I am increasingly convinced that a tremendous amount of yin and yang is important to a successful marriage. My wife and I have dramatically different opinions about dining, for example: She lives to eat. I eat to live.
If you were to give each of us an hour to decide what we wanted for a last meal, my wife would spend the time agonizing over which restaurant made the best fish tacos. She’d consult all of the multiple lists on her iPhone dedicated to her favorite chefs, dining establishments she’s always dreamed of visiting, recipes she’s loved in the past and ones she’s planned on cooking in the future. She’d call our brother-in-law for wine recommendations and she’d pore over lists of cocktails made with organic vodka and imported cucumbers.
In the end she’d present you with a blueprint for a nine-course tasting menu and insist she requires another two hours to get dressed properly.
I, on the other hand, would spend the entire sixty minutes frantically wondering why I was to be killed and desperately trying to plot an escape, and would never once think about eating.
This dichotomy reminds me of one my favorite quotes about the difference between men and women. The criminally under-appreciated Dave Barry wrote:
[If a woman has] to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she would probably elect to save the infant’s life, without even considering whether there were men on base.
Why Sports Is a Drag, March 10, 1985