Robert Kirby is off doing … something (legal, we hope). This is a reprint of an earlier column:
It’s time for another important interpersonal relationship test for men. Question: If you are married, eventually you will have the following:
1. A big fight.
2. An expensive divorce.
3. A small baby.
4. An anniversary.
The answer, of course, is D. Just because you’re married is no guarantee that you will have children or get divorced. Also, some married couples never fight.
I’ll wait for the uproarious laughter to subside.
Stay married long enough and eventually you will have an anniversary. Time length is exactly one year, then precisely every year thereafter until you die (sometimes because you forgot your anniversary).
Anniversaries are a way of counting the milestones in your relationship or a scientific way of measuring just how much of a slow learner you are.
Exactly which one you go by depends on how you fill in the blank in the following sentence:
“We’ve been married for 14 [insert word here] years.”
If you used a word like “wonderful,” then you are counting your blessings. If you used a word that would cause Aunt LaMona to leap up and run wailing from the room, then it’s the slow learner one.
Next month is my Silver Anniversary. That’s 25 years of being married to the same person. It’s not a particularly long time as some marriages go, but it’s long enough to make me something of an expert on forgetting my anniversary.
I forgot my 11th anniversary. I would have forgotten my third, but I remembered it a half-hour before midnight, mainly because that’s how long it took me to find out what I’d done wrong.
For some reason so huge that Congress will never be able to pass a law preventing it, women tend to place more emphasis on anniversaries than do men.
They expect men to remember. Flowers, jewelry, washing the dishes two days in a row — nothing you can do for your anniversary later will ever mean as much to a woman as the fact that you forgot.
Fortunately, there are ways to remember. Thinking about getting divorced is one, but I mean more constructive ways.
You could pay someone to remind you. As long as it’s not another guy, who probably can’t remember his own anniversary, you should be all right.
Try writing it down in a place you can’t avoid seeing. When my wife wants to make sure I see something, she writes it with a dry-erase marker on the TV screen.
The best way to remember your anniversary is to listen to your wife. You have to be quick. Like the Mayan sun calendar, scientists are still trying to figure out hints dropped by women.
One thing we know for sure is that anniversaries are like the Chinese calendar. There’s Year of the Tupperware, Year of the Tin, Year of the Rat. Stuff like that.
So, if your wife says something cryptic like, “This is our crystal year,” it’s probably time to start wearing a hole in your stomach with worry.
Most of the time it doesn’t matter what year it is. The day is what’s important. Women expect guys to remember the exact day they got married the same way we remember the annual deer hunt.
If the woman says, “The first part of October makes me feel romantic,” immediately start buying gifts. If you’re not sure of the exact date, give them to her over a period of about a week. You’re bound to come close.
Never ask, “What day did we get married?” All that means to a woman is that you forgot early.
The best way to remember your anniversary is to never forget. The best way to never forget is to get married and forget just once.