Tag husband

Three Signs He Isn’t Cheating On You

Heather Christena Schmidt 3 Comments

A lot of people think my husband cheats on me. They have for a long time. I can tell with some, by the looks they give me. You know them: the looks of pity that this poor woman is just so stupid she doesn’t see what’s really going on. Others outright tell me. Sometimes my mom and her husband refer to Poor Nick as “that lying’ cheatin’ S.O.B.” and still other friends and family are more eloquent about it than they.

To their credit, he does act like it. He comes home late all the time. He says he’ll be home at a certain time and shows up hours later. He can be kind of a jerk to me at times. By jerk, I mean he blows off my birthday, sides with strangers over me, tries to shame me for being a woman, and ignores the majority of our conversations. He says things like “excuse me, I have a life outside of here” in reference to our family. He withholds affection about 95% of the time. He lies. He spends a considerable amount of time deleting things from his cellphone. He picks fights over petty things. I could go on, but I’m not helping my point here.

Because then there are the signs that he isn’t cheating on me. There aren’t many, but I do know that as long as these status things are in place, all is well in the matter of our marital monogamy.

His feet still smell

IMAG1380My husband has always had the most rancid smelling feet on the planet. I remember when we first started dating. He had a shoe rack by the front door of their condo, and the scent was so overpowering I would always try and find excuses to go in through their garage whenever I went over there.

No amount of foot spray or foot powder or foot anything helps the smell, either. He uses a daily foot spray to avoid spreading his athlete’s foot issues to everyone else in the house, but it does nothing to contain the smell.

Have I told you faithful blog followers about this before? I’m sure I have. The problem with Poor Nick’s feet is his shoes. All of them are at least 10 years old, some of them disintegrate every time he wears them. He has these sandals that are so disgusting – and quite frankly cheap ($30); when he wears them, his feet sweat so badly that he comes home and there are black chunks of sandal stuck into the in-between of his toes. He asked for a new pair for Christmas, and I said “are you going to throw out the old ones then?” to which he said NO. So he got no sandals. On more than one occasion, I have been so horrified by the stench this whole sandal-sweat-disintegration debacle created that I’ve made him go wash his feet.

As long as Poor Nick’s feet still smell like a rotting animal carcass, covered in sweat and mildew, I know his heart is still with me.

He still eats like he’s packing it in for a long winter

One of the classic signs of someone cheating is they change their eating or exercise habits. It’s totally cool to eat more healthy or want to lose weight if you are in the red on either of those fronts. But if it’s sudden, unexpected, excessive, unwarranted, and secretive, you do have cause for concern (although concern over what is iffy – cheating, depressed, eating disorder, etc).

On one occasion, I did actually question what was going on when I saw Poor Nick download a weight loss app to his phone. Those of you that know him know that he is already underweight. The thought that he would want to lose weight horrified me; but then he followed it up by packing in two beers, a meal that had an entire day’s worth of calories in it, plus a dessert. Since then, I haven’t heard or seen anything about weight loss, so I’m resting easy that he isn’t cheating, depressed, or developing an eating disorder.

As long as my husband eats like he’s packing it in for a long winter, I know we’re good. And it isn’t just how much he eats, but what he eats. Red onions in copious amounts. Garlic by the baleful. Hot dogs smothered in relish. There isn’t another human being on this planet that would tolerate the way my husband smells after a rousing game of “let’s see how many hardboiled eggs I can eat.”

He continues to do entirely idiotic experiments with his various areas of hair

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Am I the only woman on the planet whose husband plays experimental game with his hair – head, as well as facial?

“I want to grow it long.” “I told her to just trim the top but let the back grow.””I decided to just buzz it all off.”

“I felt like the feel of a smooth face.” “I like this little patch of facial hair here!” “What’s wrong with hair growing down and around the back of my neck?” “Sideburns are in again.”

This is a weekly thing in our house. Poor Nick is constantly playing games with his hair, which is rife for embarrassing family photos and people thinking I’m in a relationship with a fifteen year old. When he shaves off all his facial hair, he looks like a teenager – really, he just looks so young. When he leaves some but not a full beard, he does this ridiculous gang-banger, cholo thing. Once I Googled it and found picture after picture of gay gang members – all sporting the same facial hair.

