Sitting in the car, waiting for the boys to finish tennis clinic at the Cal Club, I listen to Eminem’s, “I Love the Way You Lie” over and over. The song shows how crazy a man can get when he is madly in love with a woman, which makes me feel very annoyed with Beloved. Why can’t he be more wildly passionate?! Not in the physical sense, which I didn’t mean to infer because that would be gross, but in the hard-core rapper sense, which isn’t. I get a little thrill every time his girlfriend (Eminem’s, not Beloved’s) says she’s going to leave and he says forcefully (but only because he loves her so much) “No you aint!” If I said I was going to leave him, Beloved would probably just (sensibly) say “I hope that’s a decision you’ll be happy with down the road.” And he would definitely not say, “ain’t.” The rest of the song gets a bit risky what with tying people to beds and setting houses on fire, but still it’s enough to make me exasperated with Beloved’s sense of restraint and annoyingly proper grammar.
I realize it’s not fair to judge Beloved thus, but still I do! One minute I’m wondering why he can’t be as manly as the cigarette smoking job foreman working on our house, and in a startling about face wonder why he’s not as attentive a listener as the darling sales associate at the Jonathon Adler Boutique.
If Beloved were to judge me as I do him I would collapse in a heap. Luckily for me, he seems not at all interested in analyzing my personality, femininity, fashion sense, behavior at dinner parties, sense of humor, friendliness to service people or how I am at “active listening.” In fact, he is so accepting that if I ask him if he likes my outfit he is able to mumble that it is “fine” without ever taking his eyes off his computer screen. A couple of times, just for fun, I’ll stop speaking in the middle of a sentence to see if he notices. I’ve timed him up to 18 minutes before I storm out of his office, slamming the door as loud as I can leaving him completely bemused, saying he has no idea what sets me off on these moods of mine.
Of course, I love Beloved just the way he is, but why can't he try just a teeny bit harder? I know it is silly for me to expect my straight-laced husband to act like a rapper, but would it kill him to work on his snappy repartee and maybe acquire the slightest hint of a British accent? Hugh Grant seems to manage it well enough!
