Many of us quote the old adage: ‘Money cannot buy happiness.’
Others favor the trailing quip: ‘But it sure helps!’
We applaud the Coal Miner’s Daughter shoeless in the woods singing, “We were poor but we had love” The ascetic earns our adoration from afar, but closer to home, the fact remains, that money squabbles can corrode love’s bonds.
No need to shame ourselves on this actuality, try fighting other elements of nature. Place a tangible and an intangible in the ring and see who wins the wrestling around the kitchen table, the tangible of course. Though we would never admit to it sitting around the dining room table, under candlelight, the intangible always wins.
How about: ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ or ‘Beauty is only skin deep’?
Love and beauty share the intangible tenements, though beauty has plenty of windows while love lives in the penthouse with a private elevator.
Nobody would describe my husband as an attractive person. I found myself preparing my friends to meet him by propounding all the qualities that I found attractive in him, all embellishments I would come to discover, and as these dissolved with reality so the prince returned to the toad, and the physical attraction went dead.
Before the ultimate loss of faith took place, but after I had uncovered enough lies to sigh at the front door when arriving home each day, I took refuge in work.
There I found appreciation in the form of a few promotions, one of which involved attending weekly meetings in which I represented the sole female. Immediately upon my initiation, the office clown, an irreverently garrulous guy who I had noticed hovering around the desk of anyone with breasts, made sure to save me a seat beside his own. Though I often found him obnoxious and ignorant to common mores he was also tall, broad shouldered, with the thick skin and hands of a working man. His broad face, always with a mischievous grin, displayed the lines of his age, ten years my senior, as opposed to my husband of the same years who looked so like a little schoolboy in his pigeon-chested wire thin frame and pale, bespeckled demeanor, sneering at everything with the superior judgment of someone who desperately wished to hide his inferiority. It worked well for him, made others suspect he had the intelligence to set him so aloof. On the contrary my co-worker had the reputation of the office Falstaff, and acted more the part of the schoolboy than my husband could probably ever muster without jeopardizing his facade.
As a married woman with blinders on I made every attempt to avoid this co-worker. Though he began toning down his rhetoric to find a common ground when seated next to me, I resisted smiling at his wisecracks, and kept a stone business face for him. Yet when I retreated home to my domicile of lies where I had come to question the veracity of every statement uttered by my husband, I realized a shift taking place. Rather than asking if his words were true, I began to wonder why I bothered to care.
Though my co-worker’s attention may have had a hand in reviving my spirit, I neither considered his regard for me as genuine or him as a possible rebound prospect at all. Instead, it aided me out of the cloud I had landed in after my bubble of love burst. Strange how all the attractiveness I found in my ugly husband disappeared with the feelings, but the boorish behavior of this office flirt never diminished his handsomeness…