Marital Problems

I have a hot wife.

I hate to admit this, but we are going through a rough patch in our marriage. 

“Say what?” I imagine you are thinking to yourselves, as my wife and I have been happily married for over forty years. 

“With a hot wife, just work through it, you idiot,” my guy friends are probably saying.

It is true. We have had a happy marriage. We are fortunate. Like all successful marriages, we have worked through all the biggies that stump most that fail. Money, kids, sex, time apart, household responsibilities, friends, irritating habits, family, expectations, and personality conflicts are listed as the top ten reasons marriages fail. We sailed through all of those unphased.

“So, what is it?” I imagine you saying to yourself.

“Why would you air your dirty laundry with us? You should work that out amongst yourselves,” I also imagine you thinking.

Well, you are probably right. But I’m at my wits end and need some input from others, who surely are struggling with this same issue. Perhaps we can work through this together.

Ready for the big reveal? First let me give you some background info.

In my past, I have always had a problem with sweating. In my sports playing days, my teammates marveled at how much I could sweat. My high school teammate, who played a position beside me and had to endure some of the nasty wet stuff swinging onto him, to this day, still tells me he has never seen someone sweat as much as me.

In college, my coaches wanted me to add twenty pounds to my underweight body for the position I played. They had me eating four meals a day, concluding with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at ten pm. They weighed me before practice each day, with a smile on their faces, proud of their genius idea, as it seemed to work. After practice, they also weighed me, amazed I had sweated off all if not more of the weight I’d gained heading into practice (today, if I just glance at a pb and j sandwich, I gain five pounds).

My dating life suffered because of this phenomenon. My armpits seemed to constantly display that oh so embarrassing wet ring. But we could describe mine best as a super ring, drifting far below the hidden armpit area. 

When calling a prospective date, upon asking them out, the enthusiastic tone usually dropped to, let’s say much less fervent, as their brain registered me as the sweaty one. The girls uttered many fibs of already having plans because of this affliction. And the sad thing is, I did not blame them. I would have said no to me also!

On the dance floor, I tried my best to keep my sweaty talent to a minimum. It seemed the more I tried to hold it in, the more the faucet opened. It was if my body thought sweat was something attractive to my date to, because I sure showed out for her.

“Hey, look at that dude! He’s steaming,” someone once said about me on the dance floor, as I noticed my date becoming more and more distant. One cursory look in the mirror revealed I was, in fact, steaming. It was quite impressive, in a revolting kind of way.

I notice one other person steaming on the dance floor. It was my buddy Steve. To this day, he and I are best buddies. In fact, he travels with his very own fan, just to sleep and stay dry at night.

Once I progressed into the business world, my greatest fear, in fact reared its ugly head. I let them see me sweat. And this was during the era when the slogan was, “Never let them see you sweat!”

Once I became the bald one, I developed another source of embarrassment because of my special talent of sweating. Without hair to hide and catch sweat, I now had spring fed sweat rivers that meander from the top of my head, across long stretches of bare skin, gaining momentum ever so fast, until, yes, it crosses over my forehead, along the eyebrows, and dumps directly into my eyes.

Unfortunately, I passed the sweating gene on to my sons. If one looks closely at pictures of us, they will see sweaty armpits, and wet foreheads. Shake our hands and you will get the sweaty palm treatment. I have apologized to them many times over, and just hope this special talent stops with their generation.

Now, I imagine you are thinking to yourselves, “what does this have to do with his marital problem?”

Well, let me tell you the rest of the story.

I have a wonderful wife. I am the luckiest guy in the world. She is beautiful, fun-loving, has a tremendous personality, is adventurous, puts up with my shenanigans and the list goes on and on. I am a lucky man.

Did I say I’m a lucky man?

Okay, okay. I know, I’m buttering her up, but it is true. I’m so grateful she said yes to marriage, knowing upfront all about my special sweating talent.

So here is the problem.

Recently, I quit sweating. No more wet armpits. No sweaty palms. In fact, not only did I quit sweating, I started getting cold, even in the summer. This was all new to me, and in fact, something I welcomed. Gone was all the embarrassing things that had plagued my past.

I have always thought God has an uncanny sense of humor. Helping to proving this theory, at exactly the same time that my switch moved from hot to cold, he switched my loving and precious wife’s thermostat from cold to hot. And by hot, I mean HOT! Even at my peak as a sweating machine, I never got as hot as she does.

I noticed when my loving precious wife gets hot, she turns a little cranky; maybe a lot cranky. Okay, she erupts into rages; specifically directing uncanny adjectives to the person who recently changed the thermostat from a minus 25 degrees to a plus 68 degrees, and by the way, he is still FREEZING! 

As a loving, caring, and understanding husband, I know the secret sauce to conquering any marriage issue. So I sit down with my wonderful, reasonable, and fantastic wife to discuss the issue at hand. I am now a cool cucumber and surely, we can come to a reasonable conclusion, so we can move on with our marriage.

Wrong!  The thermostat war is still unresolved. 

Recently, we reached a compromise. At bedtime, we set the thermostat to sixty six degrees, my compromise, and we turn off the ceiling fan, her compromise. I then pile three down blankets on top of me, cover my head with a pillow, and basically sleep like a groundhog. She sleeps with zero covers.

“Honey, did you sleep all right last night?” I ask.

“No, I nearly burned up,” she snaps.

“How about you?” she asks.

“I nearly froze to death,” my scratchy sore throat screeches.

SO. I need marital advise. We are both tired from sleep deprivation. She MIGHT be a little extra cranky. 

What to do?

Oh well, nobody can dispute me when I say, I have a hot wife.

Advertisement