Last week, I sat down with my parents to discuss a girl. I’ve talked to them about girls before, but this one is different. She’s the best of them all.
If you know me, your mind is racing. Guessing. Wildly stabbing the dark, like a blindfolded butcher. Who could she be? Truthfully, I wonder the same thing. I have a little bit of an idea of what she’ll be like. The qualities she’ll have. The things that will drive her absolutely nuts. However, I have no idea who she is. Even when I described her to my parents, I had to resort to a page in my journal entitled The List.
The girl is the one I’ll marry. The List details the requirements she will live up to, and the things she’ll expect of me. Posting it here would serve less of a purpose than Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign, but I want to discuss my reasoning.
While The List is headed for years of edits and modifications, there’s something to be said for knowing what you want. In its infancy, no relationship is anything more than an idea. Whether that idea is lousy or inspired by Heaven, it starts with, “I should get to know this person.”
Great ideas, by their definition, are new solutions to old problems. Thomas Edison grew up in the dark, so he created a light bulb. His new solution solved a long-existing problem. That’s my intention for The List. I have a problem with teenage angst, so the wife is going to be emotionally stable. I’m not crazy about ditzy conversation, so she’s going to be smarter than I am.
While the concept of a made-to-order wife may seem novel, The List raises the bar in my heart and weakens the force of compromise. How, you ask? Well . . . one sight of what she might look like kills the competition.
My wife and I will probably sit down with the 2010 version of The List and laugh hysterically. My predictions will either describe her astounding likeness or her polar opposite. The List can and will change, but at the end of the day, she’ll have made the final draft.
