Given their commitment curve, the line could even draw a few millennial readers. They likely would see the column in email version sent by parents or parents-in-law who clip everything out of the paper containing the words husband or wife in hopes that their grandchildren’s mother and father will set a wedding date before the middle grandchild votes in a presidential election.
RELATED: Springfield resident finds comfort playing piano
I could go on, of course, but let’s just pick up where we left off.
As I learned in my 40 years of full time work – and as you likely have learned — there is no good time for an annual employee review. My sense is that this also is true for the annual spousal review (ASR), which is coming my way soon.
That there is no good time doesn’t mean there aren’t better and worse times for it, and I come to you husbands out there today so that you have plenty of time to do what I’ve done: Schedule your review for a month from today.
I do so with this warning.
If you are a drummer, a journalist or simply a man who, at any time in his life, has forgotten to give your spouse a gift on Valentine’s Day, don’t take this step.
My experience is that the husband who on Feb. 14 presents his wife with a bouquet of forget-mes instead of forget-me-nots can expect to sit down Feb. 15 to a review table that has several finely sharpened No. 2 pencils lined up like nuclear warheads resting on its surface.
He then can expect to wait all afternoon, because no one else is going to show up.
But those who have never been part of such a Valentine’s Day massacre can expect a Feb. 15 review to be conducted in the pleasant Valentine’s afterglow.
READ MORE: Springfield taxidermist retires from storied career
Another advantage of Feb. 15 is its distance from February’s other important holiday.
At 13 sunsets from Groundhog Day, it’s likely that Bill Murray movie will have disappeared from your spouse’s mind, lessening the danger that, when review day arrives, she’ll be thinking that she can’t stand you anymore than she can stand six more weeks of winter.
If that’s so, anyway, and your review is on the day Punxsutawney Phil crawls out of his hole and predicts a polar vortex, pick up some Jack London books, grab yourself some beef jerky and curl up with Sasquatch, because nothing else is going to save you from the icy cold to come.
Guys, the whole point of a Feb. 15 isn’t so much Valentine’s Day, it’s using the middle of winter to your advantage. Look, as dull and gray as I’m getting at 62, I still won’t be as dull and gray as February.
And, most critically, there’s the temperature.
In large part because of books whose titles include Venus and Mars, husbands have wrongly concluded that when their wives complain about them not being warm enough, it’s a reference to emotional warmth.
Not true – at least in our house.
Early in our marriage, I learned that my wife is a Thermometerian. When she told me she married me because I’m a warm person, she meant it.
Now sharing our 41st winter together, she still looks at me from the easy chair with her robe wrapped around her on winter nights – her hands pulled up in its sleeves — and says: “I hope you’re going to be putting out some heat tonight.”
It’s true that, in our early years, I was racked with worries about being replaced by a thermostat. From time to time, when she’s out at antiques malls, I also still worry she’ll come back with a good-looking soapstone and show me the door.
Then came those difficult years after the release of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in which I underwent counseling for fear that, like the polar bear, I’d be a marital casualty of global warming.
But none of my fears have materials, and I now find myself in a good place. I’m a 62-year-old man married to a hypothermic wife who still thinks he’s hot – with my annual review scheduled for a month from today.
About the Author