The Husband: love and mathematics

You may be wondering how a guy like me ended up with dreadlock girl. The answer is simple mathematics.

I mean that in the most literal sense possible. Bethany and I fell in love in a math class for dumb people. We were both in college, both terrible at math, and we both needed to pass calculus in order to graduate. Well, it turns out they have a special class for people like that. The professor talks really slow and loud and uses big hand gestures.

So Bethany and I ended up together in the front row of this class. We already knew each other from church, although we hadn't spoken much before. I think Bethany said "hi" to me on a Sunday morning once, my reaction being to run away giggling like a little school girl. But we suddenly found ourselves with three hours every week to get acquainted (because goodness knows we weren't paying any attention to the professor).

Before I go any further with this story, let me clarify an important detail. At this point in her life, Bethany was not dreadlock girl. She was punk girl. She had short, spikey hair that changed to a different neon color every few days. She had sharp pieces of metal stuck in both her eyebrows, her nose and her lip. She wore lots of camo. To say that I was attracted to all of this is a serious understatement. I was, shall we say, smitten.

As the days wore on, I felt a growing need to express my affection for Bethany in some tangible way. I wanted her to know that I like, you know, liked her. And so one morning as the professor shouted to us about irregular hypotenuses or something like that, I went for it. Bethany had an open bottle of Snapple next to her (cranberry flavor, I believe). At one point she put her pencil down and bent over to get something out of her bag. When she sat back up, the pencil was, get this, IN the Snapple bottle. Brilliant, right?

No. Not brilliant. Bethany did not think my flirtatious little joke was cute or charming. She thought it was juvenile and even a little bit alarming. She asked me to please not do anything like that again.

But, of course, I didn't learn. I just can't help it - my love has a tendency to express itself in awkward ways. On our first date, for example, I placed a large dead salmon on Bethany's front step, rang the doorbell and ran away (an absolutely true story). This got pretty much the same reaction as the "pencil in the Snapple" trick, only this time there was yelling involved.

After eight wonderful years of marriage, I have calmed down considerably and, in fact, my attempts to show affection to my wife are basically normal. Why, just the other day I brought her a lovely bouquet of flowers. But our anniversary is coming up, and writing this post has got me thinking that it might be time to spice things up a bit. I was thinking about possibly tricking her into believing that it's our tenth anniversary.

This wouldn't be terribly difficult to do. After all, dreadlock girl is terrible at math.

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