Marriage: It's Weird

For reasons I won't get into here, my husband and I have been visiting a marriage counsellor. He is a very nice man. Wall-eyed and flamboyantly gay, he is sympathetic, empathetic, funny and sweet, even though my husband has occasionally wondered: "What does this man know about women?"

But here is the funniest thing about visiting the marriage counsellor -- he has brought us closer in ways he does not realize. Every time we're there, he says something so unintentionally and hilariously gay that my husband and I laugh about it our entire way out of his office and down the elevator, and often at home as well. A catchphrase for us has become: "That's noooooorrrrrmmmmmmaaaaallll,'' delivered in the same nasally tone as our marriage counsellor. Yes, we are making fun of him. But with affection. And it often defuses the simmering rage we might be feeling towards one another at the precise moment we trot out the imitation of him.

Couples have strange ways of bonding, and this is one of ours -- making fun of the marriage counsellor. Marriage is a mysterious thing, and I am learning more about it every day of my life. Yesterday my husband and I attended a co-ed baby shower for close friends. The husband was completely hammered by the time it came to open the gifts, giggling and cracking inappropriate jokes and acting as silly as a schoolgirl. His wife was the picture of acceptance and completely nonchalant about his increasingly drunken, and hysterically funny, demeanour. I wondered later if I would have been so tolerant, but realized that he was hoovering up the Grey Goose because his in-laws were causing him such stress, and the wife, knowing her mother and sister as she did, was utterly sanguine. Your husband gets drunk at your baby shower and you're okay with it? Now that's a good marriage.