Life is full of irony.
I spent all of high school in love with two different girls who I had no doubt were out of my league. On the last day of twelfth grade, they each (separately) signed my yearbook with something along the lines of, I always had the biggest crush on you. Have fun in college!
That pretty much sums up my skill with women. I could never pick up on the signs, you know? If only I'd known back then that a wedding ring would solve all of my problems. Like most new husbands, my wife had to remind me to put on my ring those first few months. I felt lucky as hell to have landed her, but the idea of wearing a ring just didn't register with me. I kept forgetting it. Now, in her mind the wedding ring is a small round shield to protect me from the wiles of loose women. God bless her naive heart.
In the seven years that I've been married, I've learned that a wedding ring is less of a shield and more of a worm on a hook. It's as if women have their own special grading system when it comes to men. The sole on a man's shoes can tell you if he's got a car, his hands tell you what kind of work he does, but a wedding ring...
Oh man!
A wedding ring is like a certificate of authenticity. Combine the wedding ring with a simple question like, How long have you been married, and a woman has all the information she needs. When I say I've been married seven years, that's like saying "I'm a good man, with obviously a good job or credit considering the store and part of the city that I'm in. I must not have any major flaws because some woman has chosen to stay with me for seven years. That must mean that I'm either romantic, loaded with cash or endowed in other ways."
Now for all the power that the wedding ring has, nothing compares to the stroller.
Let me share with you, dear friends, the ballad of the Graco stroller.
If the wedding ring really were a shield like my wife naively thinks, then the stroller would be my sword. Pushing my three month old baby in her stroller while proudly wearing my wedding ring is like dipping myself in gold and standing on a pedestal. I'm a Black man who speaks proper English, is married AND takes care of my kids. When I walk by a playground or the baby section of target, I feel like a crippled gazelle limping alone at night through the savanna.
Maybe the women are wearing camouflage or maybe my eyesight is just that bad where I don't see them lurking in the bushes on a sunny day, but it shocks me everytime when a random woman jumps up out of a manhole like an urban Vietcong and dashes across four lanes of traffic to ask me what time it is, how I'm doing, how old my daughter is or where the closest store is.
Irony- Women want you when they shouldn't. I love my wife, but if I EVER figure out how to get this flux capacitor working, I'm going back ten years and I'm buying a cheap wedding band from the mall and a stroller from Babies R' Us.
It's nice to be admired, but I have to remind myself
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