(Married) Life as We Know It

We're coming up on the month one anniversary in the Harris-Wood household (can't bear to change my name just yet), and in case you've been wondering, we're having QUITE a grand time over here. Let me just say this--in most ways, things are the same. We still laugh at the same jokes, we still debate over how much cheese to add to the quesadilla/pasta/scramble, and we still share endless conversations about our life-long list of to-dos. We also still hear our neighbors having sex, quite often.

But in other ways, EVERYTHING CHANGES. There is a man in my bed, and he tends to like more covers than me. There is a man who can't BELIEVE that I leave the heat lamp on in the bathroom while I do my makeup (it's very dark without it, for the record). There is a man who is DOING MY LAUNDRY. That's correct, folks, DW is a man of the cloth, and by that I mean he folds my clothes. All the time. He even does loads when I'm out running errands, or even when I'm doing less noble tasks, like, ahem, reading all of your blogs.

"So he does your laundry, is that why you married him?" I can hear the cynics now. Get outta here, I married him because he makes me SO excited to come home from the errands because he'll probably have a new iPhone application he has to show me RIGHT NOW. He makes sure I do my fair share of the chores. He listens to me detail all the strange, strange dreams I have about Christmas-present anxiety and my parents' divorce. This guy does a lot, and he loves me all the way through it.

Tonight I had a minor lapse in judgment (okay, major): I called DW a buffalo. I'm not going to hang all our dirty married laundry out to dry, but let's just say I'm learning SO much from this life-partner thing. Obviously, name-calling is one of John Gottman's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and I've caught myself Apocalypting on the twenty-somethingth day of marriage. But there's something about being married to this man that gives me remarkably HUGE amounts of joy and hope, and even though I've tripped up a bit with the buffalo comment, I am going to sleep tonight next to a man I love through and through, and I know the feeling is wonderfully mutual. Even when I'm being a buffalo.