8 - Too Hard to Handle

He went through his checklist:

Fresh sheets? Check.

Balls shaved? Check.

Blood tested? Check.

I sat next to him, watching and cheering him on. Fascinating, really—to switch sides for once and see how nervous men can get before a date. To spare the mister from juggling both his nerves and his overly involved wife, I decided to spend the day with the charming Swiss in Paris.

If you’re picturing some sappy rom-com scene—with us locking a padlock with our names onto the Pont des Amoureux, slurping spaghetti from one plate, and kissing under the Eiffel Tower—you got played. Similar to my husband, something about him was stiff too—just unfortunately not the right body part. Six weeks after he’d demanded my number, he got a knee replacement. So off I drove him to a follow-up appointment in Paris, while my husband was busy desecrating our marital bed with another woman. I would have preferred a more exciting story myself, but sometimes life writes scripts even reality TV would reject.

By then, the two of them weren’t complete strangers anymore—they’d already gone on a long walk in the woods together. Which was odd in more ways than one.

I found it deeply unsettling that this woman was willing to meet with a guy she’d only been chatting with online for four days—and then head into the woods with him. Personally, the thought would never have crossed my mind. Even now, I don’t like going into the woods with my husband. But that’s only because of his terrible sense of direction—I’m always afraid we’ll never make it back if he wanders off—even if he’s only 700 meters from the car.

I couldn’t decide: was it brave or naïve?

Independent or foolish?

Well, since she was with my husband, at least I knew she wasn’t in any danger—as long as she had a sense of direction.

She, on the other hand, found it strange that my husband actually wanted to talk before jumping straight into naked gymnastics. People really are different. This time it was duty first, pleasure second: after their naked workout, they sat by the fireplace with a cup of tea. She liked it much better that way around.

While Tinderella was busy with my husband’s hard thing, the doctor in Paris decided that the Swiss’s hard thing needed some more work too.

He meant the knee, of course!

But you guessed that already, didn’t you?

So I drove him across Paris—a nearly romantic sightseeing tour. We saw the Eiffel Tower, the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, and the freshly renovated Notre-Dame. The only difference was that our destination wasn’t a luxury hotel but a clinic with fluorescent lights and the smell of disinfectant.

The grand finale of my day?

An afternoon with him in a hospital bed. Thanks to his chic hospital gown, I finally got a look at his route—a route I could have climbed in forty-five seconds flat. But good things take time. And once the knee is no longer hard, maybe another body part will be.