13 years with a ring on my finger

I recently celebrated my 13th wedding anniversary ...on Oct. 19th to be exact! Yes, you can applaud and "thank you" very much.

I love being married because it really takes the pressure off a guy like me, because I know as hard as it is for some of you to believe, I'm not exactly eye candy to the ladies although I did get a lot of "Snickers" when I was out there back in my single days on prowl (insert "bow, chicka, wow, wow" song here). There's a reason someone like me, with a dream to be writer, gets a job working in newspapers and never evolves into the more visual of mediums. I for one dread the day newspapers finally complete their dodo bird-like path and vanish from our society because then I'm not sure what I'll do (although the anonymity of a blog is kind of cool...if only I could find a way to get paid for it.)

In my late teens I remember thinking I wanted to get married and have kids by my early 20s, but I soon realized I was anything but ready to become the burden I would have been on another person had I done the wrong thing at that time and asked them to marry me. Perhaps I should also confess when I actually did get married at age 30, I was probably still a bit too rough around the ol' edges yet from a marriage material perspective, but thankfully my wife said yes and showed up on our wedding date.

While we've had our many peaks and often-out-of-necessity valleys, our marriage remains strong and I like that feeling of every day coming home from work having someone with whom to share my thoughts and feelings and vice versa. Most of those closest to us know that my wife wears the pants in the family, but it doesn't bother me one bit, because with my stubby legs I look better in shorts anyway.

I still have single friends who say things like, "I couldn't be married, because I like the freedom to do what I want, when I want, where I want and whom I want." Me, I could never succeed under that philosophy, not that I'd call where I've gotten in life at this point a success story quite yet. But I digress.

When I was single I sucked so bad at dating that many of my family and friends and family of my friends and friends of my family dropped hints at one time or another of their suspicions that I might be of the gay persuasion, well, except the very small faction of openly gay people I knew at that time. They said I wasn't even a blip on the gaydar.

Now of course, that offended me terribly because it was then I realized I wasn't screwed either way.

Thank goodness those days are long gone.

I must admit it wasn't all bad, and sometimes I wish I could turn the clock back to those single days if not for just one day, because of all the things I've picked up in 13 years of marriage. The women would see how sensitive I've now become to their needs, like being able to go into a store and buy feminine products without hesitation or filling the shopping cart with a pile of things neither of us needed just to disguise the pending Playtex-product purchase.

Unfortunately, the truth was I was terrible at dating and how I snagged my wife, I really don't remember...no seriously, I don't, because there was a lot of alcohol involved and for awhile there was something about a restraining order. But, a couple thousand bucks in lawyers' fees and she started seeing the light and eventually became desensitized to it.