Marriage is the only deal where you sign up forever with a person you met when you were both lying about how interesting you are. I told her I loved hiking. She told me she loved camping. We have now been together long enough to admit that neither of us has ever willingly slept on the ground, and we never will. That is not a failed marriage. That is a successful negotiation.
People ask me for funny marriage jokes. I don’t need a joke book. I live with the material, and the material loads the dishwasher wrong on purpose.
Funny Marriage Jokes, Straight From the Couch
The first thing marriage teaches you is that love is not a feeling. Love is sitting on opposite ends of the couch, both on your phones, in total silence, and still reaching over without looking to steal a fry off her plate. If she lets you take the fry, you’re married. If she stabs your hand with a fork, you’re also married, just further along.
And the couch itself becomes a country with borders. She has her side. I have my side. There is a middle cushion that belongs to no one, a demilitarized zone where the remote goes to die. If I sit on her side, she doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me the way a homeowner looks at a stranger sitting on their porch. I get up. I know the law.
The Thermostat War Has No Geneva Convention
Every marriage has a thermostat war, and ours has been running longer than some actual wars. She is cold. I am warm. She turns the heat up. I open a window. She closes the window. I take off my shirt. She hands me a blanket like she’s treating a patient. We have spent more money fighting over three degrees than we spent on our honeymoon, and neither of us will surrender, because surrender means admitting you were the unreasonable one, and in marriage, that is the one thing more expensive than the heating bill.
The beautiful part is that we both think we are being generous. She thinks she’s saving me from freezing to death. I think I’m saving her from a heat stroke. We are two heroes, bravely rescuing each other from weather that does not exist inside our own house.
“What Do You Want for Dinner?” Is a Trap, and We Both Know It
Nothing tests a marriage like dinner. She asks what I want. I say I don’t care. She says, “No, really, pick something.” So I pick something. She says, “Ehh, not that.” I pick something else. She says, “We just had that.” I pick a third thing. She says, “I don’t feel like that.” At this point I have offered her the entire menu of human civilization and she has vetoed all of it, and she is somehow still waiting for me to have an idea.
So I flip it. I ask her what she wants. She says she doesn’t care. I name a place. She makes a face. I name another place. She says, “Too far.” I name a third place. She says, “Too expensive.” We have now been negotiating for forty minutes, we are both starving, and we will end up eating the same thing we always eat: whatever is already in the fridge, eaten standing up, in silence, like two people who have given up on cuisine and embraced survival.
And then, after we’ve eaten, she’ll say, “We should really try that new place sometime.” I agree. We never go. That place is our retirement plan: always coming soon, never actually funded.
Selective Hearing Is a Marriage Superpower
They say married people develop selective hearing. That’s wrong. We develop selective listening, which is a completely different and much more advanced skill. I can hear her say my name from three rooms away, through a closed door, over a running faucet, while I am pretending to be asleep. What I cannot hear is a direct instruction given to my face at normal volume, like “take out the trash.” That sentence enters my ears and dissolves, like it was never spoken.
She, meanwhile, can hear me open a bag of chips from the other end of the house. She can hear me think about opening a bag of chips. But if I ask her where my keys are, she suddenly has the hearing of a person standing next to a jet engine. “I don’t know, where did you leave them?” I left them where I always leave them. She moved them to a “better spot.” The better spot is a mystery location that will only be revealed after I have checked every pocket, every counter, and my own soul.
The Anniversary Test Is Rigged
Here is the truth about anniversaries: the test is rigged, and I say that as a man who has failed it. She remembers the date, the restaurant, what she wore, and what I said that was almost romantic before I ruined it by adding a joke. I remember that it happens “around this time of year,” which is the kind of answer that gets you a look that could curdle milk.
So I got smart. I put it in my phone with three alarms, a backup alarm, and a note that just says “DO NOT BLOW THIS.” The phone now reminds me a week early, a day early, and an hour early. I walk in prepared, flowers in hand, reservation made, feeling like a genius. And she says, “You only remembered because your phone told you.” Yes. Yes, I did. That is what the phone is for. The phone is the only member of this marriage with a perfect memory, and frankly, it deserves a gift too.
The Argument About Nothing Is the Real Marriage
Every long marriage has the Argument About Nothing, and ours is a masterpiece. It starts with something small, like how to load the dishwasher or which way the toilet paper should hang. Within ten minutes we are debating events from four years ago, tone of voice, and something her mother said at a barbecue in a year I cannot verify. Nobody remembers how it started. Everybody remembers how it ends: one of us says something stupid, the other one laughs despite themselves, and suddenly we’re both standing in the kitchen, mad and laughing at the same time, which is the most married feeling in the world.
That is the secret nobody tells you before the wedding. Marriage isn’t about never fighting. It’s about fighting over the dishwasher and still wanting to sit on the same couch afterward, on your own side, stealing her fries, in a house that is somehow both too hot and too cold at the same time.
And if that sounds like a complaint, it isn’t. It’s a review. Five stars. Would marry again. Just not tonight. She’s already asleep on her side of the couch, and I am not waking her up to tell her.