Jackie Wells-Fauth
Recently, I was privileged to visit the dentist for my six-month checkup. I say privileged because due to their vigilance, my teeth are no longer the diseased, cavity ridden, hellhole they once were. I credit my husband for making me more conscious of good teeth care, but it is still up to me to drag myself to the dentist for those checkups.
The hygienist scraped and tapped and washed my teeth a little bit and then she said something that’s never been said to me before in a dentist office: “Your teeth are pretty clean; there’s not much I need to do.” I was still basking in the pleasure of this comment when she brought up the touchy subject of flossing.
“Your husband is very good at flossing,” she said. “He uses a waxed mint flavored string; is that what you do too?”
“Well, no. I don’t like the string,” I confessed. “I use those little pick things. They work much better for me. But I haven’t convinced my husband that he should try them, too.”
“Oh,” she laughed, “so you two are in a mixed marriage. It’s good that you’ve been able to stay together all of these years with such different opinions on floss.”
Now she was kidding, but it got me to thinking about living in a mixed marriage. And it isn’t just the great floss controversy which is mixed about our marriage. On my way home from the dentist, I began to add up the various things which make us a couple with mixed expectations.
Take our banking styles for instance; we differ greatly on that score. My husband, a certified public accountant, believes that your checkbook should be balanced, your transactions should be checked every day, and you should never spend more than you have in the account. My views are different: I usually have my checkbook balanced within $100, I check my transactions sometimes daily, sometimes not, and I have been known to get that little slip of paper called an overdraft. When we married my husband was unaware of the fact that we were in a mixed marriage having to do with finances, so with all the confidence of young love, he set up a joint checking account. After the first overdraft on an accountant’s bank account, he revised our account and divided it into two parts. He adopted a theory of tough love: he figured if I got tired enough of getting overdrafts, I would learn to handle my account. I appreciate his misplaced faith.
We have a mixed marriage when it comes to food as well. For Roy, it is important to follow a healthy diet. According to his beliefs, you eat a certain amount of vegetables, meat, bread, and you tailor that to whatever your health needs are. For me, my eating habits are a little different, considering that I believe that sugar is its own food group and should never be denied. I have, to some degree, brought Roy over to the dark side when it comes to sugar, but he would still prefer to eat a good healthy soup or salad, while I think chocolate cake is an appetizer.
Entertainment is another place where we are in a mixed marriage. Roy believes any sporting event, from professional football to amateur spitting, is worthy of his time and attention. For it to be entertaining for me, there must be a plot, interesting characters, hopefully a science fiction background, and it must contain no hint of reality. Therefore, he watches a lot of football, basketball, et cetera, while I sleep in a chair, and when Star Trek, Star Wars, or The Twilight Zone comes on, he finds something else to do immediately. Regarding music, our tastes are a little more similar. He enjoys the head-banging, guitar screaming music of the 70s, while I reach back a couple of more decades to seek the soothing tones of classic rock. Occasionally we overlap-we both love The Beatles-but there is very little other common ground. At least this portion of our mixed marriage allows us to be polite enough to listen to the tunes of the other.
The greatest point in our mixed marriage must be room temperature. During the summer, I am convinced that Roy was the son of a tribal chieftain located along the equator in his last life. He prefers the temperature in the summer to be warm and he doesn’t object to humidity either. In the winter, he digs down to his Eskimo roots and keeps the temperature as cool as possible. I’m not sure if this has to do with heredity or just to the fact that he doesn’t want to spend too much on temperature control, but it is definitely not compatible with me. I find myself in a quandary, because my ancestors hail from somewhere between the equator and the North Pole. That means in the summer, I like a comfortable temperature which doesn’t require me to wear a headband to catch all the sweat, and then in the winter, I’d rather not wear my ski jacket while sitting in the living room relaxing on a cold afternoon. Therefore, one of our mixed marriage problems is that we spend all of our time turning the thermometer up and down on the furnace and on the air conditioner until the dial starts to smoke and a message comes up from the basement telling us to get our hands off.
After all these years, the things which make our marriage mixed have also provided a great deal of entertainment; or maybe that’s just distraction. So even though we don’t agree on food or temperature or even dental floss, I think this mixed marriage will continue to stagger forward. I wish you a compatible day and whatever floss you use, just make sure you do it!
dropsinthewell 