The Joke That Sparked Something: A Married Romance

Twenty years of marriage had given them many things: two kids, a mortgage, a shared hatred of assembling furniture. What it had not dulled, to his ongoing gratitude, was his wife's wicked sense of humour, and lately her favourite game was watching him try very hard not to react to a certain running joke.

❦

The joke

It had started with a television show they both pretended not to watch and both watched to the very end, every time. Somewhere in the second season, his wife had glanced over at him during a particularly adventurous scene and said, in her most innocent voice, "You would like that, would you not. A third person. Perhaps someone we know."

He had admitted, because honesty had always been their arrangement, that the fantasy appealed to him. She had laughed, patted his knee, and said it was not for her, and that should have been the end of it.

It was not the end of it. It became a bit. "Which of my friends would you pick?" she would ask at dinner parties, in the car, once memorably at a school concert. "Because Lisa says she would borrow you." She always delivered these lines with total serenity and then watched him become extremely interested in his steering wheel, his plate, or the ceiling. Their friends thought it was hilarious. He was beginning to wonder if hilarity was all it was.

❦

Asking properly

So one quiet Sunday, with the kids at his sister's and the house improbably silent, he did the radical thing. He asked.

"The joke," he said. "I need to know. Is it a joke I am supposed to laugh at, or a door I am supposed to notice?"

His wife looked at him over her reading glasses with an expression he had loved for two decades: delighted, and caught. "It is a joke," she said. "Mostly. The fantasy is fun to visit, darling. I like visiting it. I like watching you visit it. I do not actually want to move there, and I am fairly certain you would last eleven minutes before getting jealous and making it weird."

"Eight minutes," he said, and she laughed until she cried.

"But," she added, in the softer voice she used for true things, "I have noticed something. We talk about it, and suddenly we are twenty-five again for a weekend. So I do not intend to retire the joke. I intend to aim it better."

She still makes the joke, by the way. Last week she asked which of her friends he would pick, and he said, without missing a beat, "The one I picked in 2004," and she went quiet in the good way, and reached for the deck.

❦

Aiming it better

What "better" turned out to mean was a game: a couples' dare deck that appeared on the kitchen table that evening like she had planned the whole conversation, which, he realized, she almost certainly had. Some couples keep the spark alive with grand gestures. His wife preferred cards, candles, and a twenty year head start on knowing exactly where all his buttons were installed.

The rest of that Sunday is a closed door and none of your business, as she would say herself. What can be shared is the moral, and it took him forty-one years to learn it: the hottest thing in a long marriage is not a third person. It is the discovery, arriving right on schedule in the middle of an ordinary weekend, that the person you married is still playing with you, on purpose, and playing to win.

She still makes the joke, by the way. Last week she asked which of her friends he would pick, and he said, without missing a beat, "The one I picked in 2004," and she went quiet in the good way, and reached for the deck.

The End

Featured in this story