(Editor’s Note: This is a piece I wrote about four years ago and I’m pleased to announce that my beloved and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth in a couple of weeks.)
My beloved and I recently celebrated our twenty-first wedding anniversary. After putting up with me for more than two decades I figured she deserved something special. I checked with the Nobel people to see if they had a category for endurance in a marriage. No luck.
So an award was out. I checked the web to find the traditional gifts for people whose marriage is of legal drinking age. Any guesses? Elegant dinnerware? Fine fabrics? Sweet foods? Nope. Nickel, brass and iolite.
Which raises an important question; what the heck is iolite?
Turns out it’s a shiny purple rock that’s part iron, part aluminum and all cheap. It is officially described as resembling quartz with “a greasy or vitreous luster”. Makes you want to run right out and get a big ol’ iolite necklace for your sweetheart, right?
The metals aren’t much better. Brass and nickel. Why not bronze? At least you can take bronze in the Olympics. Whoever heard of a brass medal? What kind of brass gifts are there anyways? Brass candlesticks? Tacks? Knuckles?
And nickel? Giving her a nickel-plated revolver seemed like a very bad idea. What was left? A big back of nickels? Here honey, Vegas is only eight hours away. Go play the nickel slots and have a great time!
So, with no help from the traditionalists, I was on my own. Like most guys, I’m a little uneasy at the prospect of gift shopping. It’s not that we don’t like browsing – anyone who has ever followed a guy around a hardware store knows we can stroll the retail floor with the best of ‘em.
We’re nervous because we fear that we’ll never get it right. No matter what we buy, it will be the wrong size, the wrong color, or even the wrong gift altogether. And the woman we love will be disappointed. People claim that it’s the thought that counts.
I believed that right up to the year that I bought my wife a full ironing ensemble – board, iron, cover, and starch – for Christmas. Turns out the thought only counts if you’ve been thinking about jewelry or perfume or clothes … but not appliances.
The most dangerous gift to buy for a woman is clothing. Clothing presents a variety of choices that bewilder the average man. Assuming we can remember our wife’s “colors” and pick the right style, we still have to get the right size. Fellas, here’s the advice of a man who is entering his third decade of marriage.
If you’re buying clothes for a woman, buy ‘em small.
Buy ‘em too large, you’ll have to face the unanswerable question: “Just how big do you think I am?” This is the kind of question trial attorneys love–no matter what answer you give, you’ll incriminate yourself.
Of course, you might try to avoid the issue altogether and give the lady a gift certificate. Bad idea. (In fact, as bad ideas go, this is right up there with Enron’s accounting practices.) The only way to make up for this gaff is with diamonds or negotiable securities … or both.
Usually it’s easier (and safer) to buy jewelry in the first place. It’s never the wrong size or color, and it’s always “just what she wanted.”
So, you’d think that I was smart enough to buy jewelry and have done with it. Right?
Nope.
I went shopping. Only I did it in a completely guy way, by clicking through on-line retail websites until something caught my eye. I bought her a servant.
It’s not like I was on the domestics-R-us website and found ad copy reading;
Just In Time for Your Anniversary, Christmas, Wife’s Birthday or other gift-giving occasion: It’s the Jeeves 2000.
Complete our on-line credit evaluation loan application and we’ll send you your very own live human butler carefully packed in a shock-resistant travel case with enough food and water to survive two full weeks in transit.
Be the first in your neighborhood to have your very own genuine British servant!
No, some kind of web-induced-guy-amnesia kicked in and I decided it would be a good idea to buy my wife another appliance. I ordered a device called a Roomba.
It’s an automated vacuum cleaner that resembles a gray-plastic frisbee on steroids. When you turn it loose, it scoots around the house randomly vacuuming crumbs off of the floor. Sort of the inverse of our teenage sons who wander the house randomly dropping crumbs onto the floor.
Press the ‘Clean’ button and the Roomba scurries off and automatically gets itself stuck under the couch where it chirps pathetically until someone comes to rescue it. Once it’s set free you press the button again and it heads right back under the coach.
Actually, the Roomba works pretty well and for the first time in at least fifteen years we’re keeping pace with the food fallout from the kids. Our living room no longer resembles the plant floor at a cracker factory.
Still, even if the thought did count and my wife did like the Roomba, it didn’t seem like enough. So I thought about it and gave her what she really wanted … what we’d agreed upon twenty-one years ago. I gave her me.
We both work, we have two teenage sons, and we volunteer for a variety of religious and community responsibilities. We don’t always have the time we’d like together. My wife didn’t want presents. All she wanted – wonderfully and inexplicably – was my presence for a few hours. So we took two days off – no e-mail, no work, the cell phone for emergencies only – and went away. We hiked in the mountains, lingered over a two-hour dinner, spent the night in a nice hotel, and did a little shopping. What we did mattered less than the fact that we did it together.
After twenty-one years that seemed like the least I could do.
