The lovely wife and I celebrated our 11th marriage anniversary last week, which means we've been living together in a house or flat on our own for about 13 years. Frankly, I'm baffled that we get invited anywhere as a couple anymore, because our conversation is just full of in-jokes and dumb TV show quotes, and we're the only people who know what the fuck we're talking about.
We were at a family barbecue last night, and couldn't resist throwing out a couple of quotes from Archer, and trying to do Tom Hardy's 'I have a use for you' from Taboo, even though nobody else had seen those shows. We just did it to make ourselves happy.
And if we're not doing that, we're boorishly going on about some travel that we did together, casually dropping some reference to the toilet situation in Mongolia or the goofiness of the reindeer in Lapland, even though nobody else could have any idea what we're on about. We're just awful like that.
We have some very different tastes - she's a Say Yes To The Dress fan, I'm more Storage Wars; she has a fatal weakness for period romances, I like my horror to be as gory and intense as inhumanly possible. But we also like a lot of the same stuff, and share a very general sense of humour, so we end up watching a lot of things together. We both like watching - and quoting from - things like South Park, Family Guy and Robot Chicken, although I'm the only one feeling stupidly guilty about it. The Simpsons is still the best at providing a quote for all occasions.
She never used to be this dorky. She'd never seen an episode of Doctor Who until we got married, and I started her on the soft stuff like Buffy, before getting her hooked on some serious nerdy shit like the Venture Bros. Now, quotes from all these TV shows and movies we watch together get stuck in our conversation, and we'll end up wondering how the singer of Depeche Mode could be so straight, or why the Crash Test Dummies make the best funeral music.
And if that's not enough, we're constantly tossing Malcolm Tucker insults at each other, and share the wit and wisdom of Scott Adkins' Boyka (especially the 'this is not punishment, this is training' line from Undisputed 2). Several favourite lines from The Wire regularly crop up, but must sound awful out of context, so we tend to keep those ones to ourselves at home.
After all, this shit doesn't even count the ultra-nauseating language we use around each other when we're alone, which should under no circumstances be shared with anybody. Pet names, and whispered secrets. (I once accidentally sent one of these terms of affection to a co-worker in an email he'd accidentally been CCed on, and I still pray to God every day that he doesn't remember it.)
In more than a decade together, she's changed me for the better - I dress better, I eat better, I am better. In return, I've made her considerably nerdier - during a recent stopover at a comic shop in Oslo, she bought something, while I walked out empty handed, and that's the first time that's ever happened.
But the most obvious example of this dorkcafication is in this secret code of half-remembered quotes and shared experiences. It's only going to get worse over the coming years, but sharing my life with this gorgeous, smart and capable woman is the great joy of my existence, and she's always going to be the only one I can talk to in this way. Eleven years is just the beginning.
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