The Longest Date: Life as a Wife by Cindy Chupack

adventure travel. I know we’re a litigious society here in America, but once you’re in the back of a stranger’s truck surrounded by harnesses and ropes, you might begin to wonder if the threat of lawsuits and the ubiquitous waivers and safety regulations and warnings and roped-off danger areas are maybe a good thing. I also began to wonder why the hell I agreed to do this. I wasn’t eighteen anymore.
    Oh, yeah, that’s why I agreed to do it.
    I was still single at the time, and being single in your late thirties means you have to do some seriously stupid shit to prove you’re still fun, like ride in the back of a pickup, rappel down a waterfall, or go on a two-day river-rafting/camping trip, which Ian scheduled for after we rappelled down a waterfall.
    Clearly, Costa Rica was an early trip for us. In fact, it was a trip Ian had planned before he met me, and he told me repeatedly (in addition to the fact that he was not looking for a relationship) that he would be going to Central America for a few months, and I shouldn’t try to stop him.
    I, in fact, had no intention of stopping him. I’m not sure what kind of controlling women he’d been with in the past, but I like to travel alone sometimes, and I respected the fact that he did, too.
    Then, a few weeks before his departure, he sheepishly asked if I wanted to join him in Costa Rica. And that was our courtship in a nutshell. Ian would firmly announce whatever he was absolutely
not
going to do (have an exclusive relationship, or say “I love you” very often) and then would do the opposite. He still says “I love you” almost every day, and to the best of my knowledge we are still exclusive. I think he preferred to start with establishing low or no expectations so he could be happily surprising instead of sorely disappointing, which was a good strategy, because I usually started with unreasonably high expectations and had nowhere to go but down. Much like being at the top of a waterfall.
    In Costa Rica our relationship literally got off the ground when we did this zip-line tour, because Ian was impressed that I was so game for everything. He started the trip alone with a Spanish immersion course, and I flew to Costa Rica to meet him, which, after I landed, involved driving two hours in a car with no A/C on a road that every so often was cut off by a body of water that my Spanish-only-speaking driver would nonchalantly drive through. I met Ian’s host family and drank the lemonade I was offered (even though I’d been told absolutely not to drink the water), because I didn’t want to insult them, and before I knew it, I was in a pickup truck headed for a family-owned ropes course.
    I was
quite
game, come to think of it, and oddly good at rappelling, especially considering that I missed part of the safety briefing when I got distracted.
    Our guide was wearing a harness as he spoke, and the harness fits around your thighs and cinches up around your shoulders, so if you are a tan man wearing shorts, which he was, it basically lifts and accentuates your penis. I don’t think that’s intentional, but this guy helped design the course, so you be the judge.
    He was saying something to the effect of “This is very important: when you lean back, don’t—” which is when I got distracted. Frankly, I think tan, muscular Latin men should not wear a harness when giving a safety lecture to women. I thought my momentary lapse went undetected, but that night at dinner, Ian said, “Were you checking out our guide’s package?” and I did a spit take, an actual spit take with liquid spewing out of my mouth, which we laugh about to this day.
    Ian, being straight (as opposed to other men I have married), was not distracted during the instructions, which is why he came up with the idea of wrapping a garden hose around his waist years later when we were trapped on a roof deck, as our friends and their baby stared in awe.
    Let me add that it was not so awesome at first, when