As an editor, a big part of my job is paying attention to details from grammar to headlines.
I also consider myself to be a bit of a romantic.
A number of years ago, I knew I wanted to get married but I also knew that she wasn’t quite ready yet.
So I carved the proposal into a tree and decided to wait until she was ready. This way it would look like it had been there for some time when I did think she was ready.
The actual carving job is something that still makes her chuckle today. I signed my carving to which she was like “well, even if I ran into it accidentally, which is extremely unlikely, how many people were going to leave proposals on trees for me?”
For Valentines Day this year, I thought I’d keep it a little simpler. I got her some flowers and chocolate. However, the thing she always seems to like the most is books. In fact, the topic of getting married had come up before I proposed and she told me not to spend a lot of money on a ring; rather she told me to bribe her with books (which I definitely did).
So for Valentines Day I also wanted to get her a book. I think I have a pretty good idea of the books she likes to read. I’ve successfully managed to buy books she has liked in the past.
The great difficulty with buying her books is that there’s a substantial risk of buying her a book she’s already read (at least when buying books that are in the categories she likes to read the most). I have on a previous occasion bought her something she had already read (although sometimes she’s still happy with it if it’s a different or especially nicer version than what she has).
In the past, she’s had over 30 books checked out or requested from the library at the same time, sometimes reading three in a single evening after coming home from work. She contests this by saying those were “easy reading” but I still think it borders the absurd. Once, she read the same book three times in one day.
After spending about 45 minutes in the bookstore, I settled on a book I was fairly certain she hadn’t read yet that I also thought she would like. I went home and as I was about to hand it over I thought that I’d done pretty well. In that moment, I realized that for Valentines Day I was giving my wife a book titled 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.