Humor

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Thursday last, I was busily engaged in minding my own business (which has turned out to be a career without either salary or benefits and absolutely no retirement plan) when the Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage snapped me back to reality. “Didn’t you promise ….”

With that phrase my brain froze and I did not hear what she said next. However, somewhere along the line, she got the idea I promised something and furthermore she expected me to do what I promised.

This only points out the philosophical difference between husbands and wives. A wife remembers everything her husband promises and even those things he never consciously promised. The problem with husbands is we never know what we promised in reality and what we promised in “wife virtual reality.”

Every wife assumes when her husband absentmindedly nods his head he knows what she said, has agreed with her, and, in effect, has made a promise. Furthermore, these promises are etched in stone and can never be changed as long as the world stands. You would think by this time the world would at least sit down. But there it stands.

What wives need to understand is when her husband absentmindedly nods his head it is much like a baby who smiles … it’s probably only gas.

Husbands, on the other hand, do not put as much stock in promises as their marital counterparts. To husbands, a promise is a necessary inconvenience to get through a particular situation or unpleasant encounter with his wife. As such, a promise is only as good as a husband’s memory.

A husband’s memory is quite different from his spouse’s. This is the key to a husband’s promise. When it comes to memory, husbands are rather selective. Knowing there are too many things in this world, a husband selects those things he believes are worth remembering. Every husband worth his salt understands that not everything falls into this category.

A husband’s memory capacity is not as large as his spouse’s and therefore he must be very careful not to overload his memory system. Once that memory system is overloaded … well, it is not a pretty sight. Husbands know this and are very diligent in selecting those things to store in that restricted memory system.

This “selective memory” is done because of the husband’s deep love and abiding affection for his good wife. He knows she does not deserve to see the memory system overloaded and therefore, with great carefulness and conscientiousness, he selects those pieces of information worthy to be stored in his memory system.

Now comes the difficult part. Because of his compassion to carefully select the right things to remember, there are times when inadvertently he will miss something that should be stored in that memory system. This is not done deliberately; but rather it is an oversight spawned by love.

Wives, on the other hand, have a memory system that is virtually infinite. Every good wife can store in her memory system everything and anything. In fact, some research suggests that the more they remember the bigger their capacity to remember becomes. It is one of those anomalies of the female nature that no man can understand.

There is only one problem with this “female memory system.” Their memory is indiscriminate. In other words, they remember everything and equate everything they remember as equally important. This, as you can understand, is a source of continual bafflement for every man married to a woman.

Another feature of this is that any woman can at any time recall any bit of information stored in her memory system. This total recall has also been a source of conflict in every marital relationship. This puts husbands at a great disadvantage.

Through the years, my good wife has reminded me of promises I made 100 years ago and I have no way of proving if I, in fact, did make such a promise. Eventually, and out of a sense of self-preservation, I accede to her interpretation and memory of the facts at hand.

To be fair about this whole business of making promises, I think a promise should be a legal document notarized and witnessed by two friends on each side of the marital aisle. Then that promise becomes a fact. Of course, there is always the likelihood that the husband’s friends will not remember signing said document.

The only problem with this is, no wife worth her salt would ever agree to it. It lacks, from their point of view, a sense of romance. No husband has enough indiscriminate memory space to argue with this.

I am sure glad God does not have problems along this line. His memory is perfect and his promises are absolutely divine. A Bible verse that brings me great comfort in consolation is, “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9 KJV.)

Our challenge is to search the Bible and discover what God has actually promised. Some people are expecting God to do certain things he has never promised. God will always do what he has promised but he will never do what he has not promised.

Getting back to my wife’s query. “Didn’t you promise to take me to lunch today?”

I did not remember, but we had a very nice lunch at the Burp ‘N Slurp Café.

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