…and the Pineapple Doormat. Or, A Tale of Two People Who Love Each Other Having a Small Argument. Or, The Pervading Inside Joke of this Marriage.
Once upon a time, while Justin and I were engaged, we went to Bed Bath & Beyond to start on a wedding registry. It was a Saturday, late in our senior year of college, at least a month before the wedding invitations with our wedding website—including the registry information—on them would be sent. We hadn’t a care in the world.
At first, it was delightfully fun. We were planning our new life together! We registered for fancy gadgets and small appliances that I’d never used but that Justin, as the more experienced cook, indicated would be useful in our future shared kitchen. We picked out plates and coffee mugs and silverware. Bedsheet thread counts and colors, throw pillows and comforters. Two kinds of wine glasses, a decanter, two sizes of water glasses. I remember picking the water glasses that had the same design on the bottom as the water glasses at my favorite local restaurant, where we’d been on many dates. We had the fun little scanners. Beep, beep, beep.
We’d been there for who knows how long, when we reached the kitchen towel section. I was trying to picture our future kitchen, with matching towels, washcloths, kitchen aid mixer, accents of decor, etc. Just in case we were given every single thing on our registry, I wanted to make sure I picked the right things: things I could love using for years and years: things I wouldn’t get tired of looking at. (Anything orange was immediately out.) And, I wanted Justin’s input on everything to make sure he wasn’t going to hate something forever because I picked it without consulting him.
Side story. I heard from a friend, who heard from a book—and I wish I knew what book it is, but unfortunately I don’t—that there are two distinct ways people tend to make choices. The first type of person will feel a need to choose The Best Option. (ME!!!) I want to analyze the possibilities from every angle and then choose The Best Option. This is why it takes me forever to choose what to order at a restaurant. This is why I keep trying new brownie recipes—in case The Best One is still out there somewhere—even though I already have 3 brownie recipes I love. This is why I spent an embarrassing number of hours reading reviews on Amazon while creating my baby registry the first time around.
The second type of person is happy to choose An Acceptable Option. “That’s good enough, I’ll take that.” This doesn’t mean they are settling. On the contrary, they are saving their precious mental energy for more important things, and meanwhile, getting something they’re happy with. I admit I’ve had to rationalize myself into believing that the An Acceptable Option people are not just plain wrong. Justin might read the first page of a menu, find something that sounds delicious, and decide to order it without first consulting the other page or two (or ten—I hate trying to order from The Cheesecake Factory’s menu because of its extensiveness) of choices. I cannot do that. And that’s okay. We’re different. It’s just a different way of making a choice.
Anyway…
I vaguely remember that we established “green” as what we wanted in the kitchen. We picked a couple of plain green hand towels. I wanted a cute/fun towel, too, to complement the plain ones. There were two options with green at Bed Bath & Beyond: a red towel with a green chili pepper on it, and a green towel with a pineapple on it. I couldn’t decide; I was leaning toward the pineapple, but I wanted Justin to weigh in, because (A) I was afraid the pineapple might be too gimmicky for him, (B) I never trust my own taste in interior design, and (C) I was beginning to experience decision fatigue from our long day of beep, beep, beep. Which one was The Best Option?
As it turns out, Justin didn’t care which towel we registered for, because (A) he’s a guy, (B) he trusts my taste, and (C) he had a headache from our long day under BB&B’s fluorescent lights. Either one was An Acceptable Option.
We were both exasperated. I’m fuzzy now on whether any voices were actually raised, but tension was indeed high. He wanted me to make the decision already while I wanted him to help me make the decision already.
I made the decision. I picked the pineapple towel, not at all sure it was really the one “we” wanted. But we confessed our headache and decision fatigue to one another, beeped in the pineapple towel, and took the scanner back to the registry desk directly. We can come back to finish another day.
In the part of town we were in, Cheesecake Factory was nearby. Of all places! One last agonizing decision for me. Fortunately for my tired little brain, Justin ordered me a drink without consulting me, and I had my first ever Mai Tai, which was exactly as sweet and refreshing as it sounds—exactly what I needed in the moment, especially because I didn’t have to pick it out. We sat on the patio to enjoy some natural sunlight, so Justin could recover from his fluorescent lights headache. And we had a grand old time together, completely over our little tizzy about the pineapple towel.
Well. Almost completely over it.
Fast forward to the day after the wedding. We were opening a massive pile of gifts from generous family and friends. We would be getting on a plane to Texas the next day, so we weren’t going to take the gifts with us—my mom was going to so kindly deliver them to us in her minivan soon—but I wanted to be able to get started on thank you notes before she could make it.
One gift included the pineapple towel! When we opened it, we both cringed. And then laughed. And then explained to our small party of onlookers about the argument over the pineapple towel. And to this day, every time I pull it out to use it, I have a momentary flashback to Bed Bath & Beyond, and then smile to myself. Justin comments on it frequently, too. Now that pineapples are so trendy, I’m extra glad I picked this towel instead of the green chile towel. I happen to like pineapples as an accent of decor.
On that note, I must include the brief story of our current front door welcome mat. For our previous homes, we’d been given a couple of doormats, and/or we left in place the one that the previous owners left behind. However, when we moved into our current home last fall, only one of our doormats had survived all of our moving, and that one is best suited to the interior of a back door. We have two back doors plus the front door here. So, I looked around online for some new additional doormats to decrease the amount of dirt being tracked across the floors of my house every day. I asked Justin if he would like to be included in the picking out of doormats. He declined: “Get whatever you want.” All righty then. I went to the store, so that I could assess durability and meet-my-personal-needs-ability based on in-person look and feel.
Y’all, there was one with a pineapple! Actually, there were several with pineapples, due to their trendiness, but there was one I particularly liked with a pineapple. There were others, with and without pineapples, that were tempting: simple, sturdy, all-season. I wasn’t into the ones with clever sayings, although I do “hope you brought tacos” if you show up at my door. Lol. Jk. (Mostly.) Nor was I into super colorful ones. I prefer plain backgrounds and black-and-white designs with perhaps a small splash of color. My eye kept coming back to the “welcome” with a pineapple, though. I knew Justin would probably blink twice, because of the pineapple towel. And to my delighted non-surprise, he totally did, as though it were a personal affront to him, which, perhaps 1% of it was my passive-aggressive way of reminding him that I actually prefer his input on all matters, including such ones as what doormat will welcome people into our home for the next several years (as I don’t replace things like that seasonally; I tend to wait till they’re in tatters). And to my delighted surprise, a couple weeks later, when a friend came over to our house, she complimented me on the welcome mat, and I felt very smugly satisfied at having chosen such complimentable home decor all by myself.
I feel I must wrap this up. When I get out the pineapple towel and Justin says something about it, I’m usually laughing, while he is rolling his eyes. He might have been just as happy to purge this particular towel before any one of our many moves. Maybe he gets a flashback to his headache? I think it’s a great story, though, and it’s a cute towel!, so I’ll keep it till it’s in tatters, even if pineapples go out of style. Then I’ll toss it to Justin to use as a shop rag in the garage, so he can keep on enjoying it. 😉