Marriage Boot Camp
A honeymoon conjures any number of images: romance, lobster dinners, perhaps a week-long Kama Sutra practicum. Not our honeymoon. Our post-nuptial rite of passage brings to mind communal living, peanut butter sandwiches, crime—petty, felonious, and blasphemous—and a host of other crazymaking that laid a rock-solid foundation for a marriage I’m nothing but proud of.
We backpacked Europe for our honeymoon. Nine countries over ten weeks. We made this decision as a sort of consolation prize. My wife planned to study abroad in college, but that plan was derailed by Donald Trump. Let me unpack that.
On a lark, encouraged by a friend, she entered the Miss Orange County competition. And she won. She’s going to be pissed that I’m sharing that here, but I survived the honeymoon, so I’ll survive this. I should also add that she only ever competed in two pageants: Miss Orange County, as noted, which led to Miss California where she won Miss Congeniality.
Trump owned the Miss USA pageant (and thus Miss California and Miss Orange County) and if you choose to wear the crown, you have to sign a law library of legal contracts with odd stipulations: no drinking in public, no public displays of affection, no international travel, blah blah, blah.
After a year of public appearances at charities and waving to parade goers from the backseat of convertibles, we were free of Trump’s beauty pageant tyranny. We said our vows and hopped on a jet. What follows is a list of highlights that revealed to me all the nuances of my lovely wife.
Royal Pains
Becky adores all things royal. The only reason I use the word ‘adores’ instead of ‘fetishizes’ is because she married me. I couldn’t be less royal. Many of my family members have done long stretches in state prison, and most of the ones who haven’t probably should. I am decidedly not royal.
So it was odd that Becky left it up to me to book the hostel. More than odd, it was a display of gross misjudgment. I booked a hostel off the Oval tube station in Zone 2 of London. It has since been explained to me that this was like being excited about going to Beverly Hills and booking a motel that charges by the hour on skid row.
The defining moment came after we had a couple of pints at a pub and the worst fish and chips ever fried, scales, skin and all. Massively disappointed, we started for our hostel and a man asked us for 50p to feed a parking meter. Thinking we could use some good karma, I dipped into my pocket for some change, and suddenly, a half dozen other men filed out of the bushes and surrounded us.
They only nicked ten pounds but it set a pretty lousy tone for the first leg of the honeymoon and put Becky on her guard. She was expecting tea with the queen, polo with the princes, and the changing of the guard. Instead, we got mugged.
Strange Odors on a Train
We took an overnight train from Bruges to Copenhagen. The couple sitting in front of us were doing nothing to combat European stereotypes. They smelled like someone shoved raw onions up a dead badger’s ass. Their funk was offensive, violent even. At one point, soldiers boarded our car with machine guns, and I was certain they were there to execute this foul couple, but no, just a routine sweep of the train with machine guns.
Later that night, I woke up to a new smell. My wife could no longer take it. She had gotten Febreze from her pack and sprayed down the couple as they slept. And I don’t mean she did a little hook shot from a distance. She was engaged in close quarters combat. Had they woken, they could have made a strong case for assault with an air freshener.
Bunk Bed Defense
In Copenhagen, our hostel was a barracks with about 50 bunk beds made of particle board, and every bed was occupied with people who looked less like backpackers and more like extras from a particularly harrowing Breaking Bad episode. I insisted Becky sleep on the bottom bunk, reasoning that in the event that shit goes down, I would better be able to protect her by raining blows from above. The only shit that went down, though, was the particle board. Anticipating another mugging, I tossed and turned all night, causing pieces of particle board to chip off and fall on Becky’s beautiful honeymoonin’ head.
Drunk and Dry
Desperately in need of some laughs, we walked miles to the Carlsberg brewery. On the way, we got caught in the rain, and we showed up sopping wet. Drenched jeans, shirts, and shoes. At the end of the tour, they gave us tickets for pints. All the senior citizens gave us their tickets and we drank ourselves dry.
Mocking Christ Our Lord
We had to buy pants to get into St. Peter’s Basilica. Apparently, legs are sacrilegious. But not as sacrilegious as mocking Jesus. Which we unintentionally did.
Say what you will about the Catholic church, they know how to inspire awe. St. Peter’s is overwhelming in scope and aesthetics, and you don’t have to tell them that, but if you do, don’t do it the way we did it. Becky posed for a picture and said in awestruck fashion, “It’s so magnificent!” She stretched her arms wide to emphasize said magnificence, and in seconds, a half dozen men in robes were upon us, jabbering in Italian.
