'Til Death Do Us Part

Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that’s a real treat.

-          Joanne Woodward.

His Nibs and I had our wedding anniversary yesterday.  Our anniversary is always a happy day in this house, because we both take the day off work every year.  His Nibs takes the day off because I ask him to, and I take it off so that we can spend the day together and go out for a nice lunch, and so I can hit him with random memory tests of our wedding day and drive him mad.

Yesterday was a beautiful day.  We went out for a nice lunch, and sat outside to eat.  I had pasta, he had a steak sandwich.  The food is irrelevant to the story, but if I was reading this for the first time, the only thing I’d be thinking for the rest of this story is “I wonder what they had for their lunch?”  Especially if I was hungry while reading it.

Anyway, all was going well, we were happy and relaxed until I hit him with “What’s your strongest memory of our wedding day?”

I could see the hunted look come into his eyes immediately.  I knew he was thinking too fast and would give the wrong answer.

“It started raining in the afternoon.  That was great, because we didn’t have to spend hours taking photographs.  So we got to spend the time with our friends in the bar.”

“That’s your strongest memory of our wedding day?  The weather?”

He was no longer hunted looking.  He sat back in his chair and smiled.

“I remember we nearly had a row in the car on the way to the hotel, when you found out that I hadn’t written my speech.”

This is a true story.  We left the church, got into the car, and went off to take the photographs. (This was before the rain started).  And as we finished waving at our guests and drove away, His Nibs turned to me and said

“You wouldn’t have a pen, love, would you?”

“No, I don’t bring a pen to our wedding.  Why would I?  And more to the point, where would I put it?  What do you want a pen for, anyway?”

“I thought I might write my speech.”

There was a long pause.  Not the sort of pause you’re supposed to have within an hour of getting married, where you stare at each other, smiling like idiots, and words aren’t necessary.  This was very much the other sort of pause.  The unhappy sort.

“You didn't write a speech?”

“No.  I didn’t get around to it.”

“You’ve known this wedding is happening on this date for thirteen months, and you never got around to putting your speech together?”

“Well I wasn’t going to write it thirteen months ago, was I?”

“Love, seriously, have you even a first draft of a speech?”

“No.”

His Nibs didn’t look remotely frightened or shaken by my thunderous face.  Nor did he look remotely worried.  He informed me that sure, if he didn’t have a speech, what harm?  He’d do it off the cuff.

I was horrified.  I’ve never known His Nibs to make a public speech, and his making his speech completely off the top of his head was not part of our wedding plan.  But I took a deep breath and let it go.  It gave me something to worry about later.  I think that my letting that go may have set the scene for our future as a married couple.

He gave an off the cuff speech.  I was frantically writing the names of people he had to thank on a serviette and passing them to him.  He didn’t need my help though.  He gave the loveliest speech I’ve ever heard, full of love for everyone, and full of happiness.  I’ve never been prouder of him.

But when quizzed yesterday, this was not his first memory of our wedding day.  The weather was. So I continued to torment him.

Could he name any songs that were played at the reception?

What did we have for our dinner?

Did I make a speech? Did my Dad?  Could he remember anything about either?

Poor His Nibs.  Sitting there, trying to remember minute details of a day fourteen years ago, which he probably hadn’t even noticed at the time.

The difficulty His Nibs faces is that I remember the tiny details of everything.  I can’t remember what I walk up the stairs for, but I remember exactly what song was playing in the nightclub the first time His Nibs asked me to dance, twenty five years ago.  When I find a receipt in the bottom of an old handbag I say annoying things to him like “Oh look, it’s the receipt for the coffee, remember the day we went to Kilkenny and I bought deodorant and you bought socks, remember?”  I’m sure this drives him bonkers. But he smiles and nods, which is enough to keep me happy.  This memory for trivia has been a life long skill of mine.  My brother insists that I’m imagining things when I try to remind him of tiny events that happened in our childhood.

Anyway, I’ve decided that to celebrate this auspicious event, I will take this opportunity to list a few tips on marriage:

Use your tears wisely.  When His Nibs and I moved in together first, every time we started fighting or he was particularly stubborn about something that was important to me, I’d start crying.  This very quickly loses its power.  Before you know where you are, you’ll be getting ready to squeeze out a few tears so that he’ll do the washing up without your input, and he’ll mutter “here comes the waterworks” under his breath.  And that’s a day to remember.  Because that’s the day you’ll realise that you’ve lost your power.  Even when you start crying with good reason.  In my case, I really hurt my finger once when we were both trying to replace a fence panel Poppy had headbutted to death.  It was an actual injury, there was bleeding, and he decided the cut wasn’t as bad as I was making it out to be, and that I should carry on with the work and “don’t start crying”.  If he had had any respect left for the tears, he would have reacted more to my liking.

If, like us, you spend more time than you want to out of your house, because you have to work all the time to pay for the fecking thing, do not spend more than half the time you’re in the house cleaning it.  This is a waste of time.  Especially if you share said house with a husband like mine who leaves an inch of cold coffee in mugs all over the house and who seems to mess up the entire lower level of the house just trimming his beard.  Only a husband like His Nibs, who has a grin that has me for an eejit, can get away with the kind of caper.  Just accept a certain amount of dust and get on with it.

There are rows that you will have for the rest of your lives together.  His Nibs and I haven’t a minute’s luck in the mornings.  There’s unending shouting and roaring and sulking and there would be crying, if it hadn’t lost its power, as set out above, every single morning.  I can’t get up in the mornings, because I go to bed too late.  His Nibs springs out of bed far too early and is bossy and shouty and difficult.  This will never end.  And we’ve decided to accept this.  The fights we have in the mornings end as soon as we get in the car and I go back to sleep, and are not mentioned again.  They don’t count.  The sooner you both decide what your version of our morning row is, the faster you can get over it.

His Nibs says the only thing he ever forces himself to remember as a tip on marriage is “Happy Wife Happy Life.”  I think it’s a bit of a cheek for him to say this.  He couldn’t think disappearing every week to a hurling match, which he records on television while he’s gone, then coming home and watching the same match on television, then watching the highlights again that night, leads to a happy wife.  The only reason he has a happy wife is that he had the presence of mind to marry a woman lazy enough to not get hysterical about these things.  So maybe he’s an oracle of wisdom after all.

I was trying to think up of more questions for him, as our lunch ended.  He’d finished his steak sandwich, and was picking through my leftover pasta, looking for hidden bits of bacon, when he spoke again.

“I remember the wedding song.  It was great.  It was called You’re The One.  And that bit was definitely true.”  He grinned at me, and I grinned back and stopped quizzing him.

This type of talk makes me confident that we’ll make it another year.