I’ll be honest: Though I’m single, it’s not often that I find myself pining for a wife in a particularly immediate way.
Actually, I’m going to contradict myself: Every time I have to cook for myself, I wish I had a wife. So that nobody assumes I’m a misogynist who thinks a woman’s place is in the kitchen, I will simply say that I hope to find a wife who enjoys cooking. I’ll gladly clean the bathrooms and do laundry and any other chores she would rather not. I just loathe cooking, and would be made the happiest man alive by not having to do it for myself.
So aside from anytime I need to cook for myself, I’m generally not processing the fact that I’m single.
But yesterday I happened to be sick — sick enough to want a wife in a very immediate way.
I feel the need to explain myself again. To be clear, I don’t assume it’s a woman’s job to take care of her husband whenever he’s sick — just like it’s not her duty to cook her man’s meals. But when I’m sick it would be nice to have someone other than my roommates looking after me. And by “someone else” I mean “a woman.” It’s not that they wouldn’t take care of me if I asked them to. They have in the past. It’s just that guys don’t do a very good job of comforting one another. And comfort is, more than anything, what I wanted yesterday.
That desire for comfort — as I lay pathetically in my bed, listening to The Boundless Show because I didn’t have the energy to sit up and do my homework — brought to the forefront of my consciousness my deep-down longing to be married.
Yeah, leave it to me to take something boring like being sick and imbue it with all sorts of meaning and stuff.
But seriously, being sick as I was yesterday made me look forward to the day when I’m somebody else’s primary priority. When what I’m doing and how I’m feeling is immediately pertinent to someone else. When I don’t have to go shopping for my own chicken and noodle soup, metaphorically speaking. Or actually speaking.
And I anticipate very much the privilege of being all that for her.
