One of my biggest joys in life (aside from revelling in the downfall of Natalie Portman, but I’ll get to that another time) is shopping. I’m so good at shopping I consider it my cardio. I love nothing more than strolling around any shop picking through jewelry, clothes, shoes, decorative items, and more.
That would be fine in and of itself. But I’m a package deal now, and my better half seems to believe shopping is some sort of CIA-born torture session on par with waterboarding or making someone binge-watch full seasons of Gilmore Girls.
This past weekend I had in mind to get all the pieces to finally make my dream makeup vanity. I planned this for weeks. I needed to go to three places to get all the necessary parts, and all of them were big. That meant I had to ask for help from The Reluctant Shopper.
You have no idea how hard it is to prepare a man like this for this kind of shopping trip. You can’t just charge in, full force, and announce, “WE’RE GOING TO TARGET,” or whatever. You have to gently introduce the idea. You have to pick the moment between his favorite television shows to let him know. You can’t wait too long, or he’ll get comfortable in his Sunday pants and forget it, you’re lugging those giant boxes out of the store yourself. Navy SEALs don’t spend as much time planning clandestine missions as I spend trying to convince one man to drive 15 minutes to a big-box store to get new sheets.
One good thing about my fiance is that when I’m with him, no one at a place like Lowe’s will ever ignore me and make the mistake of asking The Man what the project is. Hey, I’m the one who took the woodshop class and has all the power tools, after all. There’s nothing like the feeling of explaining to a hardware shop worker what you need help with and having him turn to your mate and say: “So what are you working on?” Trust me, he has no freaking clue. My fiance only has a tool box because he won it in a raffle (he was trying to win 100 pounds of fudge and was really upset when he didn’t).
This doesn’t happen with my fiance because he has a perma-clueless look on his face whenever we enter any kind of shopping venue. People instantly know what they’re dealing with. He looks like a gorilla in a tea shop, hopelessly wandering around, desperately looking for an Xbox console or praying that somehow someone will magically start playing a Packers game on the wall.
To prevent him from dying of sheer boredom and misery (a thing he has assured me could definitely happen during these long trips), I give him simple tasks to keep his brain occupied. But even this proves almost impossible. I once asked my fiance, well-trained and disciplined good listener that he is, to go grab some paper towels while I was looking through paint samples at Home Depot. He wandered off for 20 minutes and came back with a rake. Having no clue how to address this, I bought and paid for the rake. We don’t even have a yard.
Mostly, I just let him stay home and enjoy a day off from stores and me spending 45 minutes deciding if I need another pair of shoes in light blue or a different light blue. Besides, I sure as hell don’t need another rake.
Rebecca Rose is available on layaway. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 2-9, 2018.
