I'll Just Sit Here and Look Pretty

When Husbandrinka and I got married, I decided to be all-feminist and "pull my own weight" in the relationship.   Which would have been fine if I weighed twelve pounds.  He outearned me a margin of kazillion to one, and also I wasn't much of a housekeeper, or a cook, now that you mention it, so I offered to pay the bills. Not with my own money, bite your tongue, but to write out the checks from our checkbook and send them out.  With a stamp and everything, I'm not a complete slug.

Husbandrinka was delighted with my offer, although he became somewhat less delighted within a few months when we started getting "turn off" notices from the phone company and our electricity provider.   I was used to living paycheck to paycheck, so turn off notices were my equivalent of those little "friendly reminder" notes.

"What's the big deal?" I asked. I may have been eating ice cream at the time.

"The big deal is that we are supposed to pay our bills," he explained. He may have been taking Exederin Extra Strength at the time.

"Well, I didn't.  So what?  Is that like against the law or something?"

"Do you like heat? Do you like lights? Let me rephrase that, do you like TV?"

I nodded.  I did like TV a lot.  I liked it so much that I taped General Hospital every day.  As a matter of fact, this conversation was eating into my TV watching time, so I was hoping that it was approaching a quick conclusion.

"You have to pay bills on time," he told me.  Seriously, it takes all kinds.

I realized that this marriage business was going to be more work than I'd bargained for, what with all these "we must have electricity" demands. But I made sure that the electricity bill was paid, so that we wouldn't have that awkward conversation again.  But this was in the days before automatic check paying, so I had to manually write out the checks, like an animal, and I don't know, I got bored or my hand got tired, so although I paid the electricity and the phone, I didn't pay the credit card bill.  For a few months.  And do you know what those anti-Semitic Jihadists do when you don't pay your credit card bill?  They charge late fees and also increase the sodomite finance charge.  

So Husbandrinka looked at the credit card bill and the finance charge is like 800% and he askedme if I have a credit card with Tony Soprano, which is funny, so now we're Husbandrinka: 1, Marinka 1,986.  

And then he told me that I wasn't allowed to pay bills anymore.  The one thing that I was able to do, he took away from me, just because I did it badly and nearly bankrupted us.  Men.  They try to keep you down.