Shoulder Season. Can't write about skiing yet, so I'll write about love.

No longer in the singles line.
Although it's a quad chair and we do live in Utah?

No couple's tale of courtship is ho-hum or dull. The story of true love should always be cherished, even in its ridiculousness. But that doesn't mean we always want to hear those stories. When people ask, "How did you meet," they are being nice, they don't want chapter and verse. Much in the same way you ask, "How is your daughter enjoying learning the clarinet?" You are being nice, but you aren't going out of your way to attend a 6^th grade musical recital. After a few beers with some friends last weekend, my wife and I became the parents convinced that everyone should enjoy little Molly's off-key rendition of Three Blind Mice. The simple conversation piece of our upcoming anniversary turned into droning on to our friends about our first few dates. We may be tone-deaf to the goose-like squawks coming out of our second-hand clarinets. Maybe it was the beer, but our friends appeared entertained. Much like dating itself, stories of romance are improved by alcohol.

But you don't have to go reaching for the bottle of George Dickel just yet. This blog won't detail our misty water colored memories, instead, I just wanted to share a thought I had about our relationship as we celebrate our 4-year anniversary today. Our union started with an apathetic cupid with a purple Y on his ass chucking a blunt lawn dart at each of us. Because the people we were really interested in sleeping with were busy one night, Lexi and I scheduled our first date as a post-work meeting at Fiddler's Elbow. Talk about low expectations. After that first date, Lexi and I had one major thing in common; a lack of interest in each other. Both of us walked away from that date never expecting to see each other again. As we tried to find better fish on Yahoo Personals, eHarmony, Match.com, Jailbabes.com, each of us endured dating disappointments. So with the enthusiasm of a kid trying to memorize the Apostles Creed, we trudged back to one another, hoping for some definitive reason to finally cross each other off our list. We never found that reason. She got past my unemployed hockey player hair and I learned excellent bladder control from her ability to talk without a pause long enough to excuse myself to use the bathroom. We never found the nail for our relationship coffin, and oddly, the lack of a romantic spark, the missing moment where the Carpenters started playing "Close to You" had a positive effect on our blossoming relationship-- we were ourselves. When dating, we all try to be an expectation of ourselves, not necessarily just be ourselves. With Lexi, my indifference to putting on airs was so great that I invited her on a date grocery shopping, I didn't bother hiding soft-core porn when she came over and I am pretty sure I used the sentence, "I'm not doing anything fun, but you can come over if you want," during a phone call that I was just trying to end. Testing the limits of what we could tolerate was taken care of long before we said, "I do" on this day 4 years ago. "Be yourself" is a cliché, but after knowing my wife for over 8 years, the value in our relationship isn't just that I can be myself, it's that she also has helped me know who I am.