Marriage Illustrated with Crappy Pictures (10 page)

At least potentially. He’s only six. We’re grooming him for this position. He’ll let us know how much we can afford to pay him to be our accountant later on.

BALANCING THE BUDGET

Everyone knows that money stress is the source of many divorces. So we decided to take a class in financial planning to try to get better at this stuff to, you know, avoid divorce. One of the rules of the class is that we must sit down together and make a monthly budget at the start of each month. Everyone warned us that this is something known to cause huge fights among couples.

We have to write down how much income is coming in that month and then deduct every single expense for things like gas and electricity and the phone. The regularly occurring bills. And anything left over has to be accounted for too. Every dollar has to have a name on it, even if it is just going toward debt or savings or birthday gifts.

Apparently, most people do this regularly or at least have done it at some point. This was our first time. It hurt at first but we got the hang of it. It only took us three hours.

What was everyone whining about? We totally rocked this. We didn’t even fight.

We explored the idea of not eating for a month, but ultimately decided to start all over.

And then the huge fight began, trying to come up with a way to lower our monthly grocery budget.

It was classic and ridiculous. But eventually, we moved beyond blaming and anger and started to make fun of ourselves.

Laughing got us through and we managed to figure it out. Still thinking about the grocery store and toilet paper ideas though.

FARTING IN FRONT OF EACH OTHER

Guess what? Everybody farts.

Some people wouldn’t dream of farting in front of their spouse. That’s cool. Whatever works. But for us, we would have been divorced by now if we weren’t allowed to fart in front of each other.

I can’t imagine! How uncomfortable would it be to not feel fart-safe in my own home?! I’d have to get up while watching a movie to go fart in another location. Over a lifetime, that is a whole lot of farting in secret. I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

Now this is love.

A LINE HAS BEEN DRAWN

We fart in front of each other. We also pee in front of each other. But even for us, we have to draw the line somewhere. The line is at poop. Sure, we can openly admit that we poop, like that time at a deli recently:

But doing it in front of each other is strictly off-limits. Who would want to do that anyway? Don’t answer that. And definitely don’t look it up online.

I’ve also added one additional pooping etiquette rule:

He cannot talk to me through the door. He always tries to, seeing as he has me cornered and all, but I won’t engage. Those two minutes where I lock the door and ignore the kids banging on it are sometimes the only two minutes alone I get all day. Everybody, go away!

SHOWERING (OR NOT)

I love the smell of Crappy Husband’s sweat, but I don’t know anyone who likes the smell of overripe feet.

Really, it was more of a request than a question.

EXERCISE AND LOSING WEIGHT

You know what it takes for me to lose weight?

Exhausting exercise every day and a diet of kale and water.*

After two weeks:

*I don’t really eat only kale and water. That would be stupid and unhealthy. Though probably fairly effective.

This is what it takes for Crappy Husband to lose weight:

He thinks about losing weight so he’ll throw in a push-up or two between gorging himself on high-calorie, delicious foods.

After two weeks:

DIRTY CLOTHES

After I wear an article of clothing, it goes in the laundry basket to be washed.

After Crappy Husband wears an article of clothing, it doesn’t go into the laundry basket. It goes anywhere but the laundry basket.

When Crappy Husband comes home, he randomly takes off his clothes while walking through the house. This means his pants will wind up in the dining room, his socks on the kitchen counter and his shirt on the couch.

Why? Why?

His measure for whether clothing is dirty is totally different than mine too. To me, if something has been worn it is dirty. But to him: