Adrienne Burris - Marital Bliss

 

 

Okay. So, it's November 2011 and I just got married, so everything's pretty much perfect in Adrienne Land. I have a kitchen that's full of gadgets and gizmos. I don't even know how to use things like a bread tube. I don't know, but I'm a wife now, so I'm going to figure out how to use it. [audience laughter] I have a closet full of just gorgeous new clothes that I had to buy for all the bridal showers my church threw for me and the rehearsal dinner, including this sleeveless real silk ivory button down blouse with pearl buttons that made me feel sophisticated. 

 

All of these things are in our first home, which is this three-bedroom house in the suburbs with a creek on the side, and hydrangea bushes in the back and birds and trees. It's the picture-perfect start to a marriage, which is something that was really important to me at the time, because I didn't have that growing up. My parents got divorced when I was 11. Then my dad married his mistress and then divorced her. When I was a teenager, my mom thought it was a great idea to date my high school principal. Spoiler alert, not a great idea, mom. Thanks. So, a lot of my expectations for marriage and my values for what it should look like came from Jane Austen novels and romantic comedies. But I was really doing the best I could. 

 

So, it's November. We've been back from our honeymoon for about a week, and my brother comes over to visit in our home. I'm playing little hostess, and we're on the couch watching TV, and I've got snacks out and I'm showing off all of our gifts that we got for the wedding and pictures from the honeymoon. My husband, Ben, pops out of the bedroom to say he's going downstairs to do laundry. And I think, of course, you are, because you're the perfect husband. You're going to do laundry. He goes downstairs, and I keep talking to my brother and I just start to get this feeling that I think probably, he might have forgotten something, because he's just a husband, he probably just forgot like an item in the bedroom. 

 

So, I leave my brother, and I go into the bedroom and I realize that there's something missing. He's taken my real silk white blouse with the pearl buttons for my rehearsal dinner and put it into the washing machine with the blue jeans. And I flip my shit. [audience laughter] I'm like, I'm screaming, “What have you done? What have you done?” And I run out. By this time, he's back up from the laundry room. And like a sane person, he says, “What have I done?” And I start yelling, “The shirt. The shirt.” “What shirt?” And this only incites me further. 

 

So, I push him out of the way, I run down into the basement, throw open the lid to the washing machine and throw both arms into the running washing machine. The powder is beaming against my arm and the suds are coming out. I'm throwing wet blue jeans, like, into the air onto the floor of our basement trying to save this shirt. I'm throwing things, and I'm cursing and I start thinking about how this shirt was like the new shirt and it was beautiful. It's the nicest piece of clothing I've ever owned. It was to start this marriage. I start crying. I'm throwing clothes and I cannot find it and I know it's in there. 

 

And then, I'm about to start screaming again when I hear the door slam upstairs and I just stop. I had forgotten that my brother was there at all, and it wasn't Ben who had left, it was him. I'm immediately taken back in my mind to Valentine's Day 1999, when I had my little heart shaped box of chocolates and a bear, and my brother had like a little Valentine's race car or something and were waiting for my dad to get home and he never did. I woke up in the middle of the night at 03:00 AM to hear them yelling at each other. It was almost immediately after that I found out they were splitting up. 

 

I know when my brother came to visit, and heard me yelling at my husband like that, just a week after we got married, he was thinking, “This is obviously what marriage is going to be like in our family.” I had an epiphany with my arms shoulder deep in a running washing machine that my marriage was not going to be like that. Love isn't about having the marriage that's from a sitcom, from having the picture for perfect postcard, because we're going to make mistakes, but it's about loving each other through those mistakes and actively choosing to love each other and choosing to forgive each other. 

 

So, I pull my arms out of the washing machine and I close the lid. I just leave all the clothes on the floor. I'm like, “Whatever.” At this point, I sacrificed the shirt for the sake of the marriage. [audience laughter] I turn to walk upstairs to make my shame known and find my brother and apologize. I don't even make it to the top before I see Ben standing there looking tired and frustrated, rightfully so, holding in his hands, the crumpled white silk shirt with the pearl buttons he had found behind the bathroom door. Thanks.