Red-Eye Etiquette

So my husband took the red-eye flight recently from San Francisco to Philadelphia. He flies a lot for work, and probably three times a year, he takes a red-eye flight. But this last time he went, he came in the house at 7am, looked at me for a thoughtful second and then said, “Maybe your next article should be on red-eye etiquette.”

“Red-eye etiquette ? What happened? Someone snore all night? The person next to you frequented the bathroom?”

“Frequented the bathroom? What are you, Web MD?” my husband went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

“Well what happened? The person next to you left their light on?” I was struggling here, what else could there possibly be.

“No,” he whined, “they did not shut the lights off in the plane until an hour and  half into flight, which was annoying, but fine, I could deal with that. It was the other people. They were talking. All night. Having conversations.”

“Okay,” I felt sympathetic, but even though I know it was a red-eye, I also know not everyone sleeps, “were the people in you row talking?”

“No, just people around me,” he motioned a circle with his arms,”talking as if it were the middle of the day.”

I shook my head, showing him my sympathetic “yea that stinks” look, but inside all I could think was, “Really?”

Then it hit me. Wow. We have now been married long enough that he was like me. That was something I would complain about. Before we had kids and all of that, he could fall asleep upside down during a bombing, but now I had rubbed off on him. He had developed my keen sense of hearing everybody say everything. He had taken on my annoyance with others when, really, there was no need to be annoyed. He had become me.

All of a sudden I was proud.