Ten Years with My Gingineer

My husband and I are celebrating our ten-year wedding anniversary this week. How is that possible? I mean, our eight-year-old son is good evidence of our longstanding relationship, but it seems like just yesterday that I met the man of my dreams.

Was it in a bar, you ask? At church? At work? Through mutual friends? In a grocery store?

No, we met on Match.com.

It’s a little shameful, a little desperate. No one wants to admit they met online. But at the time, I’d been losing at love, or more precisely, I’d been winning prizes I didn’t want to keep. So, I put myself on a dating site and kept an open mind.

There were some interesting fellas on there, but none were boyfriend material. And I was too busy for frequent dates – tending horses, scraping asbestos popcorn off my ceilings, teaching high school, and hanging out with my friends. When my future husband messaged me, I agreed to a date, sometime. He messaged again, I said sure, sometime. He messaged again with an ultimatum – if I meant it, set a date.

So I did.

He invited me over for dinner at his house, a suspicious first date to be sure, but as a woman who didn’t know her way around a frying pan, the prospect of a man cooking for me was very attractive. I thought he could be the one.

Yet when I walked into his house, the first thing that went through my mind was, “What a goober. This won’t go anywhere.”

What convinced me otherwise?

He grilled a mean steak. And he was persistent. And he was kind.

Soon after we met, I got sick with the flu. Imagine my surprise when my date dropped off a care-package with canned soup, bourbon, crackers, tea, and honey. That racked up at least a hundred points in his favor.

Also, he was funny. He’s still funny. Clever and crude, my hubby’s sense of humor matches my own. It is the humor that sealed the deal.

For example, after a few months, he brought me home to meet his family. We pulled up to his mother’s old farmhouse and claimed his sister’s vacant bedroom upstairs. We visited with his mother a bit, then went to bed.

In the morning, I awoke first. My new love was laid beside me, mouth open, drooling on his pillow. I rustled, and he nestled his face further into the pillow, snuffling and snorting.

And there was – how can I say this? – a smell coming from him. A horrible smell. He stunk.

I assumed it was the aftermath of a day without a shower. I’d not noticed his severe body odor before, but perhaps he’d been masking it. Confronted with reality, I reconsidered our relationship. The smell was overpowering. I sniffed the mattress, the sheets, my pillows, myself. I sniffed him. The culprit was clear.

When he woke, I kept my distance. Hesitantly, I mentioned the odor.

“I smell it, too,” he said. “What could it be?”

“I think it’s you,” I said.

“No. I don’t think so. Let me see.” To his credit, he sniffed his shirt and did the palm-to-the-mouth breath test. He checked everything in the room like a trained bloodhound. No luck. It had to be him.

Then, in a moment of inspiration, I smelled his pillow. Bingo.

Turns out, his mother’s cat had soaked the pillow in urine because it didn’t like his sister. The pillow reeked to high heavens, and my sweet man had been sleeping on it all night, burrowing his face in dried cat pee.

His response? Laughter, and an enthusiastic replay of the cat-pee pillow story to anyone who would listen.

This is what made me fall in love.

I tend to make decisions based on intuition, and I decided to marry that man, the sooner the better.

But he was a traveling man. His construction company was replacing the local bridge fender system, and they were already supposed to be finished. A series of delays meant he had six more months in town before he left for good.

I invited him to move in with me for the remainder of his stay. It would save money, and why postpone the inevitable? But he wasn’t so sure. He wanted to take it slow. He declined my offer.

Until a few days later, when he got a call from his rental agency. His lease had expired, and the owners wanted their house back. He had one week to find new accommodations.

A quick search showed no options. Sheepishly, my husband called me and asked if he could move in. I think it was a sign from above.

Soon after, we stopped at a wine and beer store together, to buy some craft stouts and porters. We have in common a love for Guinness-esque brews.

That day, the store was hosting a wine tasting, and they poured me a sample-sized cup of one of their fine reds.

I’d just tipped the contents into my mouth, when at my shoulder, my future-husband said, “Hey, I wanted to try some of that.”

So, I spit the wine back into the cup and offered it to him.

That’s how strong my love is.

Happy Anniversary, dear.

– Jessi Waugh