Romance

Let it be known that I am not a conventionally romantic soul. It's something I occasionally lambaste myself for: really, Ken, you should buy Eva flowers/have dinner by candlelight/at least know the colour of the eyes you gaze into. Want to know how I proposed? I didn't. She announced 'we're getting a ring today' and that's what we did; she even picked it out.

I can sense the recoil from the female half of my audience. I'm either going to mollify some of you or more likely send you running away screaming with my defence:

1) The flowers. "Here's a symbol of my love for you. It needs dirt to grow; it grows even better if you shit on it; and at least in our house, it'll be dead in a week." Not exactly the message I want to send.

2) Dinner by candlelight.

Apparently I am entirely too pragmatic about food. After some twelve years, my darling wife will still ask me what I want for supper. She will sometimes do this at eight in the morning. I...DON'T CARE. I never care. Food, I want food. Is it food you're thinking of serving for supper? Yes? That'll be just fine.

That sounds blase, I'm sure. It shouldn't. Whatever Eva's going to make for dinner is going to be delicious: that goes without saying. The first meal she prepared for me was her take on her family's spaghetti recipe, and it was and remains the best spaghetti I've ever had. Her meatloaf is so good that I have to restrain myself from going all Cookie Monster and gobbling the whole thing, pan and all. The same goes for her lasagna and any number of other things she makes. I love her cooking and I make sure she knows it. But is that romantic?

Our tastes in food largely overlap, and they especially overlap in that neither of us enjoys 'frou-frou' food. Roasted squirrel testicles au jus, pan-seared unicorn with a sprig of Venus flytrap, foie gras served on a bed of crisp thousand dollar bills...just give us a burger, okay? And never mind the Kobe beef.  Such comfort food doesn't exactly lend itself to the candlelit ambiance. Passion-cushion, do you want fries with that? And afterwards, I'm gonna turn the light down lower and BURRRRRRRRP!


3) and most damning, the eyes.


Ken, what colour are Eva's eyes? 
Umm..uh...erm...brown? I think? 


Sigh. It gets worse. If I'm at work one day and she suddenly decides she's going to get her hair done, there's about a ninety-percent chance I won't notice the change when I get home. If we're out grocery shopping at, say, Costco and we have to split up, I have to consciously note what she's wearing. Repeatedly, so as it imprint it in my mind, because I just don't notice or care about clothing. If I don't say "tan shirt, black capris' about sixteen times, it's quite possible I might walk right past her.

I can't explain this. It makes me look bad, I know it does. Really bad. Completely inattentive and uncaring.

I plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Because I'm clearly insane: I honestly and sincerely don't care what my wife looks like. She can gain a hundred pounds or loose two hundred, go blonde or ginger or green with pink polka-dots and all I'm ever going to see when I look at her is the Eva that I love. It was her personality that first attracted me--always and forever the case with me, physical appearance is almost meaningless within standard humanoid parameters. It's her personality I respond to still. But I do find her physically beautiful.

This still, I think, throws her for a loop on occasion. She knows well enough by now not to bother with lingerie. I just don't respond to it, never have and likely never will. It's like a black hole in my mind: why bother? Aren't those coming off? But my attitude towards clothing and makeup and all that crap still perplexes her, sometimes. I don't even care enough about it to shrug it off. It's a total non-factor. I've trained myself to tell her she looks gorgeous every now and again, and I mean it when I say it, but the truth is she looks that way in anything or nothing, standing, sleeping, or posing on the toilet like Rodin's The Thinker  (except in our house it's The Stinker). Does that make me a cold fish? I think it makes me pretty freakin' romantic, myself...just not in a conventional way.

I try to make up for this perceived shortcoming by anticipating her needs and fulfilling them as best I can whenever I can. I don't always succeed at this, but I try. I also make a real effort to make the woman laugh, hard, at least twice a day. That's important. It wasn't in our wedding vows, but maybe it should have been.

I miss her when, as now, we're apart. But if we're together, odds are pretty good she's watching TV/playing a videogame and I'm surfing. It's good enough that we're in the same room, exchanging 'you're safe' vibes. We're eight feet away from each other, concentrating on different things entirely, and yet I've always got a piece of my mind on her, every waking moment. Is that romantic, or not?

Because I like words, and because I'm a fair wordsmith, I craft love poetry for her. It's probably the only conventionallly romantic thing I do, and I hope when I give her a poem she can read its subtext:


I'm sorry I don't give you flowers, or dinner in soft golden bowers
I'm sorry I can't see your eyes in my mind and pronounce the name of their hue;
I'm sorry I don't see the outermost layer, I'm sorry it seems like I don't give a care
But you know that I love you, love, all the way through
With all that I am and in all that I do.