The Keys to Unlocking the Male Brain. wait... I just had them... they're somewhere here in my purse...

I wanted to start by stating the obvious. Then, I'm going to illustrate with a few clichés.  Finally, I will tie it up with a seemingly personal anecdote veiled thinly in a tired metaphor.  Still reading?  Ok, see you next time.

In a marriage, it is really important that you never stop complimenting each other.  For example, a few nights ago as I was coming out of the shower, my husband said, encouragingly, "I know you said you were 'all crampy and bloated', but you don't look any different to me."

Swoon. An extemporaneous love poem.

From early on in our relationship, I knew the universe meant for my husband and me to be together.  It became clear to me when I first realized that there was no one else, with the ambulatory means to escape, who would endure such maddening idiosyncrasies. And that is what pure love is all about--stress-testing each other just to the verge of murder-suicide. It builds character.  As a collateral benefit, marriage is also about having a ready partner when your neighbors call you over for weeknight whiskey and canasta, assuming that will catch on again at some point.

To illustrate what I mean about the idiosyncrasies, my husband, when describing a delicious meal, will not use sensory adjectives like you would expect. Like "juicy", "salty", "rubbery", "rich", etc. I would even give him credit if he tried to be a little tony in his description.  "The hot dog mac and cheese was sassy tonight!"  You know, the things a normal human who can successfully function in society with the other humans might say. Instead, he prefers to rate everything in terms of its cost-to-benefit ratio… free steak, cheap pizza, exorbitant cheese fries, bargain sushi, looted wedding cake.  Clearly, he is insane.

However, one of the things I have come to appreciate about my husband is a certain lack of interpersonal conscientiousness or, rather, a lack of certain interpersonal conscientiousness. I know at this point it sounds like I'm just being a passive-aggressive, overly critical shrew. But, hear me out.  I mean, I am usually those things, just not right now.  I actually think most men are like this, and that can be a great thing.

When we were dating, I noticed a towel hanging in his bathroom. My keen eye discerned that this towel bore the indelible mark, by way of white monogram stitching, of the Arabic letters "H-A-N-N-A-H" which I instantly recognized, through advanced cognitive abilities, as a person's NAME, particularly one that is most common in the FEMALE tradition.

Of course, as it has been upheld in all American jurisdictions of which I am currently aware, the law of romance dictates that you hold on to the object of your unrequited love as a symbol of the assurance of your lifelong suffering. Therefore, applying this common law to my current situation, I understood that, in acquiring this "Hannah"-emblazoned textile, via whatever means it was acquired, it was done so with the intent that, when he gazed upon it, he would hearken to the sweet memory of the ethereal, young Hannah, which would then stir the restless hope that perhaps one day this Hannah would return to reclaim her property and would fall irreversibly in love and pledge her reciprocating devotion to him, and I, having been callously forgotten, would thenceforth learn only of their worldly jaunts, amassing of extravagant wealth, prolific child-bearing, and accumulation of academy awards through desperately frequent Google searches.

But now, having known this man for a decade, deeply--his faults and virtues, his strengths and weaknesses, his ambitions and his life's priorities and his personal worldview of justice--I now understand that the only thought this item conjures to him is, "Sweet, free towel." 

And that, believe it or not, is one of the great things about men.