It also has recently come to my attention that amongst all the labels I use for classifying posts, my wife doesn’t have one of her own. My son does, in the form of the “baby stuff” tag, although he will have to share that with his younger siblings as they come along and I suppose eventually he’ll outgrow it. The only other person who has his own tag at the moment is Batman, and I can say without hesitation that my wife is actually much more important in my life than the Dark Knight, so clearly she deserves a tag (at the very least).
It’s surprisingly difficult for me to write about my wife and/or my relationship with her and have it come out sounding the way that it truly feels. All of the sweeping blanket statements about what she means to me would end up sounding like unexceptional clichés. On the other hand, I could focus in on the tiny and trivial things that make me happy on a daily basis – the way that we both always seem to crave the exact same fast-food-we-haven’t-had-in-a-while at the exact same time, the fact that she never lets a day go by without trying at least once to make me laugh, the thousand different ways we’ve found to fit together on a couch – but while those are writerly tricks that can make an imaginary construct seem more grounded and real, what I’m trying to express is neither fictional nor tiny nor trivial. To use an unlikely (and perhaps overwrought and certainly stereotypically English Major) analogy, it’s like snow. Every individual snowflake is beautiful and weightless, but they add up. My wife is a blizzard of happiness and an avalanche of awesome. But to express that would either be to paint with too broad a brush, or to spend an inordinate amount of time counting snowflakes.
Even if I had unlimited time to catch and sort and classify every piece, how much of that would translate into readability, considering the general rule of thumb that griping is entertaining but gushing is not? There’s an adolescent romantic notion that maintains the love of your life is the person you want to be with in spite of their flaws and in defiance of the ways they drive you crazy. But nothing could be further from the way I feel about my wife. There’s nothing about her that drives me crazy (in a bad way, at least) and I know this will sound glossily disingenuous but I never see any flaws in her, let alone obsessively pat myself on the back for overlooking them. Maybe I’m just forgiving of flaws in general, in her as well as everyone else I know (except maybe myself), and I have a pretty easy time letting them go as just part of the background noise of being human. Maybe, for my wife in particular, the good outshines the bad too much for the bad to be observable.
The biggest concession to realism I can bring myself to make is that my wife may not be perfect but she is unquestionably perfect for me. Our common interests are myriad, and on the rare occasions one of us gets to introduce something to the other, as a rule it quickly becomes another shared favorite. (Biggest examples in terms of time invested in mutual enjoyment: she introduced me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I introduced her to Vegas) She and I were friends long before we fell in love and she has ascended to the rank of best friend with unparalleled success. She’s the best domestic partner I can imagine. She’s an amazing mother to our son. She’s an admirable role model as a human being. All of those statements have a few thousand examples to back them up and I don't even know where to start in cataloguing them.
It’s all true and it’s sweet (depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing) but is it interesting? It’s very interesting to me – I could sit around just thinking about my wife with a big goofy grin on my face for hours. But can I convey it to an audience in all its epic magnificence? That’s pretty daunting. It’s similar to my reluctance to overhype my own child, blown up by a couple orders of magnitude, because at least babies (even other people’s babies) are inherently cute and amusing. But other people’s relationships, especially when they move past the falling-in-love stage and into the being-in-love … I think there’s a reason why stories end with a three-word encapsulation like “happily ever after” and every attempt to look more closely at what that means becomes a very arch and ironic deconstruction. The most mind-blowing soul-fulfilling love (which is in fact what I am laying claim to) can be boring as hell to an outsider, and looking at it too closely can seem like bragging or, worse, that old adolescent obliviousness (“No one else has EVER felt this way!!!” … oh, dear.) But the flipside of that is a reluctance to make too many overt mentions of my wife one way or the other. If I don’t let myself write about the mushy stuff, I worry about presenting a misleadingly incomplete picture if I only write about the non-mushy stuff. And I think that has contributed to my wife’s untagged status, which is painfully out of synch with reality.
So. Inherently or universally interesting or not, that is how I feel about the woman I’m lucky enough to share my life with, and it’s worth hoping you’ll indulge me in saying it at least once. Henceforth, calibrate your default reading settings accordingly. If the question ever comes to mind, “Does he really love his wife?” or “Is he really happy?” the answer is a zillion times yes. If my wife does something silly that I choose to mention here, know that I’m always laughing with and not at. If she and I disagree about something and I think out loud about it here, know that my respect for her is unshakable and she and I will come together somewhere in the middle as always. If I indicate that I am in danger of becoming the victim of domestic violence on a grand scale, or I seem suddenly and shockingly disrespectful, keep in mind that I am a joker and half (at least) of what I say is purposefully ridiculous. The context of everything I ever say about my wife is that I am desperately and deliriously in love with her, and I imagine pretty much everyone reading this nodding appreciatively and saying “Yes, that’s as it should be, now please shut up about it.” I respect that, so consider this my one-time getting it on the record and we will take it from there.
The remaining order of business, then, is to come up with a permanent blogonym for my wife, but I’m still struggling with that. It’s awfully difficult to settle on a name that means everything I would want it to mean. Given my geeky love of mythology and my unabashed adoration of the woman, I lean towards a goddess-inspired name (I’ve used them before for her in earlier posts) but it has to be both the right kind of goddess and a cool-sounding name and nothing too obvious. For a second I thought I could hit all of those points with Astarte, the Canaanite love/fertility goddess, who is associated with cat and horse symbology, especially once I started playing with nested words like “start” and “star” … aaaaaand then my brain said “ass-tart?” Which quite possibly makes the name even more rad because it’s funny and crude and vaguely suggestive and a bit potty-mouthed, and those are also all things I associate positively with the love of my life. But still, it might be a bit much. The search will go on.
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