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He was an adult. It was weird.
By Elizabeth Z Pardue — Written on Jun 16, 2016
I was suspicious of my husband the first month we dated for reasons that sound insane to anyone who hasn't dated a young bachelor. We'd started dating after a birthday celebration for me with mutual friends turned into us watching both Wayne's World movies at his studio apartment at 2 AM. I noticed immediately that it was clean, despite him having no way of knowing we were coming.
I'd been drinking, so I didn't put much thought into it until I came back again a few days later to notice it was still clean. Even the bathroom. This seemed odd.
What's more was that, every morning, before he did anything else, he took a shower. He'd even take a shower before he was going outside to tinker with his car in the heat ... and then he'd take another one afterward.
The weirdness didn't stop there: He called when he said he would. If he went out with his friends, he never drank more than two beers even if the drive back to his apartment was half a mile. He was earning his tuition as Art Director for the university student magazine where we'd met.
He invited me to come hang out with his group of friends, a diverse group of laid-back, funny twenty-somethings who partied without getting into anything shady and always seemed happy to see me. He was never late for anything. He told me what he wanted in a relationship up front. When I said something that hurt his feelings, he calmly addressed it once we were in alone.
"Alright, dude," I thought. "What's your game?"
A week after we started dating, I waited until he'd left for school and proceeded to go through everything in his apartment, confident I would find something he was hiding. I'd been in a relationship before where I always found out something hurtful with minimal snooping effort and I was determined to not ever be played a fool by a lover again. I tore that place apart. I found nothing.
After I put the whole place back together again, I told him what I'd done. He seemed confused as to why I was confessing but the truth was that I realized that, for a change, I was actually with someone who was being completely honest with me.
His sense of responsibility or penchant for cleanliness wasn't a cover for illicit acts. He wasn't checking his P's and Q's out of fear of getting caught doing something wrong. He just, well, had his sh*t together.
I mean, I'd briefly dated a couple other guys who were clean and responsible but the relationships were never ones in which I regularly saw their daily lives, so there was a bit of a disconnect as to what a functioning adult looked like up close.
He hasn't changed in the nine years we've been together and aside from being a luxury, it's made me step up my game significantly. When we first met, I was still living the early-twenty-something-trainwreck cliché, but being with someone who has his "poop in a group" has made me strive to do the same.
I mean, I'm not there yet. But someone has to create a little chaos around here if we're going to have balance.