The King of Love Letters
At my college in the 90’s, we weren’t allowed to email or use cell phones. After 7 o’clock each night, our in-room phones lost access to those in the dorms of the opposite gender. We did, however, have a dorm-to-dorm evening mail delivery service called Pan Hellenic. At a college where guys couldn’t touch girls and in a situation where I barely had money for laundry, I romanced my wife through this service. Someone once even dubbed me “the king of PH.”
Several years into our marriage, with a small hamper filled with such mail, my wife told me that the barrage of letters, cards, and creative notes didn’t mean much to her. “I knew you were trying to impress other people with it.”
An Expensive Lesson
A few months after our tenth anniversary, I was in Vancouver on a writing sabbatical. I arranged for a limo back home to stop by our house, retrieve my wife and several friends, take them to get manicures and a dinner at my wife’s favorite local restaurant, then deliver my wife to a luxury hotel, where her friends had surrounded a garden tub with lit candles and the soft serenade of an iTunes playlist.
I learned later that I had overpaid for an underwhelming experience. “You were just trying to impress [one of the girls who helped me coordinate the logistics of this caper].”
In My Own Way
Having seen a pattern, I’ve been working in the years since to discreetly romance my wife, either directly or through people she knows I’m not trying to impress. For our fifteenth anniversary, I even asked her for two of her girlfriends to be my coconspirators. My idea: to fill a pickup bed with pillows, have a picnic at a scenic overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway, watch a sunset and a movie in this mobile pillow pit, and then snuggle under the stars.
I couldn’t keep it a secret. I told the JoAnns employees cutting the fabric for my pillow cases. A checkout clerk at one of the discount stores where I bought some throw pillows told me this kind of romantic gesture was on her life goal list. My mom complimented my creativity. My friend who detailed his late-model F150 for the event warned, “Don’t tell any of our wives what you’re doing.”
I disobeyed. In so doing, I doomed the whole caper to failure.
History Repeats Itself
It just so happens that I scheduled this tryst on the date of an all-day sex trafficking conference here in Lynchburg. With my wife’s ministry work for those in that field, she was excited to attend. Even though it killed our sexual chemistry to talk about it, I asked her lots of questions about her day, trying to keep conversation alive.
That was a chore, because I had errantly scheduled this date on a Friday—the only day of the week when my wife wakes before the sun. On top of that, she had chosen a playlist on my phone of slow, pensive music. She knew that I knew that she was running on empty. “I’ll have more energy after we eat,” she offered.
At higher elevation, our picnic spot was much cooler than anticipated; and we were underdressed. Thankfully, I had brought two fleece blankets. We retreated to our individual blankets as we quickly and quietly ate our sandwiches.
We stayed in our separate cocoons for the start of a movie, whose trailer had oversold the plot. Less than halfway into the awkwardness, I closed the laptop and apologized. “Sorry. I should’ve bought two movies, just in case.”
I tried to start aspirational and sentimental conversations as we stared at the Milky Way and the passing lights of jetliners. I could hear Goldilocks yawning. I would learn later that she had been fighting a headache.
Only ninety-five minutes after parking the truck, we were winding our way back down out of the mountains toward home. Not long after pulling in the driveway, we were both asleep, having shared no hugs, no kisses—just a “Thanks for watching the stars with me tonight.”
Redeeming the Failure
I had basked in the romance points I collected from strangers, friends, and family. One older woman at church had even recommend that I teach a class on how to do what I do for my wife. Candidly, I had thought about how the pictures would look on Pinterest and Instagram—pictures that didn’t get taken. I had been going for epic instead of thoughtful.
I was giving my wife my ego instead of my heart.
Over the last three years, a series of things in which I’ve taken pride have become embarrassments. My professional hourly rates that sneak inappropriately into personal conversations have been met with thousands and thousands of dollars in surprise income tax. The real estate decision I told my wife to let me make because of my daily real estate advertising experience cost me $55,000. The new house I have been too eager to tell people I designed has unevenly sunk since we built it, requiring 30-foot pillars to be drilled under my house to stop it from literally cracking apart. That same house that gave me an office bigger than our old townhouse also came with more than $50,000 in surprise contractor expenditures ($31,000 of which I was presented after closing). Right after wrapping my car in head-turning graphics and after two years of telling people that I race that car on the track, I had to drop $13,000 to keep it on the road.
I am a walking example of the ancient Hebrew proverb that warns, “A haughty spirit goes before a fall.”
So, why do I tell you all of this? Why reveal this to people I may never meet?
Because telling the other side of the story is humbling. As a party-size concoction of arrogance and insecurity, I need humbling. Public revelation tempers future attempts at praise and attention. It lets people not be impressed, neutering my internal reward system. It should make me more aware in future conversations.
That’s what I hope, anyway.
If nothing else, my anniversary next year should be more impressive—to the only one for whom it should matter.