Here is how I know my husband isn’t cheating on me right now. In spite of some of the mean things he’s said recently. Besides the fact that he let another woman (the carpool lady) keep him at work two hours late, waiting for her to get off at her respective job, then yelled at me that I just didn’t understand the demands of her career. Spitting in the face of the two hour argument he picked over whether or not we should switch to only two DVDs on Netflix a month to save $3. I know my man is still my man because of his most recent bad haircut.

“I told her just to trim it up” turned into short on top, spiky on the sides, and long in the back. The back actually poofs out behind his ears to make what is perhaps the most amazing inadvertent mullet of all time.

At this point I’m kind of hoping my husband doesn’t read this blog. In more ways than one, I’ve taken him down much further than even Chinatown. But it’s all true, and it’s a good thing – I know he isn’t cheating on me! But if the intoxicating odor of his feet, or his diet and hair habits ever change I know I’m in trouble.

One day, it’s liable to happen though. Poor Nick will walk in the door and his hair will be clean-cut. He’ll say “I’m tired of playing games with my hair, and I’m not hungry tonight. I’m going to the gym. Alone.” Then when he gets home, I’ll notice all new shoes and a surprisingly fresh scent wafting up from his feet. That’s when I’m screwed.

Do you have signs that your significant other is remaining faithful? I bet they’re not nearly as … unique.

Conversations With Nick, Episode 3: Anyone In There?

Heather Christena Schmidt 22 Comments

It’s been a while since we’ve had an episode of Conversations With Nick, although it’s also been a while since my husband (Poor Nick) talked about putting his penis through a donut hole; or since I had a dream that he was having an affair with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut out to look like Cher.

So pretty much all the time, my husband’s job goes through either really really busy periods or really really dead periods. There is no in-between it seems. He manages a small company in Los Angeles that does post production work. Typically I tell people they did Delivery Me for Discovery Health and still do the Behind the Musics for VH1 and everyone gets it. During these periods (remember, all the time), there is nonstop complaining – every day in the afternoon I get a phone call and Nick sighs repeatedly during it until I ask “what’s wrong?” and he either bitches about how slow it is or whines about how much running around he’s had to do.

The other thing that happens during the really really busy periods is Nick is completely in another world. Remember, he’s a misogynist so it makes things a little annoying, to say the least. In the last few weeks alone, he has just altogether stopped paying any attention to me when I talk. I can take being treated like a slave. I can take never being treated like a woman. I can’t take that ignoring me shit, though. I told him my CD player will break if he turns the radio on in my car (there is some short in the switches) and he turned it to AM anyway when he went to pick up Thai the other night. I asked him to take the box of unused Halloween decorations out to my car so I could take them back to my dad and he just walked away, ignoring me. The list goes on, and I won’t bore you all with it; but the coup de grâce of it all was last night. I was in the middle of my fucking sentence and my dill hole husband stood up and walked away to call work.

I don’t think so, asshat.

So today I sent him a barrage of emails. I figured he can’t ignore those, right?

Conversations With Nick:

Balls – Anyone In There?

I started with an eCard. I don’t often make eCards; although, am realizing that I should get more into this. It’s fun and a socially acceptable place to let out the thoughts that run through my whacked-out mind on the regular.

I thought I’d start with it to soften the blows that would follow.

How terribly, terribly true that statement is.

Conversations With Nick:

Anniversary – Anyone In There?

The next email was about celebrating our anniversary.

My husband and I have many anniversaries. There is the one of when we met. The one of when we got engaged. The wedding anniversary. And the anniversary of our Catholic co-validation (basically a second wedding). We only celebrate them all once, and it’s around this general time of year.

It would have been nice, though, if Poor Nick weren’t too busy with work to remember just to wish me a “happy anniversary” on each of those days. The anniversary of our Catholic co-validation was last week and the day came and went without a mention. To make matters worse, we went to a family party that weekend and they were celebrating two birthdays and two anniversaries (one wedding, one college graduation); but not a one acknowledged the anniversary of the thing we did (and money we spent) because those very people wanted it.

