25 Random Married Things

I'm afraid all my blogging mojo has migrated over to Facebook these days. It appeals to both my voyeuristic and exhibitionist tendencies, and it's fun when things happen such as your wife's gay cousin, your boss at work, and your mom all chatting together in the comment section of a particular post. Anyway, here's something I typed up over at Facebook, with a few additional tweaks:

♥ What are your middle names?
Ann: None, Me: Kimball

♥ How long have you been together?
Married 11 years in April, plus our four-month courtship/engagement.

♥ How long did you know each other before you started dating?
The extent of one brief phone call.

♥ Who asked who out?
We were set up on a blind date.

♥ How old are each of you?
Me 42, Ann 43

♥ Whose siblings do you see the most?
Probably mine. I have five out of six sisters living relatively nearby (all three brothers are in other states), while Ann has only one sibling in the state.

♥ Do you have any children together?
Three: Austin (9), Kimball (4), Zach (3)

♥ What about pets?
The kids feel like pets quite often, and we also have a cat officially named Dragon but often known as Titty.

♥ Which situation is the hardest on you as a couple?
Dealing with the baggage from my previous marriage, including two kids and their mom. That's the only thing that's ever landed us in a therapist's office, which helped, actually.

♥ Did you go to the same school?
Not for undergrad, but we both earned master's degrees at BYU.

♥ Are you from the same home town?
No, she's a Provo gal and I'm from Southern California and Bountiful, Utah.

♥ Who is smarter?
We're well matched. Ann is definitely better on things like logistics and directions. I'm more the dreamy creative type. We're both pretty logical in most areas.

♥ Who is more sensitive?
Neither one of us is very emotional, most of the time. Neither gets their feelings hurt by the other very easily. We're both quite live-and-let-live, without unrealistic expectations, grudges, all that high-maintenance crap.

♥ Where do you eat out most as a couple?
Bombay House

♥ Where is the farthest you two have traveled together as a couple?
Paris, France (but we're shooting for China this June)

♥ Who has the craziest exes?
Me, by far. My ex-wife disrupts our life at least weekly. And from what we've talked about regarding earlier partners, it sounds like I had a knack for attracting fairly dysfunctional women (up until Ann, that is).

♥ Who has the worse temper?
We're pretty close to the same. I think I yell at the kids more than she does. Ann has probably gotten madder at me than I've gotten at her, but it doesn't happen very often.

♥ Who does the cooking?
Ann does most of the time, but I'll occasionally make lunch or cook some spaghetti or macaroni for dinner.

♥ Who is more social?
Pretty close to the same. We're not very good about reciprocating invitations or reaching out socially as a couple. It seems like we just don't have time. Ann has some girlfriends from her single days that she stays in pretty close contact with, and I tend to get most of my social interaction at work.

♥ Who is the neat-freak?
Me, hands down. I'm not a white-glove kind of guy, but I'm driven crazy by a cluttery, untidy environment. Ann, on the other hand, is a great organizer/cleaner when she gets around to it, but she is content to let things pile up for weeks or even months. I think she probably has better priorities than me, though, in terms of using more of her time and energy to actually, you know, interact with the kids and stuff.

♥ Who is the more stubborn?
Neither one of us stands out as more stubborn than the other. We both have our little weird hang-ups, I guess (maybe I have slightly more than she does). We're very evenly matched on temperament, which is why we experience almost no conflict on an ongoing basis. Seriously, we just get along extremely smoothly. It's been great!

♥ Who hogs the bed?
I am probably ruder about kicking out the sheets so my feet can breathe and then sometimes pulling the covers off her when I roll over in the night. We would love to upgrade to a king-size bed sometime.

♥ Who wakes up earlier?
Most weekdays we both get up at 6:45, but sometimes Ann gets up earlier to go to the gym. On weekends, she is usually the first one up with the kids around 8:00, while I sometimes sleep until closer to 9:00.

♥ Where was your first date?
I was forty-five minutes late to Los Hermanos in Provo (I was driving down from Salt Lake, and it was during the big freeway reconstruction project, so she waited for me). After dinner, believe it or not, we went to a BYU basketball game with her parents.

♥ Who has the bigger family?
I have nine siblings, she has three.

♥ Do you get flowers often?
I'm the man, so no. I get them for her 2-3 times a year, almost always on the expected holidays. I really don't like trying to surprise people or get them gifts.

♥ How do you spend the holidays?
We alternate Thanksgiving between our extended families. We spend Christmas eve with her family and usually some close neighbor friends of theirs (we live in the same neighborhood where my wife grew up—in fact, her mom still lives across the street from us). We have Christmas morning at our house and then go up to my folks' house in Bountiful for Christmas dinner that afternoon. New Year's Eve we usually just spend home with Ann's mom.

♥ Who is more jealous?
Again, neither one, although Ann did have a weird, uncharacteristic episode of jealousy about two years ago when I was corresponding with a lady in France, who I'd never met, about critiquing each other's novels.

♥ How long did it take to get serious?
We were dating exclusively after our second date and engaged about two months after we met, then married six weeks later.

♥ Who eats more?
I eat larger portions at meals and often succumb to the temptation for seconds, but I think Ann eats more baked goods and desserts than I do.

♥ Who does/ did the laundry?
Ann does all of it, but I'd like to start sending out my work clothes more because she's already too busy and sometimes they sit for several months in the ironing pile.

♥ Who’s better with the computer?
I may be slightly better on some things, but there are also things she does better.

♥ Who drives when you are together?
I drive unless we need to get somewhere fast or follow complex directions or parallel park, and then she takes the wheel. I'm very much an autopilot driver who puts very little thought or effort into it, while she puts a lot of thought into routes and traffic patterns and gas prices and all that stuff.