The husband I have today won’t let me sleep in our room because he says a burglar could break in and come upstairs and walk past our open door to Kaylin’s room to – wait for it – kidnap her and whisk her away to Thailand. And so I have to sleep with her in her room. At least until he installs double locks on our front door.

It was weird and outrageous and (I’ll admit) kinda sweet and adorable all at the same time, although when he said it to me, the tired mother-of-his-child who hasn’t had a night of unbroken sleep in over three months, at two o’clock in the morning, well, let’s just say it was a lot less endearing.

Of course, I understand where he’s coming from. I can’t imagine what I would do if anything were to happen to Kaylin. A fellow mum once told me she never knew she could love a person so much until her daughter was born. Finally, I know what she means. This panic, however irrational, that I feel every time I imagine something going wrong is normal, right? As is getting all emotional over articles like this 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner (warning: it’s a real heartbreaker).

Hubby likes to tell people that becoming a father hasn’t changed him. He tells me it hasn’t made him more emotional or worried or panicky. That’s in broad daylight. In the middle of the night, when all is dark and still, I guess that’s when the truth comes out. Happy anniversary to us!

To me, if you’re going to respond to someone, the onus should be on you to make sure you are heard and understood. (Ah, that’s another debate – if I can hear vague noises coming from him but can’t make sense of them, does it count?) But hubby is of the opinion that as long as he’s made the effort to answer me, he’s done his part. If I can’t hear him, there must be something wrong with my hearing. If I can’t understand him, well, then it’s my fault.

We’d been going to and fro like this for months, when the following happened one morning while we were getting ready to leave the house. I reckon this has turned the tide in my favour.

I was brushing my hair in front of the mirror when I asked hubby if he had time to grab a quick breakfast before heading in to work. I waited for a response, listening extra carefully in case he muttered something. Nothing. He was out of sight, getting dressed in our walk-in wardrobe, so I gave him another minute. Still nothing.

When he finally emerged, I gave him a look and said, “I asked you a question. I’m still waiting for your answer.”

He said, “I already answered you.”

I said, “No, you didn’t.”

He said, “I did. I shook my head.”

I ask because I was raised to move my ass the instant someone called, and when I married Y, I was surprised to discover that he wasn’t. In fact, he has no problem keeping his family waiting while he finishes something up, whereas I’d be the one standing at the door (or the dining table) going, “Come on, your parents are waiting.”

It was a bit of a “culture shock” the first few years, but now I’m used to it, if not entirely comfortable with it still. More and more I’m beginning to see how Y and I are rubbing off on each other. These days, he definitely moves that much quicker when someone is waiting for him while I, on the other hand, am learning that it’s okay to be a little slower sometimes. I hope we’re changing for the better.

After a while, hubby finally conceded that the phone must be “faulty” and that he needed a new one. So he got the iPhone. End of story, right? Wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, my phone started falling apart. It’s nothing major; the casing’s coming off so one side of the keypad sort of sinks lower than the other. It irritated me at first (I’m used to it now) and because I’ve been lusting after the iPhone or something similar, I told hubby about it.

He said sure we can get me a new phone, and then one evening, he suggested, “Why don’t you use my old Omnia? It’s kinda like the iPhone.”

“I thought it doesn’t work properly,” I said. “It doesn’t always ring when people call.”

“I’ll reset the phone. That should fix it.”

Pause.

“Then why didn’t you do that in the first place instead of buying an iPhone?”

Silence.

Then, “Err… I just thought of it?”

The first time I went with hubby to the emergency room because he’d strained a back muscle playing basketball and couldn’t move – this is after he underwent surgery for a torn ankle ligament and subsequently sprained his other ankle several times – I tried to get the doctor to tell hubby basketball is a dangerous sport.

The doctor laughed at me. Laughed.

This is also after hubby had previously suffered a pinched nerve (a.k.a. slipped disc, albeit a mild case) and a basketball buddy dislocated his ankle and had two teeth knocked out. Okay, so the pinched nerve didn’t happen during a basketball game but that poor guy’s injuries did.

It completely flabbergasts me how these guys play basketball. Either my husband is the most injury-prone player in the world or these guys think they’re playing American football. Should I buy hubby some shoulder pads, knee pads and a helmet for Christmas?

Then last week, hubby came home after a game and said casually: “I dislocated my shoulder.”

His arm needs to be in a sling for two weeks – currently, it’s one week two days and counting – and he’s not to play basketball for six. I promise I’ve had visions of marching back to that doctor and saying: “See, I told you it was a dangerous sport. You don’t know how injury-prone my husband is.”

Which is hugely ironic considering hubby’s always on my case for dropping things. Well, at least I drop things that don’t hurt. He drops himself. I think he’s worse.

For instance, Y divides girls he doesn’t know into two categories (and you’ll excuse my being blunt here): ugly and pretty. Heidi Klum and other super-beauties aside, the rest of the world’s female population generally tick either of these boxes. I say girls he doesn’t know because once he gets to know a girl, it becomes less to do with how physically beautiful she is and more to do with whether he gets along with her and how much he enjoys her company. So he’s not completely superficial. For now.

Me, I grade the regular guy according to three categories: average, above average and good-looking. Most guys fall into average, some fall into above average and only a handful get to be good-looking in my book. Nobody is ugly. Again, genetically-blessed celebrities do not apply. And I have a bias towards tall men.

I remember having a conversation about this with Y a couple years back and being totally aghast that he doesn’t have an “average” category. There must be some people who don’t fit into either group, I argued. To which he replied, if they’re not pretty then they’re ugly.

Then last week, we were talking about singers when Y said someone we’d heard on the web was bad. I said it was okay. Not fantastic but still reasonably good. He scoffed and said good was what one of our friends could do. I said that in my book, that friend is super-good. And I realised Y doesn’t have that category. He has bad and he has good. I have bad, average, good and super-good.

(Now I’m starting to see why some men might think women are complicated.)

So my question is this: Are Y and I a classic case of men versus women, Mars versus Venus yada yada? Do all men see the world in polar opposites while the womenfolk carefully divide everything into three or more categories? Is Y being overly judgmental? Am I just being weird?

(Oops, that was four questions instead of one. How… girly of me.)

Y’s new toy:

I have decided that no matter how much I shop, there’s no way I’m even going to come close to the amount Y spends. Hooray for me.

Hubby: [Panicked look] Huh? What’s the date today?

Me: It’s the 2nd July because it’s past midnight.

Hubby: [Checks the clock] Oh ya, happy anniversary!

[We hug.]

Hubby: Four years and counting.

Me: Uh huh.

[We go back to watching Wimbledon.]

In that split second, my lightheaded state from not having enough oxygen in my brain from not wanting to breathe because of the stench was the only thing that prevented me from marching straight back upstairs to our master bedroom to give my still-sleeping hubby a piece of my mind.

That and I was running late and the bedroom was a good two flights of stairs up.

So instead, I made one flight of stairs to deposit the offending items into the washing machine and headed for work. Then I sent hubby an SMS to tell him what he’d done and, because I’m a softie and by then I was no longer as annoyed (or the continued lack of oxygen was really starting to take effect), I started my text with “Hi darling.”

Hubby apologised. Twice. The second time much more profusely than the first. And in the middle of his second apology I decided, not for the first time, that love is truly blind because I cannot explain why I adore this man who drives me so completely insane sometimes.