Kryptonite

Today is my 14th white wedding anniversary, and for some godforsaken reason my husband saw fit to infuriate me over the weekend thus putting a damper on our festivities.

Disclaimer: my husband rarely makes me angry. Oh I get annoyed and all that, but totally “WTF?” mad... hardly ever.

When he does make me really, really angry, I hate it because there is not a thing I can do about it. Ok, well yeah, I can give him the cold shoulder for a while... but that only lasts a day or so. I just cannot live without talking to him, and when I talk to him, I like him again.

Yesterday I spent some time thinking about how we fight. It is hard to have good battles with kids around, and since he came with one as a package deal, we have always fought incognito. A fight will brew under the radar for a while, and then bang a few minutes of yelling, and then ice for a day or so. As we get older, our fights are even less dramatic... Hell, I can’t even pretend to kick him out or threaten him with a break up. Me alone with five kids while he is out nursing his pain in a bar full of snacks and football? Um, no.

But because of that, nothing ever really gets resolved. When we fight, the underlying cause is never anything new. In fact, you can probably trace it back all of our nearly 17 years together. While on one hand I think that sucks, on the other it is clear we really have nothing major to fight about. Just the usual he is him and I am me and we-don’t-do-things-the-same-way kind of piddly stuff. Or maybe we are simply super tolerant people.

Either way, I can never stay mad at him for long. When I do get angry, I have all sorts of visions of this being THE time I ice him for weeks and he suffers terribly and grovels at my feet, and never ever makes me mad again. 24 hours later I am dying to tell him about something that happened, or I am desperately needing to talk something over with him. I want to keep up the madness but when it comes down to it, I have no staying power for anger. And truly, if he starts to grovel I have to stop him because it just isn’t sexy. A simple “I am sorry for being an (insert colorful expletive here)” accompanied by my favorite latte from that little coffee shop downtown is good enough for me.

Because I have come to realize that he is my kryptonite, and that’s why I married him.


(January 10, 1999, taken a couple minutes after we each said, “I do” for the first time.)