Who’s thinking for who these days?

My friend, Julie, wrote an article titled Does Marriage Lower Your IQ?

Apparently it does. It’s taking a mastermind and great effort for My Sweet Al and I to understand each other these days. He doesn’t connect and I don’t hear. Heaven forbid, when did all this come upon us?

I said to Al, “I like the way the neighbor did his barn with the boards in front, that’s how I want to do our garage.”

“Who’s that?”

I said, “The fish man.”

“The only barn I can think of belongs to the turkey man.”

“No. I’m talking about the fish man, you told me yourself he owned the Seattle Fish Company.”

“That’s the man with the turkeys in his yard.”

I needed to take a carrot cake to a function. One pound of carrots makes one cake. I sent Al to the store to buy one five-pound bag of carrots. He came home with two ten-pound bags. I said to our daughter, “Why did you let him buy all those carrots. I don’t have room in the refrigerator for twenty pounds of carrots.”

She said, “Daddy was going to buy five ten pound bags and I had to stop him.”

“That would be fifty pounds of carrots.”

“He had them in the basket ready to check out. I had a hard time talking him down to two bags. He said you said 5 bags.”

I said to him, “What in the world were you thinking?”

He said, “You always make carrot cakes for everyone else. I just wanted a carrot cake for myself.”

I guess you can’t fault the guy. I said to the family I don’t know what to do with all those carrots.

Everyone had an opinion. My son-in-law said, “You can make twenty carrot cakes and freeze them.”

I don’t have that many cake pans or freezer space and that’s a lot of work. My daughter said, “Chop them up, measure them, and put them in freezer bags. You could Google it and find out how to blanche them.”

I don’t have time and I don’t want to blanche carrots. I’m thinking that the neighbor’s chickens are going to be on an organic carrot diet for a while. They’ll have great vision and produce big orange eggs. We’ll have happy neighbors and I won’t have to worry about the carrots.

Al contents that a man who doesn’t make mistakes, doesn’t do anything. I guess he’s right. He was willing to go to the store for me.

We were riding with some friends and listening to them. She was telling her husband how to drive. She said turn at the light at the Mall. He said I’ll turn at Home Depot. He was determined not to turn at the light. She was determined he was going to turn where she said. She was worn out by the time he finally made the turn.

It was too close to home. So I had to recap my story about the fish man. She said, when they were first married, he came home and said he was complacent about their marriage.

She heard him say, he was tired of the marriage and wanted out. So, she started saving her pennies, made plans for childcare for their daughter and packed her bags to leave.

The day she was leaving, he looked at her and asked her where she was going?

You said you were complacent about the marriage.

He said I am.

That’s why I’m leaving.

I said to my friend’s husband, you almost lost your wife, were you aware of that?

He said no. That happened a long time again. I meant to say I was comfortable with our marriage.

I told him, only by God’s grace you are sitting here as a married man.

He shrugged.

I said it again, “You almost lost your wife.”

He didn’t respond. So I said to his wife, “I don’t think he got it.”

She said, “He didn’t.”

My Sweet Al tells everyone that before he can say it, I say it. We’ve been married so long that I finish his sentences. We think alike.

I don’t think so. We might be saying the same things, but we’re not thinking the same these days. How in the world have we made it together all these years? Our IQ is going down and our lack of understanding is going up.

Final Brushstroke! I believe my friend is right. Marriage makes the IQ go down. I’m wondering, who is thinking for who these days?