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.