They say a “happy wife equals a happy life”. I don’t know who they are, but it’s 2023. I shouldn’t assume. What matters is that they know their math (or “maths” for my friends suffering from an acute case of Britishness).
Yesterday, after fervent hesitation and several intentional “delay of games”, I nervously allowed my wife — who is an amateur haircutting enthusiast and a Pole, I think both are relevant datums for this story — to buzz, cut and trim my hair into a mullet mohawk. No, you read that correctly. Not a mullet. Not a mohawk. A mullet mohawk. Not one, but two bad haircuts agreed upon by the Family Feud consensus.
At first, I thought she did it on purpose. “I must’ve done something wrong,” I questioned, “because this woman obviously wants to humiliate me in public.” I scanned my hippocampus for potential unidentified fuckups (PUFUs as I call them) but the results turned out disconcerting (or “concerting” depending on how you look at it). Quite uncharacteristically of me, I must’ve done nothing wrong this time, so I moved to the next logical explanation.
After tiptoeing around her feelings, I came to the realization that this woman truly wanted me to don a mullet mohawk. Like, genuinely. She did it unironically. It had nothing to do with public humiliation. She was genuinely happy with the final product being a mullet mohawk — a mix of white trash meets motorcycle gang “fashion”.
I was taken aback. Why would my wife choose, upon her own volition, to unironically exorcise my increasingly bald head into a mullet mohawk? I sought the Great Rubik’s cube for potential answers.
One reason could be that my wife is Polish. And not like the Polish sausage kind of look-a-like from Chicago. Like a real, generationally traumatized Pole born only a few years after the Berlin Wall fell. Like a real Catholically-enslaved, penny-pinching, Rosół-eating, vowel-hatin’ Pole who forgets an article or two when she speaks my native tongue. She is so Polish that she would hate any mention of the Catholic church. Moreover, I have no idea how her Polishness pertains to this story. But years and years of meticulous research and inspection has taught me that her Polishness is a common cause of most peculiarities.
Yet the main reason why my wife unironically chose to shear me into an extra on the Sons of Anarchy is that she is an amateur haircutting enthusiast — heavy emphasis on the “amateur” and “enthusiast”. Further prodding resulted in the extraction of several key bits of information (astonishingly long into my second haircut, mind you). To my surprise, I found out that she had three other customers before me: her long-time ex-boyfriend (douche), and two Norwegian boys whom she liked hopefully long into her past (I was too scared to ask for further clarification on the number of Viking men aforementioned; ignorance is bliss, my friends). I wasn’t even her first. But what matters is that I turned out to be her longest-lasting customer. And now I see why. The other three fired her on the spot following gazes into the mirror.
I guess this is why we’re still married and still together. But not like happily together. “Happily together” is a lie promulgated by Hollywood to over-sensationalize love and arouse your attention, nothing more. Marriage isn’t about being happy together. It’s about caring more about the happiness of your significant other while concomitantly accepting a dreadful haircut. I now proudly don my mullet mohawk for the singular, illogical reason that I care way more about the happiness of my Polish amateur-haircutting enthusiast than I do my own happiness. Don’t quote me on this, but I think this might be the secret to a happy marriage. I’ll inform you further following my first unwarranted arrest as a suspected heroin dealer.
True story (evidence below).
As previously published on Medium
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