Your blue jeans, thee, and me

As I was pouring myself a lukewarm bath last night, I found myself reflecting on what makes a marriage work.

I had suspected that my vision of a hot bubbly bath, Vogue in one hand, wine in the other, was not destined to be when I walked into the steaming bathroom moments earlier to find my husband cheerfully sudsing up in the shower while the bathtub was running full throttle, a pair of limp blue jeans floating there in the tub.

The backstory: I will be brief. My dear spouse, who attacks all projects with awe-inspiring conviction, has recently turned his attentions to the proper way to care for small batch indigo dyed blue jeans. The procedure is thus: the jeans, soiled beyond respectability, are given a nice healthy soak in the bathtub, wrapped up in a big fluffy towel, and transported lovingly to the washer, where they are sent through the spin cycle to wrest some of that moisture from them. The next step is only for the truly hard core: the wet jeans are then donned, in order that they dry by that meager warmth emanating from the human body to just the proper fit, and the wearer sits at the kitchen table on the piano stool (so as not to dye the kitchen chairs blue with his damp blue behind) and reads the newspaper while the jeans slowly dry.

So it is really no surprise then that, despite having a hot water heater large enough to provide hot showers for god and his entire heavenly choir, there was really only enough left to sit down in a warmish little puddle by the time I got there. To set the record entirely straight, he sincerely offered to boil up a kettle of water on the stove to warm up my bath for me while I enjoyed my tepid puddle, which I, in a fit of pique, declined.

I suppose that this is the way of good marriages--there are moments when those endearing idiosyncracies and quirky obsessions of your spouse cross the line from charming to every so slightly irritating. And when a pair of indigo 501s gets a trip to the spa while you march off to bed, it seems at the moment to be veering off toward the latter. But come morning, the system resets, and he's once again his old charming self.