So There Miss Nosy Pants

SRH and I have been together since we were 20 years old – we have, for all intents and purposes spent our entire adult lives together. Certain things happen when you spend the entirety of your formative adult years together:

1. You have joint checking and savings accounts – some of our friends have separate accounts and can’t imagine having to make all money decisions together with their partner. Those people apparently didn’t start out married life as poor graduate students who could only keep an account open (you need at least $5, you know) if both of their stipends were directly deposited to said account. What I’m trying to say is that in the early days it didn’t make sense to have to make a withdrawal from two accounts if we wanted to order a pizza since neither one of us could afford it on our own.
2. You have trouble remembering that your partner didn’t go to high school with you. So you’ll say things like, “Hey, remember during prom when we…oh crud, we didn’t go to prom together, did we?” I do automatically make the assumption that SRH has been in my life for all of my life quite regularly. Side note: my high school boyfriend and SRH share the same first name, a love of soccer, and the ability to draw. Apparently, I have a type.
3. Privacy and boundaries are different when you have built your entire adult life together – it’s not the same as when established adults come together with a life, email, and credit of their own. (I presume, since I don’t have direct experience, I might just be making things up here.)
   

Let me give an example of the privacy/boundaries thing. The other day I needed to get into SRH’s wallet so that I could get his library card. You see, I had encouraged SRH the week before to reactivate his library card so that we could get Zane more videos at the library – I was at the video max. Don’t judge me, we get books too. It’s just that you’re allowed to get like 30 books at a time. We hardly ever hit that limit.

Anyway, I got a “library materials are due” notice to our joint email account, and I wanted to go ahead and renew the materials online, so I needed his card, blah blah blah. So I didn’t hesitate to go get his wallet and peruse through it for the card.

I don’t regularly go through his wallet, you understand, but I needed something very specific that was in there. Then this thought hits me, Hey, this how it happens. I’ve heard women say things like “I was just looking through his wallet, when I found her number. Then he confessed that he was in love with her and hadn’t loved me for years.”

As I had this thought, I had to laugh. What a silly thought – just the other day someone told us that we still act like newlyweds. Then I saw it – a small, folded white piece of paper with a small amount of writing on it. I don’t mind telling you, I stopped laughing.

I envisioned myself on Oprah saying,

Me: No, I swear I had no idea. I thought we had a really strong marriage. No, there were no signs.

Oprah, shaking her head: Oh please, there are always signs. You were in denial.

Me: No, Oprah. I used to be a therapist – I can read people’s subtle signs. There was nothing there.

Oprah: Zany Mama, I think you need to figure out what it is about you that you allowed yourself to stay in a clearly troubled marriage. Why didn’t you think you deserved better?

The Oprah scenario went through my mind in about .02 seconds as I opened the paper. The other thing that was going through my mind was I can’t believe I’m opening a small, folded, piece of paper from my husband’s wallet.

Then, I read the words: VILDAR THE UNDEAD WARLOCK. Yes, dear readers, I’ll say it again: Vildar the Undead Warlock.

While this may not have much significance to most readers, let me clarify that I automatically knew that this had something to do with The World of Warcraft – an online game that SRH plays with his two best friends who are in different states. It’s a weekly assignation for the three of them – they stay up late on Friday night playing the computer and drinking grape soda and killing orcs, or some such. SRH has attempted to get me interested in playing, but this is one thing I will not share with my beloved.

So, I think that’s my lesson: Don’t go snooping – albeit unintentionally, I was looking for a library card – or you may find out the painful truth that your significant other likes computer games so much that he carries around character names in his wallet. And before you suggest that perhaps Vildar is the alias for a hot young thing that knows that the way to a man’s heart is through computer games, I do actually know the identity of Vildar, and he’s not SRH’s type.