Cranky pants is a closet nice guy

The hubster is a very sweet and romantic guy for a cranky pants. He’ll be the first to admit the cranky pants part. But he prefers to keep his sweet romantic side quiet. He’s the type of person that depending on the environment in which you meet him you may or may not like him. And in some cases people have admitted to me that when they first met him they REALLY didn’t like him. But then, like mold, he grows on you. Spend enough time with him and you’ll catch a glimpse of the hidden nice guy. For some reason from the moment we met he let the nice guy side show. But I was also able to see the cranky pants side.

I remember having a conversation with one of his friends. I think he was looking out for me and wanted to make sure I knew he was a stubborn cantankerous cranky pants. He was drilling me about how well I knew him and I mentioned something like “Well he can be cranky as hell but to me that just makes me feel more alive and involved. I wouldn’t want a guy that would just roll over and die for me.” And the friend responded with “Oh, you really do know him?”

So 8 years from meeting I still love everything about him. We balance each other well. The light, the dark. The calm and the storming.

Over dinner last night we talked about what makes couples couple. Why do they fit so perfectly. Because he needs to be mothered and she will do that. Or, she needs someone that just rolls over and dies for her and he’s willing to roll. Or, she needs a father figure. Or he needs someone that will make him look good in public. Or, he’s not repulsed at the sight of her. Or, they make each other laugh. Or they both like to eat sponge cake in bed. The reasons couples couple are infinite. We decided that we work because we put up with each other.

One of my friends describes him as a closet nice guy. Here are some of those instances:

When we were planning our wedding we decided from the start that it was going to be a very home grown, hand made gathering. It was not going to be a big ostentatious affair. We simply wanted our friends and family with us when we exchanged our promises to one another. It was all about the love not the wedding. Check out my rant page for more on that.

Anyway, we made our own invitations. We had gone out to a store that was hell and gone from home and while there we had found the perfect invitations. But we thought, oh, they’ll have these for a while so let’s keep looking. Well the more we looked the more I loved the ones at that shop. So a few weeks later we headed back to the store to get them. They were sold out and discontinued. I was crushed.

A few days later it was valentines day. We exchanged gifts, cards, etc. But then Michael said he had one more gift for me. It was the invitations. I cried. A flood of tears spilled forth. He had gone back to the store and gotten them shortly after we had been there the first time and had planned to give them to me as a surprise. He actually didn’t expect me to set my mind so soon on the invitations. I couldn’t believe how he even went all the way back to the store knowing they weren’t there.

Another closet nice guy was when Kellogg’s had Winnie the Pooh bobble heads. I love Eeyore so we got a box of fruit loops to see if we would happen to get one. I had a one in four chance right? Well, no, didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. Oh well. No biggie.
But then a few weeks later I went down in the basement to get something from the tool closet. When I opened it up there were over a dozen boxes of fruit loops inside. He had gone to the store and bought a cart full of cereal to try to get me an Eeyore. How sweet is that????????????

This past weekend we had gone to one of the great icons of the cities. The Electric Fetus. It’s a head shop and used record store. We bought a bunch of used cds. Our friends were with us and they were looking through the cd’s we bought. R commented that I even had a classical c.d. (She loves classical). Surprised I said “there should be two” but nope, only one. The clerk had missed the other. Hubster asked if I wanted to go back to get the c.d. I said no, that was ok. Well, I’ll be damned if he didn’t give me the missing c.d. this morning. He won’t tell me how he got it. He either took it out of the bag and hid it down his pants when we left the store, had our friends sneak it out of the bag or he actually went back to the store to get it for me yesterday. Whatever the case, he’s sweet. The romantic in me is going to go with “he went back to the store to get it”
So, there you go. Life with a closet nice guy a.k.a. cranky pants..