My marriage is one of the 50% of marriages that ended up in sweatpants.
I was mad at the Whitney “50% of marriages end in sweatpants” ad, but for reasons entirely unrelated to anyone else’s. I was mad because MARRIAGE-RELATED SWEATPANTS JOKES ARE MINE, dammit. MINE.
When I was moving in with my husband, I asked him if there were any cohabitation pet peeves I should know about—Would he, for instance, be annoyed by a wife who insists on leaving the kitchen light on at night because of an irrational belief that it scares away waterbugs? Would he expect his wife to pay bills on time, know how to cook, or contribute in any meaningful way to household chores when she was in the middle of writing something, which would be always? Would he mind a wife who sometimes has to call him several times a day so that he can reassure her that she did not leave the iron on/that her ankle pain is not a sign of diabetes/that if she were having kidney or liver failure, “she would know it”? Would he mind when his wife sends him drafts of tumblr posts about sweatpants with the subject header “Is this funny?”
Luckily, he did not say any of those things (although I suspect he wishes he did). He was quiet for a moment, a contemplative look on his face. He was obviously giving this a ton of thought. Then he said, in what was either perfect deadpan or total seriousness (I still don’t know): “Well, I don’t think we should wear sweatpants in the house.”
It made me laugh more than anything else he’s ever said, and it’s become a running joke with us. Six years into our relationship I am guilty of all of the aforementioned annoying, obsessive, irresponsible things that one should expect from an easily distracted writer with mild OCD, as well as many more. I also wear sweatpants but they are tight, hipster sweatpants from American Apparel and they make me feel like I’m in a movie like Revenge of the Nerds or Porky’s and a nerd or a Porky is watching me in my sweatpants through a hole he’s drilled into my wall. This is one of five 80’s-movie related scenarios I need to be thinking about in order to have an orgasm so the sweatpants have ironically worked our really well for us.
