Wedding reboot: Even happier than a verbal victory

My wife and I will be celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary tomorrow. Following our wedding, I wrote about some of the more memorable moments and posted them on a blog that no long exists.

As our anniversary approaches, I’ve decided to re-post some of those wedding memories here as a means of preserving them as well as sharing them with readers.

Here is the next of these posts:

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During Sunday brunch on the morning following our wedding, friend and groomsman Tom told me how much fun our wedding had been and how happy I appeared during the festivities.

“It’s the second happiest I’ve ever seen you,” he said.

“What was my happiest moment?” I asked.

About a year ago I had a run-in with a co-worker, and some bad decisions on my co-worker’s part and some quick thinking on my part made my co-worker look like a fool in the eyes of several colleagues. It actually became quite a scene for a few moments, and Tom was eventually pulled into the fray as well, albeit disoriented and confused as to what was happening.

I managed to pull Tom away at just the right moment, and as we extricated ourselves from the scene, he looked at me and said, “Whoa, that was bad.”

You should have seen his face. He was like a deer caught in headlights.

“No, Tom,” I said. “That was great. The best.” Apparently I appeared quite happy at this moment, since he claims to have never seen me happier.

And I was. It was what leadership gurus might call a win-lose scenario, and I find these situations eminently more satisfying than those boring win-win kinds. I always find it more fun to win when you know that your victory came at the expense of a deserving jackass.

Of course Tom is wrong. I can honestly say that my wedding day, and the wedding ceremony in particular, was the happiest moment in my life.

But that encounter last year remains a close second.