetarian,” he mutters semi-weekly. He probably also is irritated by my baby-talking to the dog, but whatever. I can also predict that, now that golf season has begun, I will see a whole lot less of him; but on the upside, I will be able to watch NYPD Blue reruns without interference.
The beautiful thing about being married a while, the beauty of predictability, is that when you come back to the table from the ladies’ room you find your husband has talked to the waitress and ordered you a contraband linguine with sundried tomatoes and olives, plus a gorgeous glass of cabernet, and you can only smile at his probable conversation with her, “It’s a pain she’s a vegetarian,” he’d say, “I’ll have the New York striploin.” It’s just what I might have predicted.
awww, I loved that post. I kind of wish my husband would do something like order my favorite dish. I think he’s afraid of getting it wrong…. but that’s a lame excuse, right?