Things I have learned from marriage (by Xavier)

Cooking requires skill and thought

For the first week after we got back from our honeymoon I made most of the food aside from our daily ice cream. I thought things were going swimmingly well for the most part. We had tuna sandwiches, shredded chicken breasts with barbecue sauce, lettuce with vegetables on it, and protein shakes. This gave us our protein and calories so what more could a person want? Apparently a lot as I was ousted from the kitchen and have not been allowed back in since. On the bright side, our food now has flavors and we get things like almond crusted salmon and pizza with the crust made out of cauliflower. So I guess whatever I was doing wasn’t really cooking. It was more just making things hot enough to eat and then putting a condiment on them, but now I have learned to appreciate the art of cooking.

 

Cleaning can be rewarding

Although it is nice to have a little bit less responsibility in the kitchen, I seem to have picked up more duties everywhere else in the house. Unlike in the summer, things like making the bed and picking up clothes have become necessities. I try to be neat in general but I had what I believed to be logical reasons behind why I avoided some household tasks. I don’t like making the bed because it will return to exactly the same state it was previously as soon as I sleep in it again so why not just leave it like that all the time. My rationale for clothes lying around was actually an attempt to reduce laundry. When I wear a shirt for only a little while I figure that I might as well set it aside so that I can wear it again before washing it. However I cannot put it back in the closet because that’s where clean clothes go, so the only alternatives are the floor in the bedroom or the floor in the living room or the couch or my desk or occasionally the kitchen table. These make sense to me because it helps distinguish the semi-clean clothes from both the clean and the dirty. I have since been told that semi-clean does not exist as a state for clothes to be in, only clean or dirty. And I have also learned to appreciate the peacefulness of an uncluttered environment where I don’t have to dig in corners to find the pants that I wore for half a day last weekend.

 

All time can be made precious

I truly enjoy spending time awake and chatting or hanging out with Emily, but there are some really good times when just one of us is asleep. On the way back from our honeymoon while I was sleeping Emily made the decision to stop at a mini-golf course and woke me up just as we arrived. It was the perfect end to a fun week to be able to wake up to something like that. Other times I’ll wake up and dinner will be ready or the dishes will be done, or when I get really lucky there will be a bowl of ice cream or piece of candy inches from my nose. When Emily takes naps, most of the time it just encourages me to do the same, but in the few instances that I’m still awake I’ve found that it’s actually a lot of fun
to watch Emily wake up to some surprise like vanishing laundry piles or a kiss attack. So it’s not time that we have to just leave another alone, but I think we’ve both learned that it can be special time that can be redeemed to bless the other in their first moments returning to the land of the living.

 

It’s a lot of fun learning together as Emily and I continue in the opening chapters of our story. I like to think that I don’t have too much more to learn before I’ve got it all down, but I am certain that I will continue to be surprised with how little I actually know about life.