So I decided I want to celebrate our anniversary this weekend, and the next email I sent him was about just that. I want to dress up. I want to be told I’m pretty. I want my present. I want my dinner. I want to drink my bottles of anniversary wine.

That’s all I want, though.

Conversations With Nick:

Brain – Anyone In There?

The real kicker for the barrage of emails I sent this morning to get my husband’s attention was in my new rule: no technology hour. People have suggested this before, and a friend commented about it just this morning again. I see no good reason at all why we can’t shut everything off for one hour every night.

Some of you may think I was a little harsh. Well, I’m sure your husband doesn’t regularly get up and walk away when you are in the middle of your sentence as often as mine does. And anyway, I’m sure my email was ignored.

The real point is that I feel like I have to knock on my husband and ask “is anybody in there?” sometimes.

One of the wisest things ever said to me was by my manager at Wendy’s, where I worked as a drive-thru bitch in high school. He told me that every day when he got home from work, he’d change his clothes in the laundry room, just inside the side door. He said that for one, he didn’t want the house smelling like french fries and grease fat. But more importantly, it was his physical reminder that he needed to leave work at work, and enjoy the evenings with his wife and kids. Life is not worth living if 100% of it is focused on places other than where you are.

A Miserable Marriage

Heather Christena Schmidt 5 Comments

Today on Facebook, one of my friends posted a question “what is the key to a successful marriage?”  People were posting all manner of things:  honesty, communication, devotion, sex, similar interests … all of them relevant, timely remarks that logically seem to help in making a successful marriage.  But something about it didn’t really seem to hit right on the mark for me.

My comment was a little off the beaten path of the rest of the comments (big surprise, I know..).  Nonetheless, I think mine was the most accurate, which was:  reconcile yourself to misery.

This idea came to me after I thought about a popular quote about marriage:  “I can’t have what I want and be happy; you can’t have what you want and be happy; let’s compromise on misery.”  This is intended on being funny; that in a marriage neither person can have exactly the way they want things to be; each has to give a little to get a little.  The idea isn’t that we are actually going to settle on being miserable because we both can’t have exactly what we want, though.  In reality it just pokes fun at the idea that anything other than the exact way we want things to be is absolute misery.  The truth is it’s not.  Not having exactly what you want isn’t misery, it’s just not exactly what you want.  The beauty in compromise is that it is not a complete annihilation of one side in favor of the other, but rather a synthesis of the two in which there is an element of each side’s happiness present.  In reality, a compromise can be seen as the happiest of all possibilities, for it is the best of both worlds.

I think this reflects a current problem we seem to have found ourselves in, which is that we seem to think that we are going to find a life-partner that is exactly the same as we are, thus there will never even be a need to compromise.  We think that there even can be a person exactly like us out there, and that when we marry them everything will be pie in the sky and ear-to-ear smiles.  I can’t even count the number of couples I know that seem to think they will always agree on everything, and that if they don’t that may as well be the end of their civil or religious union.  This seems to be a wholly naive and childish way of viewing the world:  that there are two people who actually are so alike they will never disagree and need to find a middle-ground on which to compromise is (in reality) just plain stupid.

So what is the key to a successful marriage, you ask?  Why, it’s reconciling yourself to misery!  In other words, it is going in to a marriage realistic about the fact that no matter how compatible eHarmony said you were; no matter how much you seemed to have in common on those initial dates – there is going to come a time that you and your life-partner do not agree on something (and believe you me, it will be a big something).  Recognize that now, because it will happen.  No matter what you do; no matter how you try to avoid it – it will happen.  One day down the line, you will be asked to compromise (in most cases, many days and countless times down the line).  The key to a successful marriage is knowing that one day the need to give a little to get a little will be upon you.  Denying this is a way to make your marriage fail, because you will be destined to think that there is no way to reconcile something that you thought was supposed to be perfect.  In reality, nothing is perfect – marriage included.  Reconcile yourself to the compromise on misery, which really won’t be miserable if you just give it a try.