Laughter Is The Best...

When I was younger, I liked to daydream about falling in love. I used to lie in my waterbed (be jealous) thinking about what it would feel like to have a boyfriend behind me wrapping his arms around my waist. I watched romantic movies and swooned over Eric twirling Ariel in her blue sparkle dress and Dmitri dancing with Anastasia on a boat in Paris, and I always wondered who my Bryan MacKenzie would be.

I found my Bryan, but I still dream about love, like last spring when a Downton Abbey character romanced my subconscious. Period dramas must be man’s most powerful aphrodisiac because yesterday I saw Les Miserables with Ian, and I came home with a belly full of popcorn, catchy melodies stuck in my head, and a big crush on Mr. Eddie Redmayne as Prince Charming Marius. SWOON.

Period dramas may also be the world’s leading source of male eye-rolls. Case in point - last night:

As I climbed into bed, waiting for Ian to join me, I turned my body towards the darkness of the wall, closed my eyes, and thought of my bespeckled British beau holding his beloved Cosette in his arms. As I played that final scene over and over again in my head, my body felt light and tingly from those old familiar feelings of imaginary romance.

I turned away from the wall and looked over at my husband, who was sitting on the a stool in his underwear, glasses slid down his nose, assembling a thousand-piece Titanic puzzle while humming “My Heart Will Go On.”

I smiled through my mouthguard, “Hey baby?”

“Yeah?”

“I have a really bad crush on Eddie Redmayne in Les Mis right now.”

“Okay.”

I waited a moment to hear a proclamation of love before prompting him, “So...Do you love me like Marius loved Cosette?”

Ian walked over and climbed under the comforter with me. “Baby, he knew her for a hot minute before he fell for her. All she said to him was ‘I’m Cosette,’ and he was like ‘Ohmigosh she’s perfect.’”

“But, but he sang about her...” I sputtered out in protest.

“Annie,” he said firmly, “He obviously just wanted to get into her pants.”

“Well, it worked.”

Ian’s logic was killing my romance buzz, but he continued anyway, “And while we’re on the subject, Romeo and Juliet should have also taken the time to get to know each other because, you know what?” He pointed at me for emphasis, “If you were Juliet lying in the tomb, I totally would have known that that was your sleeping face!”

I pulled our blanket up over my mouth to muffle my loud laughs from the neighbors.

Eric and Dmitri twirled their pretty ladies around, and Marius held Cosette in his arms, but making someone laugh is way more difficult. And my guy sits in his underwear doing puzzles and humming James Horner movie scores. Maybe laughter is the best kind of romance.

Almost done!

The Man of My Dreams

I love being married.  It’s not flowers and love notes all the time, but I find specialness in the everyday-ness of my life with Ian.  The soft crunch of barbeque potato chips being tossed next to the rice milk in the grocery cart; Mike & Mike in the morning and the Real Housewives at night; sharing a bed and toothpaste and movie popcorn with each other...  Newly alone in my Indiana apartment while I wait to join Ian in Chicago, I miss him and all the beautiful comforts of our marriage.  I’m in love.

But, occasionally I miss the feeling of falling in love.  

My step-brother-inlaw (work through that relationship web for a second) is fast falling in love with his new girlfriend.  When we met for dinner last week, he showed us her picture on his phone, smiled coyly whenever we asked about her, and blushed pink when I asked if we should expect to receive a “Save The Date” card in the next few months.  In the most pleasant of snowball effects, his happiness made us happy that night, and I’m even writing about it here.

Revelling in his feelings of young love, I couldn’t help but privately reminisce about that special time in my relationship with Ian.  I remember - with vivid delight - falling in love with him.  My heart would jump with excitement every time the dull ringtone gave way to his deep voice on the phone.  Happy butterflies filled my stomach every time I got to see him, and the feeling was so addictive that I sometimes went out of my way to make sure I’d run into him on campus after our classes.  When he first held my hand, my whole body smiled; and our first kiss made my soul light up.  Indeed, falling in love is a feeling of unparalleled specialness.

Our fun-filled infatuation eventually blossomed into the less-celebrated but infinitely more meaningful capital L Love.  So now when I miss the stomach butterflies, I only have one place left to get them: my dreams.  And I had a really nice bout of nocturnal infidelity a week ago.

One morning last weekend in Chicago with Ian, I was having the most wonderful dream ever: I was falling in love with William Mason, the oh-so-nice and cherubically handsome footman on Downton Abbey.

In my dream, William joined me in the modern day.  Unplagued by World War I and the melodrama of his former employer, he was free to fall in love with me. And I fell in love right back.  My subconscious brain filled with thoughts and feelings of young love as my handsome beau hugged me and held my hand, making my heart jump in excitement and filling up my stomach with happy butterflies.

Then I woke up.  

In my morning stupor, I couldn’t help but feel sad - about the lost dream, the lost love.  So I called out to Ian watching Mike & Mike in the living room: “Baaaaaaaabbbbbbbyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!”

