I was seventeen when I first heard about the concept of The List.
Bob and me when I was more or less 17—young and idealistic.
Have you heard of it? The List of the top five or ten celebrities with whom, whether married or not, you would totally be allowed to sleep if you ever met, no questions asked? Your spouse could never question you, never judge, never begrudge, because s/he would have a list of equal proportions wherein the same applied. A Cheater List.
Lots of couples have them, apparently.
I will give you exactly one guess whether Poor Kyle and I have any such list in our marriage.
The answer is no. ABSOLUTELY: NO.
If I live to be 100 I will never have a list like that. I do not believe in them–or rather, I do believe in them: I believe in their total disrespect for the marriage institution and everything it entails. I believe in their sneaky lightheartedness, in the way that they might start out all fun and games, but of course that only lasts until someone loses an eye. Or a soul.
I do not have a list like that because I fully believe that if Poor Kyle ever approached me and said, “Hey Babe, just so you know, if Britney Spears or Eva Longoria or Portia de Rossi or Anne Hathaway or Gwenyth Paltrow ever run into me and want some, I’m totally hooking up with them,” my heart would break.
I do not think it’s all in good fun; I think it’s in very poor taste. Bad marital form.
We’ve already established that I am clingier and pettier and stressfuller and more territorial than the average wife, but even if I were a normal person I don’t think I could fathom how any healthy couple can straight up say, “So-and-so is just hot enough that I would give you up for her in a heartbeat” and come out better for it in the end.
I cannot. I will not. To me, it’s no better than pulling down the pants and ripping off the blouse. If Poor Kyle told me he had a list like that I would feel cheated on.
Poor Kyle and I, we have a lot of lists:
A list of things to fix up around this old house.
A list of places we’d like to travel together (Australia, England, Ireland, lots and lots of tropical islands).
A list of goals we’d like to accomplish together (get debt free, become self-employed multimillionaires, possibly billionaires, have a nice little family full of children better than yours [that’s mostly my own personal goal], build our dream house complete with pastures and horses and our private air strip for RC airplanes…you know…the usual).
A list of names we’d like to give our kids.
A list of restaurants we’re dying to try and movies we can’t wait to see.
Our lives are ordered around lists; they make us happy and they give us balance and I hope we make them till we’re eighty. We love lists.
But we don’t have a List like that.
And, God willing, we never will.
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