Never Say Always

Recently, my wife stared across the dinner table, looked into my eyes, and said: "You always bang your teeth against the fork when you're eating."

"I don't always do that," I thought to myself. "I don't always do anything -- except breathe."

Women love to make improper use of the words "always," "never," and "forever." The concept of continuous, never-ending perpetuity inherent in these words is scrapped, and the words are used instead to denote relatively small periods of time.

"You never want to go to movies," my wife will say.

"That's not true. We went to a movie a few weeks ago," I'll respond.

"That was forever ago. You always say you want to go to movies, but you never do," she'll reply.

But I wasn't about to bring this up. After almost five years of marital bliss, I know better than to follow up a comment on my real or imagined chronic fork biting with a critique on my wife's grasp of the English language. To do so would only lead, inevitably, to a discussion of how I never do the dishes.

"That's fascinating," I said of her observation. "Perhaps it's because you are such a good cook. I don't want to miss out on even a little bit."

This response seemed to satisfy her, and I was left to continue munching on cutlery in peace.

Then, over the next few days:

"You always push air through your front teeth."

"You always make a little gasp after drinking something -- like a little boy."

"You can never find your keys."

"You always take more dental floss than you need."

All this always/never/forever stuff had my spousal equivalent of Spidey Sense tingling. Danger, danger, danger. This was a trick. Clearly she was trying to walk me into some sort of trap in which I admitted that my memory is better than I claim.

Of course I have a poor memory -- I'm male. Instant replay was created for men because we can forget things that we just saw. But if she could trick me into denying my incessant personality traits, then I would not have a good excuse for having forgotten something that I had clearly forgotten.

I chose to answer her commentary on my habitual nature by simply staring at her in the way that a dog stares at a ceiling fan. And I began searching my brain for any sign of what I may have forgotten. A birthday? No. An appointment? No. Her name?

Oh dang! What if her name isn't really Rachel?! And I've been calling her that all these years? Then again, maybe I haven't -- how would I know? I can't remember Tuesday. Maybe her name is Tuesday?

After digging through her purse and checking her license (her eyes are brown?) I quickly forgot about the whole thing until the two of us were driving through the Twin Cities one evening and passed the sign noting the Minneapolis city line.

"Ah, wee Minneapolis," we both said in unison, in a Scottish accent.

Declaring where you are in any sort of an accent is probably not the sort of thing you do very often. But I do it all the time. And now, I have my wife doing it.

It's a part of marriage, picking up the other's habits. My wife speaks in affected accents, and when I see friends eating particularly rich food I declare, "there's your calories for the day" -- it's a fair trade, I suppose.

I think, however, that the recent always/never/forever commentary is a sign that she's a wee bit (Scottish accent, again) concerned about how similar we've become. A marriage is a single unit with two intricately connected parts, but it's important that those two parts maintain a certain unique quality for the marriage to function properly.

I mean, what's the point of being married to a replica of yourself? If I were married to me, I'd just be mad at me all the time for drinking my beer. If Rachel were married to Rachel she might be able to get a decent night's sleep, but where's the fun in that?

But Rachel shouldn't worry. I still hate Barry Manilow and am embarrassed by the fact that we have his CD box set. Rachel still looks better in a dress than me, and doesn't agree that the single funniest moment in the 20th century was that scene in "The Simpsons" when Sideshow Bob kept stepping on rakes.

We're still very different -- we always will be. And, in part, because of her distinctive traits, I'd never want to be anywhere else than with her. I'll love her forever.

Chris Cope is married, with no children. His column appears every other Tuesday.