When you can't figure out why your spouse married you in the first place

I've heard it said that women enter marriage hoping to change their husbands, while men enter marriage hoping their wives never change.

I don't know how true that is, but I do know this: After nearly 23 years of marriage, I think my wife knows that I'm pretty much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get proposition. You're either driving me off the lot as-is or you're walking the other way.

And so far, incredibly, she has chosen to stick around.

Which is saying something, because if I lay it out in a balance sheet format, I'm finding that life with me has a lot more debits than credits.

There's the whole has-no-mechanical-aptitude thing, which gets pretty annoying (and expensive) if you live in a house, since the guiding principle of home ownership is that anything that can break most certainly will, and so will everything else that you thought couldn't.

I'm also a worrier who is constantly reassessing his life plan. You probably don't even have a life plan. I have something like four of them, and I switch from one to the other every week or so depending on which way the wind blows.

I don't cook much. I have little interest in yard work outside of cutting the grass. I'm not especially spontaneous. And I eat foods you probably don't like and listen to music you almost certainly don't like.

I allow my mood to be dictated on autumn Sundays by the fortunes of a perennially losing professional football team.

And I complain about not getting enough sleep but won't do anything to actually get myself to bed at a decent time.

What a catch! I know you ladies are lining up to see if you can steal me away.

On the plus side, I always wash the dishes because I can't stand to leave them in the sink. I'll clean your litter boxes if you have cats. And if you're playing Trivia Crack, I'm handy to have in the room if you don't know the leading hitter on the 1962 St. Louis Cardinals (Stan Musial, of course), the guy who invented the helicopter (depends on who you talk to, but usually thought to be Paul Cornu), or various other bits of minutiae that fill my head.

Aaaaaaand, that about wraps up the positives.

I don't say this to be self-deprecating or anything. It's just kind of the way it is. Unless you have a huge ego, you can probably come up with a lot of negatives about yourself, too.

For the most part, I actually don't mind my flaws. They're what make me who I am. I just don't know if I would go so far as to marry me, or someone like me. But Terry did, and I've never thought of her as especially crazy. So there must be something there that attracted her.

I think it's my blog. Chicks totally dig low-profile lifestyle bloggers.