Marriage Changes, Part 2 – The Apparel

After posting Marriage Changes, Part 1 – The Bathroom, I’ve been lying low; so low that the markings on our floor are now permanently etched on my stomach.

Immediately upon reading the article, my wife confiscated all the keyboards in our house. In response, or more like in fear, I promptly buried all our sharp objects in the backyard.

[We’ve been eating with our hands for the past two weeks and I will say it has done wonders for her figure, I mean my figure.]

Now that things have calmed down, it is time to unleash my second article. Although after my wife’s unexpected response, I’ve chosen more docile topic this time around. So for this article, I will discuss the changes that take place with apparel after tying the knot.

Clothes

I consider myself to be pretty vain when it comes to clothes. I categorize my clothing based on their purpose. I’ve got clothes for the office, repairs, basketball, jogging, swimming, and for leisurely walks on weekends. I even have a set of clothes relegated for home use.

[Home clothes are really just worn out ones with huge holes in them.]

To quantify my cabinets, I’ve got a total of fourteen doors to store all my clothes in. Two of those doors are full length, meaning I can hang my pants on clipped hangers and not have them touch the bottom. This keeps them from getting wrinkled from having to fold them on a hanger.

Looking back, I only needed a total of five doors for all my clothes. The rest of my cabinets were used for my toys, equipment, electronics, and, um, some other stuff.

A day after getting married, we went over to my wife’s house to pack her clothes. No big deal as it only took two medium-sized suit cases. By the time she unpacked, three doors were filled up and my equipment was moved to the garage.

When I recently opened the other cabinets to store more of my new toys I was shocked that all my toys were gone. In their place were even more clothes.

[Women’s clothes must be a new form of life as they multiply like rabbits.]

Thanks to their go forth and multiply attitude, all my clothes now have a new home in a collapsible plastic cabinet in the hall. As far as my equipment is concerned, it has been reunited with my toys, electronics, and, um, other stuff in the garage.

[Yes fellow newlywed men, get acquainted with the garage because you’ll be spending a lot of time there.]

Shoes

I have two pairs of leather shoes for the office, one in burgundy and the other in black. I have a blue pair of canvas sneakers for weekend. I have a pair of brown waterproof boots in case my buddies and I want to go out. For sports and other outdoor activities, I have one pair of rubber shoes in wild orange. For swimming, I have a pair of black aqua shoes. To round it all off, I have two pairs of slippers; one is rubber for outdoors and the other is Abaca, or Manila Hemp, for indoors.

Altogether, I have eight pairs of footwear. Quite a bit, I know, but this is the bare minimum for me because, like I said earlier, I’m vain.

But if you think eight pairs are a whole lot of shoes, that’s nothing compared to my wife’s collection.

Her office shoes alone dwarf my entire collection. Like me, she’s got burgundy and black shoes. The difference is that they are three pairs each. Then there are the other colors like red, blue, pink, orange, gray, green, and several multi-colored ones.

[It’s like a Crayola festival here!]

Now that the office shoes are done, let’s move over to the weekend shoes. Not only do they have the same number of colors they also come in leather, canvas, suede, and plastic. Then there are the closed-toed, open-toed, stilettos, flats, wedges, sling backs, strappy, slip-ons, and laced shoes.

And that’s not counting the slippers she has. Abaca, flip flops, and even rubber slippers are scattered all over the house. At least one pair is for the garden, one for the street, one for the room, one for the bathroom, one for the market, and the rest are for going out.

[How many shoes can women have when they only have two feet?]

And to think that I was worried about the size of the Aqua Shoes I got her at the mall. It turns out that I wasn’t worrying about the right thing because black doesn’t look good in pictures. I ended up getting another pair in pink to make her more photogenic.

My wife has so many shoes that our fourteen doors of cabinets can’t accommodate them anymore. We had to buy several of those plastic shoe holders just to keep our floor free.

Speaking of holders, they look like gigantic square plastic boxes with a see-through side, shelves, and a very long zipper. And since we are out of floor space, they are piled three levels high under our bed.

[Thank goodness she doesn’t have stinky feet or I’ll be sleeping in the garage with all my other stuff.]

Underwear

Like all men, I urinate through the use of sonar. This saves us a ton of electricity since we don’t need to turn on the lights. All we need to know is the high or low pitch the liquid makes and we adjust accordingly.

Before getting married, entering the bathroom at midnight was pretty routine and without any incident. It was a totally different story two days after the wedding.

When I bent down to lift the toilet seat, something grabbed my face and wouldn’t let go!

And since it was wet and had an organic scent that I never encountered before, I thought the Earth was finally invaded. Fearing for my life, I was screaming, “Geth ith hoff! Geth ith hoff!”

[I thought it was a Facehugger from the Alien movies.]

By this time I already had my thingamajig out and was spraying the entire bathroom as I stumbled around in the darkness. It was only after slipping in to the bathtub that the lights suddenly turned on.

Still blinded, I heard my panicked wife rush towards me to peel off… her granny undies.

[And you women thought the only reason we don’t want you wearing them is because they added fifty years to your age.]

Thanks to this experience, I have learned to always turn on the light even if it robs me of sleep during my midnight tinkle.

Final Thoughts

Let’s wrap up my lessons for this article, shall we?

Firstly, I have learned that changes brought about by clothes can be quite minor.

The real change is that I need to get used to the visiting the garage for things more than my precious car because of all my displaced stuff.

Secondly, I have learned to adjust my midnight tinkle runs.

One of the skills I needed to learn as a newlywed man is to stop using my ears for sonar and start using my eyes with the lights on because of the inherent dangers that married life brings.

There is danger lurking in the darkness. Just like a spider that has cast her web, granny undies are just as good at ensnaring prey.

And thirdly, I have learned to be thankful.

I have thanked my lucky stars that women have smaller pores so they don’t sweat as much as men do. If they did, all those smelly shoes would pose a serious health hazard. And not even staying in the garage will solve the problem.

[But the question that really needs to be asked is: If guys don’t hang their underwear in bathrooms, why do women do?]

Just like what I mentioned in Marriage Changes, Part 1, don’t let the little things bother you. There are still other things to get used to. So don’t sweat the small stuff and go out and enjoy yourselves. Happiness, after all, is what marriage is really about.

[Mabuhay and bagong kasal!]