My older son and his wife evidently believe that an element of competition adds a fun, festive note to their nine-year marriage.
Joe, 35, and Nicole, 32, regularly bet on the outcomes of even the most trivial happenings. Once on a Florida family vacation, for example, they placed a wager on whether or not I (an unwitting party to their contest) would find a shark’s tooth during my evening stroll along the shore. When I did so, Joe’s lack of confidence in my beach-combing skill left him with a week of dish-washing duty when the couple returned home.
Recently Nicole lusted after a fancy new phone at the same time that Joe eyed an expensive fly-fishing reel. But both refused to purchase the desired goods outright; instead, they wanted to feel they’d earned the right to buy, so they staged a nine-part challenge they dubbed the “Galletta Gender Games.”
My husband, Fred, and I served as referees, timers, question-posers and performed such miscellaneous functions as sitting on the opponents’ ankles during the sit-ups portion of the rivalry.
It didn’t bode well for Joe when he detailed the donnybrook’s rules and, in an eerie echo of his father’s world-class language-mangling, said, “To the loser go the spoils.”