by Jesse Raub

My future wife couldn’t care less about my writing.

After work, when settling into the couch to untie my shoes, I often attempt to regale her with tales of short stories pounded out on the keyboard in mere minutes or long magazine articles edited with ten swift keystrokes while I should be doing my secretary work. These feats of strength are usually met with a polite smile that means That’s great dear but honestly why aren’t you in the kitchen I’m very hungry and we need to do grocery shopping and write out the guest list for our wedding tonight too.

She used to care.  I think.

Back when we first started dating, I used to send her all the short stories I was writing for my fiction classes. She went to school across the state, and I’d sit at my computer, eagerly waiting for her reply email.

“I really, really liked that last one. Sometimes I forget that you wrote it.”

When she said it, it was a compliment. She meant that in her head, the short story I had written was good enough to be lumped together with all the published works she had read before. I was canonized. I was not only charming, polite, attractive enough to get by, and funny – I was also talented and creative.

Writing has always been my secret weapon. Burrowed away in my parent’s basement, I spent hours on the Internet, writing romantic short stories and attempted poetry for girls I met online through social networking websites and art-dumps. I’d type out two-hundred word pieces about a chance encounter between two thinly veiled characters which ended in tasteful disrobing and a brief romantic embrace. I was writing personalized Mr. Darcy porn to any girl who wanted it. And like a dungeon dwelling, twenty sided die tossing Lothario, I lapped it up. Of course, none of it ever panned out to anything more than lonely teenage hearts reaching out to one another through the ‘tubes of the Internet in some desperate attempt for premature love.  It was my peacock plumage.  Aside from wondering how I was supposed to be the next Steinbeck, I was trying to attract a mate.

But the future wife is no longer impressed. The need for wooing is gone. I’m still talented and creative, but parlaying my workload for website writing isn’t quite as useful or helpful as, say, chopping up peppers and onions for veggie hoagies. Or taking the dog out every morning when he’s crying by the door because he doesn’t want to shit on the welcome mat or anything else in the house he enjoys sleeping on. Or keeping up with washing my half of the dirty dishes.

And to be honest? Nothing makes me happier. No one really wants to hear how I’m thinking about adding a slideshow of featured pieces to the front page of my website. Or about the arduous process of trying to line up a web developer who shares your aesthetic view for the redesign of a magazine’s website. And though I know she doesn’t care, she listens. And when I shut up, sated with relaying my tales, we go about our life together, sauteing vegetables in tandem pans on the stove and trading off washing and drying the dishes in the sink.

There’s a trade off that occurs. We both run hectic lives, work and school schedules that eat up 60 hours a week, each. But when we’re home, we’re together. That means the computer goes away, the dog gets attentively scratched, the television is tuned to some horrible reality programming, and we settle into the couch next to each other.

The ego is grounded. No matter how great I think a new story may be, I’m still the guy who has to pick the dingleberries out of my dog’s butt fur if he has diarrhea. And that, my friends, will forever be infinitely more important to the future wife than letters on a page.

“The Future Wife of the Writer” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.