Do you and your significant other have something you just can not do together without getting mean with each other? For some its home improvements. I have talked to people who cannot grocery shop together. It seems all relationships have some "breaking point" activity that just needs to be avoided to maintain domestic tranquility. In my relationship it is Euchre. Yes, the card game. How stupid is that? Pretty stupid. However I have figured out why a deck of cards is our house of cards. I will fill you in on that later, the entertaining part is hearing the tumult that is caused by this card game.
Card playing is not something I did in my family growing up. We are not card people. We are are a cerebral people, we play Trivial Pursuit. I come from a family that likes to spout the crazy amount of useless facts in our enlarged heads. Are we all geniuses? No, not all of us. We could get pretty worked up in a game of Trivial Pursuit. It was competitive, and I loved it because even as a young person I had a lot of useless facts. I am proud of my useless facts. My useless facts make me fun to sit next to at a dinner party. Knowing a little about various topics makes for sparkling conversation. Point being card playing was not a part of my upbringing. Cards are not full of fun facts. Cards are cards.
My beloved spouse is from "card people". His parents had regular card games at their home. Socially this was their thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Many people play cards. I have girlfriends that carry decks of cards in their purses "just in case". Okay, "just in case" of what??? I have been afraid to ask.
Euchre has always been the card game that tested my patience with my spouse. Really, it tests his patience with me. I learned that game in college from one of my roommates and I liked playing with her and other people. True, I can not remember "trump" even if I call it up (seriously). In college it was fun. We would flirt to distract our competition. Good times. Until I played euchre with my future spouse, my brother, and his future ex-wife. Suddenly my not remembering trump, and not paying attention to my partners cards made a difference. Note: DO NOT OVER -TRUMP YOUR PARTNER. This seems to insight an annoyed rage in my spouse. Not a violent rage, even worse it is the eye-rolling rage. At times I was sure he would roll his eyes out of his head. This type of response from ones beloved is very painful. Even worse is the "talking about it" later. He honestly would replay how the cards were played and how I "over-trumped" his "trick". I can not even remember what trump is during the game, let alone all the card that were played after several hands of euchre. He takes cards seriously. That is the way he was raised. This scenario has replayed in several settings over the years. A close friend witnessed the "euchre curse" and I really think she was pretty shocked by the emotion. Even she said, "Maybe you two should not play cards together. Ever".
Trivia Girl can not roll with Card Shark. He enjoys this card game. He has skill and apparently a photographic memory. He does not know that John Quincy Adams used to swim in the Potomac River most days of his presidency (true fact). That is how we differ.
So is it really about the cards? No. It is about me not wanting my spouse thinking I am a moron. I really do not care what the rest of the world thinks. Any other person in a Euchre tournament can say, "Allie is a real dolt when it comes to playing cards", and I literally would not care. Well, I may have a few snarky comments, but that is just me. My spouse's opinion matters. It mattered when we were dating, and it matters to this day. So it has never been about the cards. The cards are just the thing that exposes a shortcoming in me that I prefer he not see. The cards are the pants or dress you try on one size too small (because just maybe they will work) and then look in the mirror to see the horror. No one wants their mate to see that. Cards expose my mental figure flaws.
This revelation that is not about the cards has taken me about seventeen years to realize. Perhaps because I have never wanted to admit that someone's opinion mattered to me. Perhaps now I can learn to play cards for enjoyment and to socialize. Maybe I am going to have to let him read this blog so he knows its not about the cards after all. Maybe.
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