No one likes couples who gush. And yet, how ridiculous is it to spend years writing about and adulating movies and authors and bloggers and fictitious television characters and candy and great hamburger joints and pithy quotes… and almost never stop to deliver some well-deserved praise to the fella who makes you coffee every morning.
This guy’s first ever email to me was regarding something I’d written about my father….and what a hard and worthy endeavor it is to figure out what the hell it means to be a good man. And how hard they have tried to be so, in retrospect.
All of which might sound like a line fashioned for emotionally conflicted writer girls but in the months and years since, I’ve seen that he means those words to his core. The struggle to be a good, giving, selfless, compassionate, principled, productive, honest, creative, balanced, loving man is what defines Chris. He comes home from an hour long commute and unloads the dishwasher. He sets his alarm so he can make me coffee. He doesn’t put up with my sassy shit when I’m in a beastly mood, but he does make me laugh at myself until I surrender the battle. He stretches and grows and encourages and listens and dances at Target and sings in the car and sends me books he thinks I will love and makes up inappropriate bio-pic titles for Friday Night Lights characters with me and remembers Emaline’s flea treatments when I forget and loves his family.
He cleans up the house and puts up a surprise Christmas tree before I come home from a long trip away, because he knows that all these palm trees and this relentless foreign sunshine and thousands of miles between me and my nieces and nephews are going to hang on my shoulders as I walk off that plane. And he’s not perfect, but he cares every day about making my world as good as possible. And helping me be better for this world.
Basically, when you find a guy who will happily entertain your six year old nephew’s texts, you just stop looking.
Erica is amazing. Not only did she say all this wonderful stuff about me, but she left out the part where just last night I told her she was being an asshole. In all seriousness I said that! Who’s the asshole now? I am. When you find a girl who will laugh when you are being ridiculous, you just stop looking.
And her nephews are seriously amazing.
