MARRIED LIFE 2021: TAKE THE CLEAN-UP CHALLENGE

Married life at its best brings out more in the partners than any other relationship.

Sometimes it’s too much, and that’s the challenge.

How you react to the unexpected, then use it as a learning tool, tells you all about married life.

For example, what would you do if . . .

You start a group walk from home, a small group on a short walk, when the lady of the manor needs to return to the house.

Does the husband go back with her, or handover his keys to the front door and continue. Those are the choices.

First, offer to return with your partner. If they say, “No, I”m fine. I’ll see you when you get back,” go ahead and give her your keys if she didn’t bring hers.

After a short walk on a cold day, you return to a locked door and can’t get in. No problem, right? Just ring the door bell, or knock, and problem solved.

Be a patient partner and wait until they hear the doorbell, the knocking, the pounding, the yelling.

Shut down the thoughts of why no one is answering the door. They’re not dead in the bed, or kidnapped; they didn’t stop at the neighbors and go inside for hot chocolate during the covid pandemic.

The patient partner waits it out as long as feasible, then borrows the neighbor’s extension ladder, the one he uses to hang Christmas light three stories up.

The walking group packs the ladder around to the backside of the house and decides who is climbing to the second floor deck with the French doors.

One volunteer after another, two of us, stands back while the youngest and strongest climbs up and over the railing. And the deck doors weren’t locked.

This is when Married Life kicks in with authority

What do you do when your marriage partner ‘accidentally’ locks the front door, makes tea, then goes up to a room, shuts the door, and turns on the TV?

Be glad they’re safe, and not abducted by aliens. Be happy to solve the problem of getting locked out because the touch-pad garage door opener on the side of the house doesn’t work.

In this moment of relief, think of your patience, and where you went wrong: You gave up your keys. No one said give up your keys.

You could have returned to the house together, or separated the keys on the chain and given the house key and kept the car key with the garage door opener in the car.

Or fear the worst and climb that ladder. As they say in hardcore basketball, no blood – no foul.

Dry January On The Married Couch

If 2020 adds up to a bad year, and you tried to drink it off, plan for a dry January, you booze hound.

But, since New Years was Friday, you had Saturday and Sunday to wrap things up with a little excess, and start Dry January on Monday.

If, on Sunday night, you ordered out from a ramen place, good job. Finish that boilermaker and settle in for a bowl of tasty noodles and broth that smells better than anything so far.

But you’re slightly lit and your wife could have served Gravy Train and you’d eat it up.

You balance the amount of ramen in the biggest bowl, forgetting too leave any extra, and get comfortable on a cloth upholstered love seat. You scoot around for the perfect position to watch TV.

The next thing you know, you scooted one too many times and tipped the bowl of hot fluid and noodles. Now you’re covered in ramen. So is the couch cushion and matching pillow.

It’s a mess, but not the first one, not as bad as the plate of spaghetti that slid off your plate onto another couch. That’s the couch you warned the kids about messing up.

With skills learned earlier, you know how to fix it. And you go to google for a refresher.

But it’s more than a couch, it’s an heirloom that deserves more attention than vinegar and water and dish soap in a spray bottle.

Instead of $0-cost, or commercial stuff that might fade the fabric, or make it rough to the touch, call the people who sell fine couches and ask them what they’d recommend.

What they recommended made the bowl of ramen the most expensive in history.

Wife: Too bad you didn’t spill on something that didn’t stain.

Husband: I feel pretty bad about it. I’m not a spiller.

Wife: No, you’re not, but you’d been drinking.

Husband: In a lifetime of beer drinking I’ve never spilled like this.

Wife: It could have been worse.

Worse than what? Like getting locked out and risking life and limb to make sure no one had had a stroke? Worse than worrying about a loved one disappearing just like that?

Married life says don’t bring things up to smooth over a screw up. Husbands, solve the immediate problem instead of digging a new hole to fall into.

Keep the most current disaster separate from the last. Do that and you’ll be rolling strong in no time.

And eat at the table so your wife doesn’t need to remind you of events.