Many people have asked what makes my relationship with Paul so amazing and I tell them it's because we never fight.
That's not entirely true, we rarely fight. I can count on one hand the number of arguments we have had, if that hand was deformed and it had forty six fingers. But, nobody is counting here. Our arguments are few and far between. Actually, we fought today. Although I can't really say that we fought today, because today we simply were not speaking to each other. We fought last night when I told him he should be wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a crab on it to match his attitude instead of that stupid lobster T-shirt. It was a cheap shot, I'll admit, but sometimes a little humor can diffuse a tense situation.
And sometimes, it does not.
I'm not saying that we are the perfect couple, but we are darn near close! Sometimes I forget all of the painstaking, meticulous and laboriously detailed plans that Paul recounts ad nauseum and occasionally I can be callous when, oh let's say, I laugh at his coming out song which happens to be Reflection by Christina Aguilera. Remember Disney's Mulan?
And sometimes Paul can be less than enthusiastic about my writing projects and offer helpful criticisms such as "I didn't get it," or "Does this one pay anything?" But all in all we are so compatible it is almost scary.
For example, he loves cars and I love to ride in them. He loves to cook and I like to eat. He loves to clean and I'm a mess. I could go on and on, but you get the drift. I'm the yang to his yin, which I suppose means we're more opposite than alike, but if you think about it the whole yin/yang thing really ties us back nicely to Mulan, doesn't it?
Maybe our success as a couple has more to do with our eerily identical sense of humor. Just the other day, I pulled a pair of Paul's shorts out of the dryer, put them on and held the waist band out
like I had just lost one hundred pounds and let them drop to the floor. Then I encouraged him to try and squeeze into a pair of my jeans. The waist wouldn't make it past one of his thighs. We laughed and laughed! You know, now that I think about it I may have been laughing more than Paul, but he always tells me he's really laughing on the inside when he reads one of my hilarious blog posts.
We are extremely secure. That's what it is when you get right down to it. I'll go out with my friends for a "girl's night out" as Paul calls it and he's not the least bit jealous. He knows that I need some time with my best friends Sam and Cary and the occasional validation from some drunken guy at a bar who totally unprovoked, mind you, will cop a feel. I'll come home and tell him how terribly attractive everyone thought I was, how they wished I was single and he doesn't bat an eye! That is security right there and we both have it in spades.
In the end we're not afraid to admit when one of us is wrong. I know that when Paul picks me up from work tonight and drives me home he'll be thinking about how lucky he is to have found me. I'll go to the gym while he cooks dinner, and he'll add a little bit of extra love to that meal as the final ingredient. And when I step out of the shower and sit down to a warm home cooked meal?
He'll apologize.
A slightly modified version of this post originally appeared in William Dameron's personal blog The Authentic Life