Sex and Marriage

Before I got married I lived by myself. Living by your self you develop your own routine so that you know where everything is when you need it and there always seemed to be time to get things ready like clean clothes for the week and an ample supply of socks.

I had socks in that flat that had been with me almost since leaving school some ten or fifteen years previously. Good old Marks and Spencer’s woolen navy blue ones that had seen me through hotel training, commuting to London and countless trips around the country. Every Sunday they would go through the wash in pairs and come out almost folding themselves into pairs. They never went missing. They never wore out and best of all, I was never left with just one sock of a pair.

What is worse than going off to work with socks that match in color but do not match in length? It is almost as bad as having a leak in one Wellington boot but I guess that is only a problem if it is wet. But with odd length socks on for a day, they just never feel right and you are forever pulling them up to make them reach equal heights above your ankles.

Then the happy state of marriage came. Before we could afford a washing machine we would bundle all of our clothes together and take them to the local launderette which was the same one I had been using as a single person. Each week we would sit and read the papers while our clothes went through wash, rinse and dry. Each week we would empty the machines we had used and take our now clean clothes home for sorting. Each week I would find that somehow I always ended up with half a pair of socks. In the now vain hope that the other one would appear at some later date I would amass a collection of single socks in a drawer. Eventually this collection of singletons would be equal to or greater than the collection of paired socks. Why?

Is it the same reason that collections of CD’s in single days always stayed in the correct cases, neatly stored in the rack in some sort of order either by style of music or name of the artiste until after the wedding?

Any protestation about these inconveniences is met with the reply “Oh stop being so anal about your things. It’s only a pair of socks. No one will notice if they don’t match”. Or “I don’t know why you waste your time putting those CD’s back in order. As long as they are in the rack you’ll know roughly where they are”.

Sorry, was the title “Sex and Marriage”. I guess that was a bit of a typo. I meant to say “Socks and Marriage”.