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Strengthen your marriage
with the help of a legless frog
Let me begin by saying my marriage is NOT in trouble. My wife simply felt, after 14 years, it would be good for us to attend a weekend marriage workshop where we could further strengthen our relationship as man and wife. I told her I agreed, and suggested we take it a step further by skipping the workshop altogether and playing a game of naked Twister instead.
Even for a seasoned humor columnist, a joke sometimes falls flat. If this one had fallen any flatter, it would've been recorded by seismologists in China. Realizing this, I immediately apologized, and promised to avoid any additional comments which could negatively affect our workshop experience, i.e., saying something that would cause her to beat me to death with a Unity Candle.
To prepare for our weekend, my wife decided to look back through old love letters I had written. She said it would help remind her of the many reasons she married me. As expected, it didn't take long for her to remember those reasons and, in the afterglow, get mad at me for watching the World Series. She didn't understand how a man who had once written that his need for her "was like that of a bee which needs wings to fly. For without wings, he is simply a caterpillar with a stinger-sad and buzzless" was now only capable of expressing vulnerability by emotionally vesting himself in the Red Sox. I told her it wasn't true, but that hearing my "wingless bee" analogy only confirmed my suspicion that she had married me out of pity.
After arriving for our weekend, we checked into the hotel where, according to the brochure, we'd be spending the next 48 hours in "love lockdown."
No Television. No phones. No real communication with the outside world. In the event of a terrorist attack, we would be taken to a specially prepared underground bunker lit by candles and sprinkled with heart-shaped confetti. The workshop would then continue until (1) our time was up, or (2) we were taken out by a Bunker Buster missile. It's no surprise an impromptu poll at dinner revealed that all 14 men, given a choice, would choose a missile attack.
Preferably following dessert.
Why?
Because every man knows there's a chance, out of sheer desperation to express his feelings, he may compare his love to a wingless insect - And that some day his wife could use those words against him during a "love lockdown."
This fear was apparent on the face of every man in the room when, for our first session, couples were asked to write a love letter. Though "Bruce" was able to buy the rest of us some time by asking if we should write the letter to our wives, once the ambulance left and the police had concluded their interviews, there was still a love letter to write. It was in those final moments, with the amber lights of the ambulance washing over my wife's soft features, that I reached an important conclusion: Unless I wanted to meet a similar fate as "Bruce," I needed to reach deep inside myself and tell my wife how much I loved her.
We only had 10 minutes to complete this letter and, in spite of this pressure, I was able to draft what I felt was a heart-felt expression of my devotion. We exchanged letters, and I realized it's not how well you write about love that matters; what matters is that it comes from the heart. Upon reading my words, my wife teared up and I could tell my words had truly moved her:
Dear Sweetheart,
Without your love, I would be like a legless frog...
110204
Ned
Hickson is a member of the National Society of
Newspaper Columnists, and an award-winning humor
columnist for the Siuslaw News in Florence, Oregon.
His weekly column appears throughout the Northwest,
as well as in Michigan, Connecticut, Georgia,
Tennessee and Alabama. He lives on the coast with
his wife, two children, and entirely too many
seagulls.
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