So I Married an Editor

It all began rather innocently. He took me to a bookstore on our first date. Then he lured me in with his shelf of classic novels. We joked about James Thurber and Jane Austen. He understood me in a way most men didn't. Of course, I married him. I'm very blessed. His editing skills have provided a good income for our family, and it's great to get his advice about the technicalities of writing. There are times, however, when his editorial impulses try my patience. Here's what you should expect if you're going to marry an editor.

My husband has a way of editing my words in his brain so they mean what he wants to hear instead of what I meant. Case in point: one day in the fall, I asked him to "please take care of the leaves in the front yard." I came home later to find he'd chopped down our dying maple tree, the tree I'd been trying to save. This was his explanation: "You asked me to take care of the leaves in the front yard. When I chopped down the tree, I got rid of half of them."

Another drawback is that sometimes editors just can't stop editing. Take the birth of our last child. While my husband should have been photographing our newborn baby, he got distracted by the hospital footprint certificate. There was a mistake on it, and he could not rest until someone knew about it. When he finally took the picture of our baby, wouldn't you know, he included the offending document in the picture?

If you're going to marry an editor, be prepared to have every printed document covered with editing marks. This includes, but is not limited to birthday cards, your grandma's Christmas letter, your child's 100% spelling test, motivational quotes, and wedding invitations from your best friend. And just because you think it's error-free doesn't mean there isn't an extra space, a missing em dash, or--Heaven forbid!--an error in capitalization. That's my man, making the world a better place, one semi-colon at a time.

I have to confess that he's rubbing off on me too. There's a sign in our neighborhood that says, "Sale Your Home." Every time I see it, I itch for a sharpie. How about you? Any editing impulses?