Lea

My wife and I damned near killed each other the first six months we were married. Not happy times.

If you saw us during the second half of 1997 and had mushy, sappy thoughts of the blissful lovebird newlyweds, you may rest assured that you were just, like, eat up with wrongness. You just happened to catch us at a good moment. I can say honestly that I never started to consider whether we’d made a mistake, but I did start to consider whether to consider whether we’d made a mistake.

“Semantics, Bo.” Yeah yeah, what the hell ever. Give me a break.

Lea moved straight out of her parents’ house into an apartment by herself. I did the same thing. Neither of us had ever had a roommate of any kind. I’m a stubborn jerk. She’s a stubborn jerk. That our first married times together would go poorly seems obvious now, but ah…youth.

Sometimes I ponder that the blissful ignorance of the young may be Darwinian.

We’ll celebrate our 10th anniversary in May, and the best way I know how to describe it is that it still feels like the beginning of something. I could go for pages, but you’d eventually vomit, and then never come back, because who wants to visit a site that induces vomiting, and plus your stingy ass might try to bill me for your keyboard. Nobody wins. So I’ll keep it brief.

I guess that according to a certain all-too-prevalent school of thought, by this point I’m supposed to be all bitter and bitching about my “ball and chain” and clucking my tongue knowingly at younger people and saying “no way, don’t do it.” I’m probably betraying the Guy Code as I type.

But really, truly, madly, deeply: my wife is my best friend, and she totally rocks. I never dreamed it could be this good.

To the about-to-be-married and newly-married and married-for-a-while-but-she’s-pissed-off-all-the-time guys: if the dishwasher needs to be emptied, empty it. If it needs to be loaded, load it. If it needs to be emptied, then loaded, then empty, then load it. Do these things without hesitation whenever you are in the kitchen for any reason.

I love you, Lea.

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