A Match Made In Heaven
It’s not too often I get to tell this tale, but hear ye hear ye children. Today is the day I tell the parable of Andy and why you should really take advice. Andy and I both joined up to be nuclear propulsion plant technicians in the Navy in late 2012. Now, surprising fact about navy nukes—we’re usually pretty awkward.
We come in all different flavors of awkward, not just the “this guy can’t talk to people” type. Andy was one of those special types of awkward where he wouldn’t stop talking to you. Andy had zero problems being social! However, he was a pretty short guy with a flair for the dramatic and had about as much impulse control as he did inches.
Andy’s general routine was, as far as I could tell, hang around dating sites and try to hang out with anyone that had a woman in their friend group. This was back in 2013, so Tinder didn’t exist in full force quite yet. Andy went out every weekend and tried his best. He failed, and failed, and failed again.
One weekend, about…oh, maybe eight months since basic training, Andy met this girl. We’ll call her Becky. I didn’t think anything of it at first. I was happy for him! We agreed to go on a double date with my at-the-time girlfriend (now wife). We all go out to some hookah bar in downtown Charleston. That’s when I met Becky.
Becky was a fiery girl. She had about six inches in height on Andy and was…well, loud. Very loud. She talked a lot, cursed a lot, and had a long history of dating servicemen. In fact, the night before we all went out together, she broke up with her Marine boyfriend. My girlfriend and I thought it was a slip of the tongue when she said it.
Nope. She had just broken up with that guy to go on a date with Andy. That really is where it should’ve ended, but it didn’t. Fast forward four weeks. Andy and Becky have been nigh inseparable and Andy decided that he wanted to get married. I tried to talk him out of it. So did his other friends. So did his Chief. So did the Master Chief in charge of that Chief.
It turns out though, guys, they can’t stop you from marrying someone if you really want to. So Andy got married. He and Becky moved into on-base housing and…well, surprise surprise, things weren’t great. There were a lot of arguments that continued to escalate in both volume and length.
Neighbors would call the base authorities to get them to settle down. Eventually, six weeks pass and I see Andy in the galley on base. “Andy, what are you doing here? You can go eat dinner at your house, man”. “Uh… I’m living back in the barracks”. “Huh? Why?” “Becky and I are getting divorced”. I wish this was the end of the story, but it turns out things were worse than I originally knew.
Remember how Andy was kind of short and scrawny and Becky…well, wasn’t? Turns out, that’s a great recipe for physical attacks when your spouse is already crazy. Becky would regularly hit him during arguments. She also cheated on him, with her cousin, during a trip to New York. Perhaps the worst part of it all was that because they were getting divorced in South Carolina, they needed to wait a year before they could actually file for divorce.
During that entire time, Andy had to provide for her as his spouse. He paid for that nice house on base that she just brought dudes over to constantly. She also destroyed that house before she left, which Andy was ultimately held responsible for. Andy spent 14 months in South Carolina getting divorced for about 10 weeks of getting laid. Don’t be like Andy.