Come the weekend, I always wanted to go out to the bars, whereas she always wanted to go out to the bar bars. Needless to say, there were other issues, as well. For example, while I’ve always been a bit of a gabber, it turned out to be impossible for the two of us to sit down together and have a conversation. You might think this was because, being a length of metal rod (that is to say, a bar), she didn’t have a mouth which to speak or, for that matter a brain with which to think of something to say, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Silence, after all, is its own form of interlocution, as anyone who has ever been a self-conscious adolescent in the thrall of the infamous “imaginary audience” can tell you from personal experience. Rather, the difficulty lay in the fact that owing to my ex-wife’s very particular anatomy, it was impossible for her to even sit down in the first place, in which regard it was indeed a matter of a lack of articulation, but probably not the kind of articulation you were thinking of. Another problem, as long as I’m on the topic, was that if someone were to have broken into the house to rob us, owing to the aforementioned anatomy they could have easily used my ex-wife as a weapon against me, and knowing that was a source of unease for me in the relationship. It’s true, of course, that I could in theory have as easily used her as a weapon against this hypothetical malicious intruder, but to have done so surely would have constituted a breach of the “cherish” portion of my marital vows to “love and to cherish,” and if not that then without doubt the “hold” part of “to have and to hold” (although the irony, in retrospect, is that breaking one or another of those vows may have mercifully sped up this dissolution). All that being said, I should reiterate that the possibility of her being used against me violently by a burglar or other intruder, much like the impossibility of our sitting down together and having a conversation, was not, as I see things, the primary driver of said dissolution. That, as noted above, was the conflict that arose between us on the weekends, when I wanted to go out to the bars and she wanted to out to the bar bars. In reiterating this, however, I should probably also acknowledge that at the end of the day, I don’t think it was actually about the locales, per se. Rather, I suspect it was more about the fact that the reason I wanted to go out to the bars was because that was where all my friends hung out, while the reason she preferred the bar bars was because that was where all her friends hung out, and when the rubber hit the road it was sort of like that famous lyric from the Spice Girls’ 1996 hit single “Wannabe” that says, “if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends,” something my wife and I never did that ultimately doomed us as lovers, thereby vindicating the position affirmed by the Spice Girls in their 1996 hit single “Wannabe.’