“Yeah?”

“C’youcomehere?”

“Okay, hang on.”

Ian walked in and climbed in bed with me, nudging my poutey cheeks with his fingers.

“What’s wrong? Did you have a bad dream?”

“No, I had a great dream,” I said sadly,  “I was falling in love with William from Downton Abbey, and we really loved each other and were holding hands and everything, and then I woke up and it’s not real.  Hmph.”  I pouted again.

“Aw, it’s okay Annie. I know William’s really nice. But you still have me.”
“Yeah, I do.” I smiled.

And that’s the thing.  I may miss the feelings of falling in love when I wake up from my Downton Abbey fantasies.  But, to paraphrase a line from 500 Days of Summer, Ian’s better than the man of my dreams; he’s real.

Scents & Sensibility

Last week, Ian and I racked up some serious mileage on my parents’ Honda Element.  They let us borrow their fuel-efficient car for our big March road trip, which went like this:  Indy (home) to Chicago (interview) to Little Rock (pit stop) to Austin (wedding), and then we did all 1,200 miles in reverse.  Epic.  A few minutes after checking into our charming B&B in Texas, we found out that (home) is actually going to change to where (interview) took place: Ian got the Chicago job!  So, apart from cutting a rug and drinking lots of Dr. Pepper (created in Texas), we spent the wedding mostly confusing the party guests with our inordinately long answer to the standard introductory question So, where are you from?:  “Well, we lived in Chicago, but we’ve been living in Indianapolis for a year, and now we’re moving back to Chicago.”  I hope our blabbering came off as excitement because, as much as we love being in Indiana and close to my family, we’ve had trouble escaping the feeling the Chicago just feels like home.  But more on that later...

After a week away from Indy, our suitcase had become a clothing battleground, with the forces of Clean fighting for space against the forces of Dirty. I packed one medium-size suitcase for the two of us, and by Monday, Dirty had won.  The clean clothes, neatly rolled into squat tubes, hid under blow dryers and belts while the dirty clothes sloppily squished their way into the nooks of the suitcase.  In a true travel triumph, suitcase had turned into hamper, with the worn undergarments purposefully segregated to the front zippered pocked.

You might think that I would have been bothered by the dirty clothes mixing with the clean ones in my suitcase.  But it didn't bother me at all.  Rather, just like I’ve noticed when I dump the hamper into the washing machine every week, I don’t mind the smell of my husband’s lightly worn undershirts and button-downs.  Actually, I kind of like it.  And before you go accusing me of spending too much time in France, I’ve got science on my side: scent is a pretty powerful biological force.

It turns out that I like the smell of my husband’s dirty laundry because scent and romance are intimately linked.  And the reason I find his scent more attractive than others is because, of all things, our immune systems, as summed up in this Psychology Today article:

Our immune systems are coded for by a cluster of genes called the major histocompatibilty complex (MHC), and everyone, except if you have an identical twin, has a unique set of MHC genes. Your unique string of MHC genes are the genotype for your immune system, and your phenotype, the external manifestation of the genes for your immune system, is your body-odor! And your odorprint is as unique as your fingerprint.

In the now famous "T-shirt" experiments it was shown that specific women chose as most sexy and pleasant smelling T-shirts belonging to men who had immune systems that were different from their own. Because we all possess different MHC genes (and body-odor), for every woman a different set of men will be delicious smelling and others won't be. There's no Brad Pitt of body odor! A woman's nose not only responds to a man's body-odor in terms of his biological suitability, women actually find how a man smells to be the most important factor in their sexual attraction.

Takeaway: always let your spouse buy your perfume or cologne.


And have you ever had a smell provoke a vivid memory?  I have.  In the 9th grade, my dad found an old bottle of cologne that he hadn’t worn in years.  When I smelled it on him that morning, I blurted out, “You smell like England!”  We realized that the last time he wore that particular cologne was during our England trip five years earlier.  Apparently, this smell-memory link occurs because smell and memory are neighbors in our brains:

The olfactory bulb has intimate access to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning. Despite the tight wiring, however, smells would not trigger memories if it weren't for conditioned responses. When you first smell a new scent, you link it to an event, a person, a thing or even a moment. Your brain forges a link between the smell and a memory -- associating the smell of chlorine with summers at the pool or lilies with a funeral. When you encounter the smell again, the link is already there, ready to elicit a memory or a mood. Chlorine might call up a specific pool-related memory or simply make you feel content. Lilies might agitate you without your knowing why. This is part of the reason why not everyone likes the same smells.

I may like the way my husband smells, and I usually enjoy the strong memories distinct odors trigger in my mind, but my favorite demonstration of the power of smell happens every night.  When Teddy takes his evening nap, he sometimes chooses the porch or the cool tile in the kitchen.  But most of the time, he sleeps right here: 

Teddy sleeping on our shoes