Ladies, I’m sure you’ve asked yourself, “How can I get my man to love shopping as much as I do?” Admit it: you enjoy being with him, but it’s a drag when you’re just getting warmed up after hitting a dozen stores and he’s starting to whine, “Honey, can we go home now, I’m all shopped out.”
I have an answer for you. At least, an answer for when the two of you go on vacation. After he has finished packing his suitcase, open it up and take most of his clothes out. That way, when you arrive at your destination he’ll be motivated to go shopping with you since he won’t have much to wear otherwise.
I can testify that this approach works. However, I did this to myself on our trip to Maui—taking just a few T-shirts, a few Hawaiian shirts, and a few pairs of shorts for a twelve-day vacation. Usually I pack a lot more, but I decided to test out a hypothesis this time: Would shopping with Laurel be more enjoyable if I really needed to buy clothes?
My experimental answer: Yes. Here I am this afternoon on the ocean side of Front Street in Lahaina, wearing a fresh-off-the-rack Hilo Hattie shirt and clutching several recently purchased T-shirts. Usually Laurel shops me until I beg for mercy (also for food and a place to sit). However, I’ve been keeping up with her much better this trip, which I ascribe to my significantly increased motivation to find clothes to wear.
Understand, I’m still a shopping amateur. Laurel is the pro. On our first full day in Maui she had gone to three stores before I had finished eating breakfast. Being a woman, Laurel is energized by shopping. Being a man, I usually am drained by shopping. As noted above, I can’t count the number of times I’ve said “Well, I guess we’ve done enough browsing for one day,” and Laurel has replied, “Are you kidding? I’m just getting going.”
So that’s why a woman needs to give her man some extra motivation by making sure that he only has a few clothes to wear on vacation. It also helps if the clothes don’t match, another extra motivating factor that, in our case, I added by accident. Usually I make at least a cursory effort to see whether the T-shirts I bring to Maui have at least a vague matching relationship with the shorts I bring. That didn’t happen this time.
When I unpacked, I found that, defying the odds of probability, I had managed to pack three T-shirts and three pairs of shorts, each of which was a different color, yet somehow each combination of “top” and “bottom” was remarkably incompatible. Laurel, of course, always matches perfectly, which is why it takes her four times as long to pack.
However, when she gets where she is going, she actually has clothes that she can wear in public that don’t make little children scream, “Mommy, why does that man look so weird? He doesn’t match!” (I may be slightly exaggerating here, but I can easily believe that Laurel was such a child).
I am in good shape now, though. Six new T-shirts, a pair of shorts, three Hawaiian shirts, one water-resistant jacket (I forgot that it can rain a lot in Hawaii), and two baseball caps now reside in our condo closet.
The shopping gods have been kind to me. I knew it was going to be a good shopping day when a rainbow appeared over Lahaina and the West Maui mountains as we were setting out late this afternoon. The “L” on the hillside stands for Laurel, of course, a token of appreciation from the Front Street merchants (or so I like to think).
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