It took a moment for them to realize we didn’t speak Italian, and then they kept repeating, “No mock! No mock!” They thought Becky was making light of the crucifixion. She wasn’t, of course, but even if she was—isn’t forgiveness built into the very symbol they thought she was mocking? Maybe if they were wearing shorts, they wouldn’t have been so hot headed.
Norwegian Supermodels
At a hostel in Rome, we were in a dorm with six cots. Becky and I had two. A pair of boys from Huntington Beach on their senior trip had two. And a couple of Norwegian girls who looked like they had stepped out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog had the other two.
It was hot, and the hostel provided a sheet which was essentially a threadbare, see-through piece of linen. We didn’t think much of it until that evening when the Norwegians got ready for bed. Their pajamas consisted of panties and the threadbare, see-through piece of linen which they wrapped themselves in like a towel.
The next morning, the Norwegians strutted around our dorm in their pajamas while Becky and I brushed our teeth. The two boys from Huntington Beach sat on the edge of their cots, arms folded across their laps (read: morning erection). One said, “Should we get breakfast?” The other just shook his head no. And Becky muttered under her breath, “I can’t believe this is my honeymoon.”
Softball Slugger
The Norwegians and the Huntington Beach boys moved out, and four traveling softball players moved in. Rowdy and bawdy, these girls started drinking at noon and didn’t return to the dorm until three or four in the morning.
I woke up because one of them was snoring. She was the biggest girl of the four, thick, the kind you’d want protecting home plate. She looked like she could handle herself. For instance, if she and I somehow ended up pitted against each other in a bare knuckle boxing match to the death, I would have instructed Becky to bet against me and use the winnings to care for the children.
Her snoring was thunderous, a Looney Tunes level of wheezing and snorting, compounded by the fact that she was lying face up, feet still on the floor. Even more odd, though, was that Becky was awake, sitting on the edge of her cot with her glasses on, holding her glasses case, her eyes trained on this nose-whistling, softball player in the throes of a snoregasm.
I almost asked Becky what she was doing, but then I noticed her rocking back and forth on the edge of her cot. Not only that, she was rocking back and forth in rhythm with the boozehound’s snoring. Suddenly, Becky scurried across the dorm, walloped this girl’s shoulder with her glasses case, like hard—like a bruise-worthy slug-bug punch—and then Becky jumped back into her cot.
The drunk softball player snorted and honked and smacked her lips before turning over onto her stomach and falling back asleep. Silence fell over the dorm. The snoring had been neutralized. Becky removed her glasses, placed them in her case, and went back to sleep. I stayed awake the rest of the night, realizing I had a lot to learn about this young woman I married. Side note: I can’t prove this, but I’d argue that this incident is the origin for the term Fuck around and find out.
20 More
There are myriad other honeymoon stories I could share, like the time I drafted a fellow backpacker to talk entertainment news with Becky. Basically, she pinch hit for me as a salient detail from our premarital counseling snapped into focus: about the number of words men speak in a day versus the number of words women speak in a day, and the inequity thereof.
Or the time we shared a Cinque Terre house rental with a couple we’d only met on the train five minutes earlier, narrowly avoiding our honeymoon becoming fodder for a Hitchcock thriller.
Or the time a drunk trans woman reached for my genitals outside the Sacré Coeur, despite the protests of Becky and me.
Or the time we were in Paris on Bastille Day and a Frenchman gave a six-year-old a Roman candle and instructed him to fire it into the crowd.
All of these adventures were the best preparation for our marriage. We learned to fight with each other and for each other. We learned to laugh and play. We learned there’s nobody else we’d want to be with in the face of toxic body odor, British thugs, or softball playing snore monsters.
On Tuesday, we clock twenty years of marriage. Sign me up for twenty more. And twenty more after that. And twenty more after that… Happy anniversary to my beautiful wife.
Thanks for reading! If you loved reading about my wife as much as I love writing about her, consider some of these from the archive:
This one about her lovely relationship with our chickens: The Lifesaving Virtues of Super Glue or Snow White and the Seventh Clucker
Or this one about her lovely relationship with a 911 operator: The Canyon Zombie and My Beautiful Wife
Or this one about the day I proposed to her: The Three Vs of True Love: Valium, Validation, and Valentine's Day
Becky certainly sounds like a force of nature. Make the trip again, but this time in hotels.
I hitchhiked through Europe a couple times, and had similar experiences. But I didn't have a woman like your wife to protect me.