Holiday With My Parents Part 1

My preverbal cold shower is hanging out with my parents. God forbid I lose my job and have to move home. Then I would be living at home AND asexual. Yeep.

This holiday-sanctioned hanging out with parents had a new dimension to it, however. There was the usual cringing at the kiss scene(s) in every holiday movie my parents and I watched. But there was an additional bucket of cold water thrown on my growing frustration at singlehood. With my parents’ 40-plus year marriage on display in front of me, bemoaning my status was quickly turned into, “Jesus Christ, what’s my hurry?”

My parents are well matched. Where it counts, weaknesses in the character of one is made up for in an overabundance of that trait in the other, and there is a great balance of give and take in their marriage. Most importantly, they’re happy together.

Don’t worry; this isn’t going to turn into a belabored prose version of “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl that Married Dear Old Dad.” In addition to her myriad wonderful qualities that should qualify her for sainthood, my mother frets to the point of a low-level whimpering whenever anyone else is driving. My father’s jabbing humor is funny about 20 percent of the time, and he scratches his balls more than any daughter would like to see.

I could go on, but I don’t mean to skewer, just to illustrate that after a few days of witnessing my parents’ marriage I came to this conclusion: I better be damn sure. If I’m really going for one of these “in it for the long haul” relationships, I better be damn sure that I love the person enough to put up with the ball scratching, or that I am not bothered by constant low-level whining from my passenger. The humor thing would probably be a deal breaker before date two.

I was happy to be given the larger perspective. True, I haven’t had a good date in a very long time. But any rush is my own creation, and my punishment would likely be a lifetime of ball scratching.