#468. Sharing an email address with your spouse.

Dang you Ben Washer. He’s a friend of mine and recently emailed me a great idea for Stuff Christians Like. “You should do a post on Christian couples that share one email address.”

Perfect, I thought, that’s such a silly thing to do. How archaic, how old school fundamentalist is that? Sharing an email address with your wife as if the two of you are standing out in cyberspace holding hands in front of a Thomas Kinkade painting waving, “ya’ll come back now, you hear.” There was only one problem with that idea though, my wife and I do that.

Our email address is theacuffs@yahoo.com.

We leaved and cleaved our separate email addresses and lit a unity candle on yahoo that burns brightly throughout the virtual landscape.

I am that cheesy guy I wanted to poke fun at, but in my defense, there are three things I should say:

1. Our email address is normal.
We created that address 8 years ago when we got married. We decided that “theacuffs” was what you might see on the side of our mailbox. We didn’t come up with something like “theacuffsaresoinlove” or “truelovewaitsandcelebrateswhenjonandjennyfellinlove” or “Jennyssnugglepandaisjon.” We went straight forward and direct.

2. We don’t read each other’s emails.
Because I’ve been upfront about my personal experiences with porn and have sponsored some guys going through recovery programs in the past, I get some crazy emails. My wife gets a lot of personal emails from the Community Bible Study she leads. We are both cool with keeping those unread in the inbox until we’re able to deal with them privately. Jenny’s got her space. I’ve got mine.

3. We offset the whole thing by not dressing alike.
Rarely, I mean rarely, will you see us in matching homemade Thanksgiving sweaters that have cornucopias spilling their bounty across the tummy with plastic fruit hand knitted on for a 3D effect. We only do that maybe six, seven times a year at most. So having that boundary, a word we learned in counseling, keeps us pretty hip.

All in all, it works for us. I don’t think it’s some sort of mandatory thing that everyone has to do though. I mean sure, I’ll probably have a slightly bigger house than you in heaven with a slightly easier to fold up ping pong table but I’ll invite you over sometimes to use it. Just email me at theacuffs@yahoo.com, where I’m in love, holding my wife’s cyber hand tenderly.