My wife has successfully completed beginning kickboxing classes and is looking for more.
Not cardio–no such luck. This is for-real, “Kiii-ya! Here are your testicles” stuff.
Now, she’s a diminutive, rather fetching redhead who recently has acquired some serious fitness and the attendant muscles. Why she feels compelled to learn to beat people up–not me, one can only hope–is beyond my powers of comprehension.
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Self-defense and fitness, my eye. Most people buy SUVs, get on the highway and tailgate when they want to feel empowered.
In guyville, events such as these make you wonder how you have been, as a friend, partner, husband–all that stuff that guys customarily don’t worry about.
If you’ve been good, what’s there to worry about, crow the women out there from behind smug grins?
Now in her defense, she did offer me the opportunity to begin the classes with her. Yet as every guy knows, if things like that aren’t our idea, we don’t want any part of it.
But upon my declining, she said, “OK, but just wait until I can kick your [butt].” She didn’t say butt, but you get the idea.
There are Major Things that make guys think. One is “We have to talk.” Some others are “I was checking the dialing logs on your cell phone,” “The video store had `The Burning Bed’ in. What luck,” or “I’m going to take kickboxing classes.”
And so the contemplation begins.
Saying “I love you” enough. Check. Being supportive. Check. Cleaning and stuff. Check. Maybe I should walk the dog more . . . that might help.
I know she gave me the chance to take them with her, but truth to tell, the sincerity of the offer is nagging at me. Between my daily 50-mile bicycle commute, thinking great thoughts for Mother Tribune and weekend pedaling or making a divot in the sofa, who has time for another thing? Cello lessons got kicked to the curb, my air tools (for car fiddling) are in semi-permanent retirement. Come on, man!
Did she know about my lack of time and made the offer, secure in the knowledge that she’d be turned down? It’s like an Oliver Stone film about marriage and intentions, except you’re in the limo, and she’s behind the grassy knoll.
It isn’t that guys think about how we’re behaving only until we think we’re in trouble, but that’s pretty much how it is. We’re like dogs, actually. It isn’t until the rolled-up newspaper comes out and our nose is being shoved into some mess that we say, “What? What?”
New-relationship guys are exempted. You’re still on the “Baby, please” program, in which you aren’t acting like yourself.
You’ll know you’re out of that phase when that pet name suddenly starts getting on your nerves. “What the hell is a pooka, anyway?” You lads should clip and save this one, and imagine my voice saying, “Told ya.”
Now, there is an effective way to pre-empt this, which is to be a kind, loving spouse, mate, other, whatever.
But even if you have been (and I have . . . I hope and pray), you never know. Which every guy suspects is part of why women do stuff like this, to keep us off balance, to make us wonder: Have we been as good as we think we’ve been?
And if there’s ever an audio version of this column, and it has a rather high-pitched tone to it, you will know that the answer is, for this guy at least, no.
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Send e-mail for Kevin Williams to kmwilliams@tribune .com