Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Cut Mr. Jane Some Slack

Mr. Jane came home from work the other day with a hangdog look and started asking me questions. He wanted to know what year we married, how old we were at the time and when our anniversary is. I've seen this before and know what it means. Someone at work has been quizzing him. Just to set the record straight let me formally and publicly announce that Mr. Jane is not responsible for knowing these things. It is not his job. In any marriage, or long term partnership of any kind, things tend to be divided up. Some remain shared but if you have two or more brains to work with it doesn't always make sense for them to be cluttered up with the same data, memory or programming capabilities. In our house I serve as the combined long term memory and view this as a form of job security. If Mr. Jane wants to know the name of that kid in grade school that used to bite the heads off grasshoppers I can tell him. If my birthday or our anniversary is coming up I tell him. He remembers to file the tax forms on time. This strikes me as eminently fair. On cold snowy winter mornings when it takes the Jaws of Life to pry the covers off of me, Mr. Jane will have gotten up early and gone out to shovel the sidewalk and the driveway and will have also cleaned off the car windshields. He dispatches insects that get into the house and monitors the mousetrap under the kitchen sink. You can't beat that. I'll keep track of our anniversary any day in exchange for snow and rodent removal. My point here is that I think people should cut Mr. Jane some slack. You can have your rose-wielding, anniversary-knowing, sweet-talking pretty boys. I'll take the quiet guy who knows his way around a miter saw. As for the details we married in our early twenties and this year we will both have been married for exactly half of our lives.

2 comments:

ACM said...

amen to this! my spouse and I have a pact of mutually offsetting stupidity -- each steps in for those parts of the world that the other tends to become suddenly incompetent in the face of. as for that, one of us finds it taxing to cook while the other finds it a relaxing diversion; one of us is glad to water flowers every day while the other is happy to see them out there; there's usually somebody who doesn't mind emptying the dishwasher, as long as it doesn't have to happen immediately; etc. why be more rigid than that? conservation of team resources!!

AboveAvgJane said...

I think if someone studied well-adjusted couples this would be one of the common accomodations found. Otherwise you just get in each other's way. ;)