Time sure flies when you’re having fun, as evidenced for me by the fact that it’s two years since I wrote the following in celebration of my wife’s and my 25th wedding anniversary, but seems like only yesterday. And now, even after a near-death surgical experience and 18 months or so into the Covid pandemic, I can think of no reason to change a word of what I wrote to mark that marital milestone:
25 years of wedluck
The standard concept of wedlock is a bit too cramped, confining or outright claustrophobic for my taste. Especially considering that it commits if not condemns the happy, sappy couple to a lifelong confinement in each others’ company, with no prospect of time off for good behaviour, until death
I should know. I served two terms imprisoned in wedlock before I met my present and I hope final wife, and both ended not in death, but very prematurely indeed, in dearth.
A dearth on my part, mostly, of such vital virtues of a fair if not fabulous husband like patience, forbearance and above all unfailing willingness to bear the heavy husburden of keeping myself husbound to my promised intention to forsake all others.
In short, for my conspicuous and at times despicable lack of such qualities, I was husbinned by both women with whom I successively but unsuccessfully attempted wedlock, and so deservedly so that in hindsight I consider that after the second failed attempt I should have been outright husbanned for the rest of what remained of my life
.Back then, despite treasuring the son born of my first metaphorically abortive attempt at husbandhood, I felt like a total hus-been, and thus vowed to never again be so husblind as to try kidding myself that I could so husbend myself as to behave husblandly enough to hack yet another attempt at the dreaded wedlock.
And of course it was just as I’d thus given up all hope of having a marital rather than a martial relationship with a woman ever again, my wedlock deadlock was broken by a piece of amazing wedluck
.Not that I was aware when I first met my now wife in Hard Rock Cafe, KL, that she’d be my next wedding belle, or even, for that matter, bedding belle, but I sure as hell liked her just swell.The only hitch being that she happened to be my junior by 29 years, and, as I gradually started to gather as our friendship progressed, a potential handful from hell.
Preposterously plain-spoken, feisty to a fault, and apparently wedded to such refreshingly un-little-womanly, not to mention unwifely attitudes as ‘what you see is what you get’, and ‘like it, lump it or get lost’.
In short, I came to realise that she was far more true to herself and far further far-out rebellious against custom and convention than I’d managed to become in more than double her span of years, and thus possibly an even worse candidate for wedlock than I’d twice proven myself to be
.For example, though her own parents were evidently most happily hitched, she perceived matrimony in as dim a light as I’d come to view it: as more like madrimony, with a tendency to soon decline into matrimoany, and eventually even further into martyrmony, for one or more likely both parties.
And also like me, she saw monogamy, with its inevitable, indeed inherent, monotony, as almost certainly destined, indeed doomed to descend from its initial high of honeymoonogamy down through the mutual dullnesses of moanogamy to the depressing depths of disenchantment, disinterest or outright disgust, or monughamy.
But after co-habiting as friends and lovers for a spell, we finally decided to legitimise ourselves as parents for our darling developing darling daughter-to-be, and take a chance not on wedlock, of course, but on what we felt was our amazing wedluck.
Naturally, in the time since she switched from waif to wife, or, if you prefer, sweetheart to spouse, the young woman I first knew has changed somewhat. For example, politically she’s switched from apathetic to apoplectic, and professionally from ad-chick to academic. But such changes have been merely skin- rather than sin-deep, thank goodness, and thus essentially she’s still as spicy as a spouse could be, and as saucy a source as ever of entertaining trouble and strife.
The very phrase ‘trouble and strife’, coincidentally, being both cockney and Australian rhyming slang for the word ‘wife’ .A fact that finally brings me to the point of this piece, which is to say that, at least for me, her other half in this exercise in what some may perceive as weirdlock, married life has been, and shows every sign of continuing to be, as long as we both shall live, and continue to not take but give, a wonderfully happy and often hilarious wedlark.
Dean Johns Ad Lib 