PrettyFakes

Well, folks, it’s Flag Day 2007, and that means that today Contessa and I celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. So, to all you nay-sayers sitting on the back pew at our wedding who took “under 6 months” in the divorce pool: IN YOUR FACE!

People received our wedding invitations with some confusion. They weren’t surprised we were getting married. True, we were young, but in Mississippi spinsterism, like puberty, strikes women early. And after all, we’d been dating for years, and people expected us to get married. But the thing was, we’d been dating other people for years, and so they weren’t expecting us to get married to each other. Nevertheless, one decade later, we’re still proving the doubters wrong. In fact—this is true—we recently caused another, less hardy couple to split up because, according to that couple’s female half, her boyfriend didn’t look at her the way I look at Contessa. Score! Avert your gaze, lukewarm lovers and half-hearted commitment-phobes, lest your relationship be melted into slag, Nazis-at-the-end-of-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style! Prof and Contessa are smashing through, and we are going to wreck your lives!

Seriously, though, these have been good years, all told. It’s strange to me to think how different our lives were when we got married: fresh out of college, waiting tables, and waiting around to move to, of all places in the world, Hattiesburg. I’m not saying we’ve gone through a wholesale metamorphosis since then, but I don’t think the 1997-model Prof-and-Contessa could have anticipated the sort of life that the most recent model share. Speaking only for myself, I’m pretty confident the ‘97 Prof thought he knew what happiness was, and I am pleased to see how very wrong he was. The only thing I had basically right: people kept asking me, on our wedding day, if I was nervous, and I kept telling them “No.” And I wasn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t waste any time doing the second-guess dance on cold feet. (I did pass out while getting the blood test for our marriage license, a story I recounted here, but I think that was mostly out of shock that the only thing the state of Mississippi tests for is syphilis.) We both found it irskome that at our reception, people kept pulling us apart so they could talk to us individually—and indeed still today we violate Victorian manners by preferring to party-mingle as a pair instead of separately. And why not? We like each other.

Not only have whatever changes we’ve gone through in the last decade been for the better, they would have been impossible had we not been together. Contessa has always encouraged me to take risks and to never pretend to be anyone besides who I am, and I hope she can say the same of me. (OK, I did ask her to pretend to be Batgirl once, but I swear that was only for Halloween.)

Well, I’ll cut this off before I get maudlin. Here’s hoping for 50+ more years of awesome!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under In Mississippi, In the South, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.