On me: Club Monaco plaid blouse, Ellery jacket, Opening Ceremony vest, Cole Haan Loafers. On him: Ralph Lauren chambray shirt, Ksubi skinny jeans, Cole Haan brogues. Photos by Naomi Shon
Though my marriage is still an embryo, December 14th will mark its first notable (albeit marginal) centenary: six months of togetherness. The following week will mark the 24th anniversary of my life and just days later, Christmas will have come, gone and left only pictorial memories of deconstructed pine trees and holiday lights. New Years anticipation will commence instantaneously and naturally, we will look back, wondering if we’ve fulfilled our previous years resolutions. If we haven’t, we’ll wonder if we’ve changed. Has it been for the better? The worse? At all?
The holiday season is an appropriate time for self-evaluation and in what seems like a very timely reissue, the reflective loafers and brogues of Cole Haan are back and as such functioning as portals to a far more cerebral experience.
The shoes are fantastic in that to the naked eye, they simply look somewhat iridescent. When placed under camera flash though, they reflect said flash right back at your camera screen, (thus prompting a most effective “like” catalyst for Instagram enthusiasts.) In recognizing the shoes’ supernatural potential for many a judicious pun, behold: reflection time.
Are you ready? Okay, I’ll start.
Jogging back just six months to when I tied that menacing knot, I found a basket of baby kittens waiting for me on the other side. I married the only man who has noted “sincerity” as his favorite quality in other men because, and I quote, “too few of us are sincere.” I’m not sure he was as lucky in his findings. Being married to me is not easy: I never shave, much less wax, have the expert ability to leave any room I exit in a most traumatic post-hurricane state, and talk far too frequently about yeast infections, my period, the benefits of sustaining underarm hair and why women truly do rule (consequently too, why men drool.)
We met when I was 17. I thought how tragic it was that at such a tender age, I’d already met my soul mate. When we broke up six months later, I thought how tragic it was that at such a tender age, I would be forced to commit suicide. An act of undying love, the letter I would draft described, but I never got around to penning it. When we got back together, I was 22 and by then had learned it’s best not to think, and so began the last leg of our relationship.
If my husband is Ben Stiller, I am Jennifer Aniston, (see: Along Came Polly.) He finds utter complacency in himself, his job, his life, me. While I constantly search for the key to an everlasting joie de vivre, his constant search is for the key to an everlastingly functional humidifier. He’s never read The Paris Review, he doesn’t plan to read The Paris Review and his idea of a profoundly evocative fashion moment is one that takes place in the comfort of our living room—the blankey of my childhood draped across his shoulders.
He is fantastic with numbers; I can’t even remember my birth year and though alcoholism is a philosophical movement that I subscribe to, if he had to, would give up imbibing at the eager drop of my Maison Michel hat. When I asked how he’d like to die, he said in a plane crash. It varied immensely from my earnestly romantic, “in bed, holding your hand.”
But love knows no logic and my odd, anxious, fickle demeanor needs the prop of his tactical, strategic reliability to exist wholly. His sensible, risk-assessing approach to living all but deserves a dose of my creepy-ass brand of crazy and in reflecting on that which makes us work, it becomes evident that nothing makes us work except for the fact that, well, we work.
Sometimes, it seems, self-evaluation is simply an affirmation of good decisions. Your turn: step into my shoes and reflect.
