I have a giant project due Friday, and that always gives me the urge to clean, organize, wash, rinse, and repeat. I basically become Housewife Extraordinaire. Yesterday, I didn’t get any of the project done, but the apartment was spotless. Any woman who says we can do it all is on uppers.

I was just reading this angst-ridden query on A Practical Wedding, asking about alternative names for “wife” and “husband,” and before I read it, I thought the staff at APW had read my mind. Because, since spending a charming evening with the neighbors (who invited us over! at the spur of the moment! on a Monday! Yay!!!) I’ve been thinking about pet names. That article is not about pet names. So, I decided to write one that is.

“Would you like me to make you some tea, Love?”

Oh how I envy the casually tossed about pet name. Especially the British “Love.” It’s so endearing, so romantic. I know two Ameri-Brit couples who use it habitually and you can just color me jealous.

Then there’s the usual American list: Dear, Honey, Sugar (though I’ve never heard this one used outside a diner), Muffin (this must have come into vogue before “muffin top” was a thing), Sweetie, and Darlin’ (again, diner, and possibly the South).

I like the idea of pet names – they show a sweet intimacy, and can also be used to show passive-aggressive irritation. A sharply thrown “SWEETIE?!” is always a good way to begin the question “WHERE DID YOU PUT THE SCISSORS THIS TIME?!”

But in practice, it feels awkward to both Rogue Groom and myself. We don’t really do Public Displays of Affection either, like some of our couple friends do. We’ve kissed on camera precisely once, and that was at our wedding – at the alter. It’s all very English if you ask me. Perhaps that’s why my favorite “pet” name for RG is the prefix “Mister.” There’s something that amuses my English Major mind to take something formal and turn it on its head into a pet name.

In one of my favorite plays, “The Way of the World” by William Congreve, the two principal characters, Mirabell (the gent) and Millamant (the lady), are discussing the ground rules of their impending marriage. Millamant says:

And d’ye hear, I won’t be called names after I’m married; positively I won’t be called names—Ay, as “wife,” “spouse,” “my dear,” “joy,” “jewel,” “love,” “sweet-heart,” and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar—I shall never bear that. Good Mirabell, don’t let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks, like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis; . . .  but let us be very strange and well-bred. Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while, and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.

Translated into today’s standards, this means maintaining a little space in order to preserve romance. As much as I love pet names, let’s not get overly familiar, shall we?

Before we got married, I noticed that all of a sudden, everyone we knew was getting engaged! Exciting! Rings all around! Diamonds in every Facebook photo spread!

After we got back from our honeymoon, everyone we knew – or sort of knew – was getting divorced. Dana from The Broke-Ass Bride, one of my own bridesmaids, acquaintances I met at my high-school reunion. It was daunting. Put the fear of God in me, let me tell you. I started looking around for any and every conceivable reason why my marriage was suddenly and unexpectedly doomed to failure (because all of these divorces seemed to come out of nowhere, at least to the outsider).

Now – Everyone is having babies. Kate – of HRH William and Kate – is preggers all over the news; Meg from A Practical Wedding just gave birth; and Elisa of Events by Elisa – the terrifically talented gal who designed our Bridal Kool-Aid Cocktail Hour logo – is utterly blissed out over her baby bump (congratulations by the way – that is gonna be one cute kid).

Sure, I only know one out of the three personally, and it’s not like I haven’t known people who have given birth during the course of my lifetime, but there’s something about a new marriage that makes a girl jumpy. I’m a little oversensitive to these things. They seem very big, very looming.

We are not ready to have kids yet, which puts us in this weird finite span of time in which our social circle is limited to other kidless couples, who are getting fewer and fewer by the day. See, kids = no social life. Singles = too much social life (and late nights that we are just not up for). And DINKS (Dual Income, No Kids) are a rare and precious breed.

As a former English major, I’ve been known to bust out big words like “Liminality” from time to time. So let me lay this on you. We exist in a liminal space of newly-weddom. We’re young, but not single. We love fine wines and gourmet dinner parties, but we’re not middle-aged. We don’t have kids, and don’t want them any time soon, yet we do want a house and a nice suburban (if not downright rural) lifestyle. We are a couple that has the social life of people with kids (ie. none) without the kids. We live in-between worlds.

I don’t mean to say we don’t love our Friends-with-kids – we do. But kids generally don’t come out for drinks, attend dinner parties (where copious amounts of alcohol are served), or … do much of anything. I’ve never seen a group of young-ish married friends walking in downtown, laughing, shopping, or eating, with kids in tow. I have only managed once to go out for coffee with a new-mommy.

We love our single friends too, and we’d hang out with them more if they weren’t so darn far away. They gravitate towards the big cities.

For now, we’re stuck, blessedly childless, in suburbia. It’s a DINK desert out here.

*Photo is mine. This is what I do when going out with new moms for coffee – take super awesomely funny pictures of their babies that they don’t appreciate nearly as much as I do. Possibly explains why I don’t get invited on coffee dates often.