If you’re anything like me, nothing gives you more of a thrill than playing a well-planned prank on your significant other. Be it as simple as laying in wait in a dark room to scare the pee pee out of your unsuspecting spouse or spending countless hours doing something like this, pranking your lover is good for any relationship. It erodes the trust you have placed in each other so you can build it back up again. Oh, also, it shows that you have a good sense of humor and live life on the edge.

I love to pull pranks on my wife, but I don’t do the more elaborate pranks. Mostly because that takes a lot of time and effort and I’m really busy with other things and I’m also inherently lazy. The combination of those two characteristics are not good for pulling off pranks in an Ocean’s 11 manner. Granted, my unwillingness to engage in the more elaborate pranks could be interpreted as a lack of love and dedication to my spouse, but you’d be wrong. I love her very much, it’s just hard to engage in time-intensive pranking when you have a toddler.

So I mostly hide in the dark to scare the living bejesus out of my wife.

I love to prank her, and the only time I elected to stop hiding in the dark to scare my wife was when my wife was pregnant. Nothing says “unintended consequences” quite like a premature birth that resulted from my shenanigans.

She’s become fairly accustomed to my hijinks, but on the rare occasion that my wife returns the favor, THAT SHIT IS NOT FUNNY.

I fully understand that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”, but it really unnerves me when she gets me back. Probably because I pride myself on having a sort of sixth sense  when someone is about to prank me.

Therein lies the problem. Because my wife has the memory of an elephant, she has literally waited several months to retaliate after my initial prank.

And that’s BULLSHIT.

Take today for instance. Another prank that I love to engage in involves me throwing ice cold water on her while she’s in the shower. It’s a completely cruel thing to do, but it gets her heart rate up (I’m just trying to help her train for a marathon) and it gives me uncontrollable fits of giggles.

Every time I get her, she swears that she will exact her revenge on me and my response is always the same, “SURE you will”. And sure enough, she does. But only because she waits until I’ve completely forgot about my original offending prank.

Another Model Husband Mini-Play

[Wife surreptitiously throws not one, not two, but three large cups of ice cold water on Comic Bill Brumbach on a relaxing Sunday morning, thus ruining the entire day.]

Comic Bill Brumbach: WHY THE F**K DID YOU DO THAT???

Wife: I owe you from when you got me!! How’s it feel? HUH? How’s that ice cold water feel running down your warm body?

CBB: What? What are you talking about? That one time in 2012?

Wife: YES, THAT’S THE ONE!!!

CBB: THAT WAS 8 MONTHS AGO!!!!!!

Wife: What’s your point? I never got you back until right now. 

[Wife flushes toilet.]

Wife: Now we’re even. 

CBB: WHAT! THE! F*CK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fin. 

And that’s the reason why I think there should be a statute of limitations on prank retaliation in a marriage. Anyone can wait 3 to 6 months to retaliate; there’s no gamesmanship in that. The real challenge would be getting someone back within a previously agreed upon time period. Like two weeks. Yeah, two weeks. I think that’s an appropriate window for retaliation. Pranks that fall outside of this two week time period count as new transgressions and reset the retaliation clock.

But there are fates far worse than prank retaliation.

One of the things that you learn in marriage is that revenge is often a dish best served cold… like doing something your spouse loathes. So because I have a deviously creative mind, instead of retaliating against my wife with the traditional prank, why not do something she HATES for an extended period of time?

Something she hates more than the messes I leave behind. Something she hates more than my obsession with sports. Something she hates more than me taking over the fridge with an absorbent amount of beer (leaving no room for her healthy food).

I decided I was going to talk like Christian Bale’s Batman for 24 hours. [Although talking like Adam West’s Batman would probably be equally annoying over a 24 hour period.]

It all started with this parody video from CollegeHumor.com. The clip is called “Batman Can’t Stop Thinking About Sex” and if you haven’t watched it, HOLY SHIT YOU SHOULD. I laughed so hard people legitimately thought I was having a seizure. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen on the internet… EVER. And I watch a lot of cat videos, so I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it all.

So needless to say, after watching it for the first time, I had to watch it dozens of times more. If I had a minute that wasn’t occupied with my wife talking to me, I can almost assure you that for a solid two week span, I was watching that video again. It got to the point that my wife began to resent me and I believe she even considered divorcing me the time I watched it 17 times in one evening.

She was legit pissed at me.

But like all things, eventually I grew tired of the video and stopped watching it incessantly. But the damage had been done. If I ever talked like Batman, a perturbed look would immediately take over my wife’s face.

The perfect revenge was obviously to talk like Batman for a solid 24 hours. Aside from the inordinate amount of lozenges I required after I exacted my revenge, it was MARVELOUS. The only drawback to my incredibly brilliant revenge?

Well… I took revenge on my wife two weeks ago. We haven’t made coitus since. Although I suggested the statute of limitations on revenge be two weeks, that doesn’t mean you can exact your revenge for the duration of that time period. That’s totally not fair. That’s like using the nuclear option. Holding sex hostage is CLEARLY a violation of the Geneva Convention, and quite frankly is an act of sexual terrorism.

I’d withhold sex from her in retaliation… but c’mon. That’s like bringing a wet noodle to a gun fight.