So I married a cine-sleeper

My wife is an amazing woman.

She's funny, sweet, intelligent, beautiful, an amazing cook, a source of inspiration and emotional support, a pillar of strength and joy, and somehow she can put up with my shit seven days a week.  When you meet that person in your life that you know is destined to forever be at your side, you feel that natural force of attraction drawing you to them.  Hopefully it's not gravity, because while love is patient, kind, not envious or boastful, it also has a very strict no fatties rule.

No, the attraction I'm describing is that one perfect trait that endears them to you more than you ever thought possible in another person: one outstanding quality, characteristic, habit, or feature that, above all else, defines that person as your destiny.  For me, it's her tears.  Her delicious, life-sustaining tears.

Seriously.

This chick can cry at a movie like you would not believe.  It's like one minute the protagonist is sad because his cat Scruffy ran away or something and then the next minute you look over and there she is, eyes all red and wet and you're like "huh?"  You'd think it was a bad thing or that at least it would cut deep into the tissue budget but they hand packs of them out near the train stations anyway so it's not even like that's a big deal.  Still, we are never, ever watching Old Yeller.  Despite there being plenty of evidence to the contrary, there actually is, in some circumstances, too much of a good thing.

I'm a movie lover, and while I won't boast that I have the best taste in movies in the whole world (just better than all of my friends and people I know personally), the wife is a solid runner-up.  While she may not be up on all her lingo or be able to describe what "Chekov's Gun" is or the beats that comprise a three-act movie, Mrs. Merican is nothing if not exceptional at being able to carry on a conversation for days, weeks about a movie after watching it together.

A couple months ago we sat down together for The Princess and the Frog, and afterward pinned and dissected the thing for hours, finally impaling the head on a #2 pencil and flicking the testes at each other until the lunch bell.  A few days passed in their usual routine, dinners, breakfasts, work hours, and commutes stole away our focus until out of the blue: "you know what else pissed me off?  The fact that there was no actual tension or conflict or even interaction between the protagonists and the villain.  Dude's seriously in the movie for all of like 5 minutes.  It's like they were locked in separate rooms.  It worked in Lion King because that was a good movie with growing, developing characters, but this... this is five good songs bundled in the world's worst music video."  New life poured into the room and again we bounced ideas at each other, commenting and critiquing.

Over a Disney animated feature remarkable only for being the least profoundly disappointing theatrical release since "Hercules."  I'd never met anyone who could get so emotionally involved in a movie--any movie--before.  Even shitty movies.  Even movies she doesn't even like.

Even movies where that kind of emotional involvement is not only unwarranted but profoundly silly.  She cried when the protagonist's girlfriend was kidnapped in Orgazmo.

This is the kind of woman a guy could spend the rest of his life with.

Even go see a Valentine's Day celeb-circle-jerk with.

But then the courtship phase ends.  Let's be honest: aren't we all on our best behavior in the courtship phase?  Those giggling, whispering first months where two people are just happy that in a world where, in accordance with Sturgeon's Law, romance so often feels like roshambo.  All the while, wrapped in that sugar-coating is a festering tumor of insecurity and second-guessing, not wanting to show who we are because we first have to make them fall in love with the person we want them to see.

I'll be honest, too.  I poop when she's around now.  Not like, all the time; just when I need to.  But I do.  Before, though, those first couple months, anytime she visited I'd always suppress it like an Mel Gibson suppressing an angry tirade against the liberal Jew-run media during a field sobriety test.  I may have even done more permanent damage to my colon than ol' Mel did to his career when I finally let fly, too.  But back then I knew that every intestinal ache and smothered squeak between sweaty buttocks was worth it, because this woman... she was once in a lifetime.

Real love sticks around for the subsequent proctologist visits.

And the door swings the other way.  Once rapt with attention even while watching Shaun of the Dead on our fourth or fifth date (the wife hates horror... any horror at all), I now find this same woman dozing off during Wall-E, passing out during Iron Man, catching a quick nap during Clerks.  Even when she picked the movie.  I've heard all the lines.  "I'm tired," "it's getting late," "I'm just so busy at work," "please stop cupping my breasts when you think I'm asleep."  At some point you just tune it all out.

That point, for me, was when I pulled out 1977 Best Picture winner "Rocky" for the night's entertainment.  We took the computer, popped it on, and boom.  Out.  To say she didn't go the distance is a gross understatement.  She barely lasted through the opening bell.

"Down!" her grizzled Irish brain stem cried to her eyelids from the corner of her skull.  "Stay down!"

No.  No no no no no.  Not to this.  Not to the Italian Stallion.  He deserved better.  He deserved better.  I sat there on the bed bewildered.  Her sleepy head down on my lap as I tried to piece together what had happened.  What had gone wrong.  What I had done to make her do this to Sly and me.  I don't know, I just make her so crazy sometimes.  I know she's just doing it because she loves me and she doesn't want me sharing my lap with anyone else.  Sometimes that happens, you know?  Sometimes like cats or babies lay down there and she just has to teach me a lesson that it belongs to her.  I'm just so clumsy.

I feel like there should be a shelter I can stay at, or at the very least a support group.

Someone please help me, before she does it again!  Who would punish another person's sensibilities the way she's doing to mine?  Anyway, I'm going to have to cut this entry off here.  This bean burrito is not agreeing with me at all.