Four years ago, on our second date, I wore an olive sweater with red sneakers. She said I looked like a Christmas elf. This was a fair assessment of the available evidence.
I could have laughed. Instead, my insecure brain produced a medical explanation for my outfit. I looked her in the eye and told her I was mildly colorblind.
She immediately felt terrible. She apologized for teasing me, and I accepted the apology, thereby taking a bad outfit and giving it long-term consequences.
From then on, she helped me match my clothes so I wouldn’t feel insecure. It was thoughtful and loving, which made it considerably harder to say that I had, in fact, seen the entire outfit clearly and chosen to leave the house anyway.
When we moved in together, she organized my closet by tone. I now had a household system built around something I’d said to survive a joke on a second date. The sweater had long since done its damage. Its administrative legacy remained.
At the grocery store, she gently checks the bell peppers for me so I don’t have to guess whether they’re ripe. I stand there receiving assistance I do not need from someone whose only mistake was believing me.
For the record, I see colors perfectly. My vision is 20/20. When she asks whether I can tell what color a towel is, I have to squint, pause, and deliberately get it wrong. This requires more effort than simply learning how to dress would have required four years ago.
Now she’s my fiancée. She is an angel, and I am a fraudulent idiot with a very well-organized closet. I’m posting anonymously because I’m afraid this could cost me the wedding, and I can hardly claim I’ve been treated unfairly.
There was presumably a reasonable moment to correct this. I let it pass, along with many subsequent moments and an unspecified number of bell peppers.
How do I tell the woman I’m going to marry that four years of her kindness began because I couldn’t handle being called a Christmas elf?
