After being with my wife for 16 years, I’ve come to realize that, when it comes to the consideration put into, well, ANYTHING, I’ll never measure up. My wife considers situations and decisions from angles I never knew existed, which is, I think, why I’ll walk willingly (happily!) into most arguments completely unaware they’re about to happen. I’ll never win those arguments either.
My wife’s biggest pet peeve at the moment in regards to our home is the lack of shades on most of our windows. Window shades somehow sunk to the bottom of the priority list in the year-and-a-half we’ve lived in our new house, and my wife can stand it no longer. That said, a couple weeks ago, I found myself standing in our dining room measuring the windows with my wife overseeing as production manager behind me, recording my measurements and asking, “Did you measure both sides? Twice?”
When I was done, we moved to the kitchen for further discussion on the matter of window shades, which I wrongly assumed was already decided. Apparently there are serious consequences to living with the wrong ones. While we talked (me, of course, paying very close attention to every word), I took up the tape measure and began unspooling it to see how far it would extend before it bent. My wife’s patience for me is surprisingly distinguished and strong because she let me do this for quite some time, despite the tinny snap of the ruler collapsing on the weight of its own inches. Isn’t that the truth for most things?
I grew bored of that game, after a while, and decided to measure my height (72 inches) and was surprised by how long it looked it tape-measure form, just a single yellow line shooting across the room. At a break in the conversation, I asked my wife, “Doesn’t this look long to you?”
She quickly replied, “No.”
“For my height,” I explained.
“Oh, well, then, yes,” she said, with a clear look of “Who really cares but you?” on her face. But then, “Wait, do me?”
My wife is 5’4.5”, so I measured out 64.5” and held out the tape measure. Again it looked surprisingly long, unbelievably long for the woman standing before me, so I had her turn around and stand back to the tape measure and was surprised again to find I was right: the 64.5” was longer than she was tall. Here is where I should have lied and said, “Yep, right on the money.” Instead, I admitted, “Honey, you’re shorter than five-four-and-a-half.”
She spun around like something was on fire, saying, “That’s impossible. I’m sixty-four-and-a-half inches. I’ve always been that.”
“Well, you’re not now.”
We spent another ten minutes taking more official measurements, back against the wall with a ruler on her head, etc …, to ultimately determine that somewhere in my wife’s years, an inch fell off. A very important inch, I guess, because it sparked another discussion (one that far superseded window shades), a discussion that resulted in heavy online research for why a woman in her early thirties already shrunk an inch. She included me in this research. This time, I left the tape measure in a drawer. In fact, I never wanted to see it again, when my wife learned that humans can start shrinking as early as their early thirties, according to some medical websites. Charlatans I cursed, seeing my wife’s sinking shoulders.
After intense research, it was finally decided (thankfully) by my wife that she didn’t really lose an inch. Measuring the windows was the last on the day’s To-Do list, and she’d been up for about fifteen hours by that point. Her sudden decline in height must be accounted by the standard daily shrinking we humans experience as the day progresses. Haven’t heard the saying, “You’re taller in the morning?” Yes, we get littler by the hour. Again, ain’t that truth.
Of course, before my wife could fully decide this, it had to be tested. The next morning, I pulled out the tape measure, heart beating rapidly, and measured my wife’s height: 64.5”.
Then my wife, relieved, said, “Let’s do you.”
She measured me out, and … 71 inches.
“No,” I exclaimed. “That’s impossible. I’ve always been 72 inches.”
