Husband 1.0, 2.0

Ages ago, when I was an ambitious young litigator in high heels and Italian suits, I almost had an affair on our firm's annual associates' retreat. We all got terribly drunk, and I ended up getting into bed with the hottest male associate at the firm, but then I freaked out and had a moment of drunken clarity that I didn't want to deal with the marital aftermath of this, so nothing happened. I confided all this later into my beloved paralegal friend and said, "I find him so attractive, though." She looked at me and said, "Well, of course, he's your type."

"I didn't know I had a type."

"Well, duh."

"Huh. I have a type? How 'bout that."

Then, as the years went on, I ended up divorcing my husband (maybe I should have gone for it with the hunky lawyer after all... God, I just wrote "hunky lawyer." Shouldn't that be an oxymoron?). The same day husband #1 packed to move out of our apartment, I ran into and gave my phone number to the man who ended up being husband #2 (known as the Sober Husband, which is especially fitting as Husband 1.0 drank more than I did and should perhaps be called Scotch Drinking Husband or Self-Medicating Husband). As we dated, the similarities between husbands 1.0 and 2.0 became more and more uncanny, and it became, well, duh, more than obvious that I do have a type. A very specific type. There may not be many more of this phenotype out there, so I'd better make sure this one drives carefully and doesn't get food poisoning (note: he would NOT get food poisoning from my cooking, but he is prone to leaving crappy food out unrefrigerated overnight and insisting on keeping it and eating it. I make him swear he won't feed his toxic unrefrigerated leavings to the children. Most memorably, he insisted on keeping and eating liquid nacho cheese in a giant Costco can which was left over from Burning Man and had visible mold on it. He scraped off the mold and ate the remainder, which left him ill for over a week. The words "I told you so" did spring to my lips, I am ashamed to say).

Anyhow, here are a few of the similarities which have caused me to call this husband "husband 2.0, the upgrade":

- both have degrees in physics and worked as physicists;

- both have advanced degrees (husband 1.0 a master's, husband 2.0 a Ph.D);

- they each left physics and moved into developing computer software;

- their fathers both died when they were each quite young, in their 20's;

- their mothers both hate the Drunken Housewife, and both are bad cooks;

- they are tall (1.0 is 6'4"; 2.0 is just exactly six feet tall);

- both have very dark brown hair (quasi-black) and dark brown eyes;

- they are skinny ectomorphs, although 2.0 is much more underweight than 1.0;

- they both have the same funky heart valve issue, mitral valve prolapse (the main consequence for 2.0 is that he has to take antibiotics before he goes to the dentist; I heard on the street that 1.0 had his valve replaced after our divorce);

- both smoked a lot of pot as teens (they were each scruffy stoners as teens who went on to become high achievers in adulthood);

- both fathers spoke German, and they each grew up hearing a lot of German spoken;

- both fathers were scientists;

- each is the oldest son in his family and was the Golden Boy in his parents' eyes;

- each wished to marry the old Drunken Housewife (although that is not such a strong identifier for this phenotype, given that the old D.H. also received marriage proposals from four or five other guys who were more dissimilar). To be precise, I was a drunken lawyer or drunken grad student in the days of those proposals. It was Husband 2.0 who took a perfectly good litigator and turned her into a drunken housewife.