A little about my girl and why you will never hear me refer to her as my wife.
In my posts, you will likely hear me refer to Zebra’s Girl, the absolute love of my life. Yes, we are married (twice actually, which I will explain later), but she will always be my girlfriend and never my wife. For my site, she chose the name “Zebra’s Girl” and provided me with the artwork that you will see in this post, including her zebra image, which is a more accurate likeness than you may realize.
Before I explain our situation, first let me tell you a little about her. To me, she is first and foremost an artist. Her artistic talents include painting, drawing, photography, illustration, and interior/exterior decoration among so many others I am forgetting to list. In addition to being an artist, she is an anthropologist, a philosopher, and a humanitarian,. She is introverted yet conversational, silly but intellectual and contemplative, passionate but grounded. Having her in my life truly makes me a better person.
As you can tell, I’m pretty crazy about her and there are still two more things I have yet to mention, her free spirit and strong sense of feminism. While I was growing up in West Virginia, these terms were not always considered positive qualities; in fact, they were unfortunately associated with negative stereotypes of either women who either don’t want to commit or generally hate men. In some cases, these stereotypes still exist today, but they couldn’t be more wrong.
When I met Zebra’s Girl, she was just ending a long-term relationship and was anything but a man hater, but the last thing she wanted was another relationship. In fact, it took quite some convincing, including some milkshake sacrifice on my part, to finally get her to agree that we were dating. This occurred about six months after our first date, which is another area of debate I won’t get into. For the first two years of our relationship, we would agree to stay together for another week and then reevaluate.
You are probably thinking that this sounds tortuous. Well, maybe a little, but it was also exciting. At no point did our relationship fall into a routine or even start to feel boring. I was always finding ways to impress her to earn another week. If you have read my about page, then you realize the white knight in me absolutely loved this. Just to be clear, she never required this or even asked for this, it was something I wanted and chose to do as a hopeful romantic and because I really, really wanted another week.
It has now been seven amazing years and I continue to live our relationship one week at a time, always asking if we can date for one more week. This is why you will never hear me refer to her as Zebra’s wife. We both believe strongly that marriage shouldn’t be about rules or entrapment. At no point do I want her to be my “dependent.” Instead, marriage should be about love, excitement, and the opportunity, not obligation, to spend another day with an amazing person. As soon as we start calling each other husband and wife, it feels like a little bit of this dies.
I love my girl, with all my heart. Every day I look at her, I can’t help but immediately smile and on occasion, I still get butterflies in my stomach. She is the first person I want to see in the morning and the last person I want to see before I fall asleep. We have long conversations every day and we still love to cuddle. She is the perfect partner in my life right now, but that is the point. Our relationship is about right now, not the past, not the future, but right now. At any point that might change, but we are happy right now, and have been for seven years.
Oh yeah. The marriages. So, our first marriage was simply a paper marriage to enable her to move to Germany with me. Neither of us viewed this as a real marriage, but we weren’t ready to separate either. So, we decided that if it didn’t work out, we could always get a divorce. I know that for some of you, this will go against every fiber of religious belief or personal belief, but it was and still is our belief. Three years later, we decided we actually wanted to get married to symbolically pledge our continued love for each other. This was our real marriage, but we still live our lives one week at a time.
So, we today, we still call ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend, but it doesn’t make us any less committed to each other. In fact, just the complete opposite. I love her more than I ever have, and who knows, maybe as she reads this message, she’ll give me one more week to prove my love to her.
Here are some examples of Zebra Girl’s work.
