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I will never give anyone relationship advice, but one thing I know is that if you ever find yourself comparing your marriage to any movie, you must stop immediately and start drinking instead. Or do whatever you can to distract yourself, because believe me, unless you’re comparing it to The Shining, your relationship will not stand up well to the test of Hollywood. And not just because you don’t have our own soundtrack and the actors in your love story are more “reality” and less “shot through a lens smeared with vaseline”, if my euphemisms are resonating.

I learned this through painful experience when my husband and I saw The English Patient and I was sobbing maniacally and he was looking at the insides of his eyelids. “WOULD YOU CARRY ME THE WAY HE CARRIED HER THROUGH THE DESERT?” I sobbed. “You know that I have a bad back,” he said.

The only saving grace was that a few years later, I read that David Sedaris and his boyfriend Hugh had a similar problem when they saw that movie where Julianne Moore coughs once and the next thing you know, she’s dying. Sedaris describes himself as crying so much that he became dehydrated (seriously, isn’t that the best description? I totally would have stolen it to use in the above paragraph if I thought that for a second that I could get away with it), while Hugh asked if he always cried at comedies. Knowing that David and Hugh went through something similar made me feel like my marriage had a chance.

What I did not know is that the movie prohibition extends to literature, and I am using the term loosely. And I don’t mean just the obvious Romeo & Juliet nonsense. This applies to anything and everything ever written.

For example.

Over vacation, I read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, because I figured, just because she doesn’t know how to spell her name, doesn’t mean that she can’t write, right? I mean, she has the best-selling series of books (for teenagers, but still), so clearly it’s a sign that I should read them. Besides, the covers are really pretty. And since when I’m on the beach, I spend a lot of time staring at the cover, it really fit the bill.

Don’t worry, this won’t be a book review, where I mention that the book describes the weather in more detail than my mother in law. But I do have to tell you what it’s about, so that the rest of this post makes sense.

So, our heroine, Bella, moves from Phoenix to Seattle to live with her father because her mother is a huge pain in the ass, or is newly married to some baseball player and they travel a lot and whatever. So, she’s in Seattle. It’s rainy. Bella likes sunny. But then she meets Edward, a fellow student, who is so good looking that Bella doesn’t know how it’s even possible. She keeps saying that he’s like a statute (he’s also very cold). I’m guessing Bella likes the strong silent type. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you the part that Edward is a vampire (but that’s a secret!) and he thinks that Bella is really nice and also that her blood smells really good. Now, I was thinking he meant her menstrual blood, but apparently, I’m a sick freak, and no one else thought that, and he just meant her vein blood, that he can smell, because you know, he’s a vampire. So, I’m sure you can see his dilemma. He doesn’t want to drink her blood because that’s really rude and she would die, but just being around her is so tempting to him that he spends a lot of time moping around and generally acting like Hamlet, if Hamlet were a huge whining pain in the ass, authored by a hack. But you know, a romantic whiner.

Anyway. So of course, because every song is about me, apparently, I decide to ask my husband what he would do if he were a vampire, thirsty for my blood–would he kill me or would he deny himself the pleasure of my company. For some strange reason, my husband hates these hypotheticals. He has this theory that I throw relationship hypotheticals at him when I’m PMSing, and I’m not sure that I can disprove it, or what it has to do with anything, for that matter. By the way, is anyone else craving Haagen Dasz chocolate and peanut butter ice cream? No?

So, I ask him and he says, “Why would I be a vampire?”
And I say, “I have no idea. But let’s just say. You’re a vampire and you lust for my blood.” (That’s actually what it says on the back of the book–that Edward lusts for Bella’s blood. Is that supposed to be romantic? Because it sort of gags me.)
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s hard for me to imagine wanting to drink someone’s blood.”

“Someone’s”. Nice. Really makes me feel special. I mean, I am just trying to ascertain where I stand in this relationship, whether his desire for me is stronger than his desire for my well-being and he is totally refusing to play along. It’s almost like he is asking me for a divorce.

But then he asks me what would happen if I were a vampire. Which is sort of insane because in the book, the boy is the vampire and the girl is the vampiree. And you don’t mess with literature. It’s like the first step towards book burning and censorship.

“I wouldn’t drink your blood because I love you and I wouldn’t want you to die,” I tell him.

And he says,”Ok.”

And just like that, the conversation is over. Which makes me think that if he had a blog, it would be totally boring.

One year ago ...

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