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" She&amp;#039;s Got Game By Steve Rushin My wife is an Olympic gold medalist, WNBA All-Star, Jeopardy! champion, and Rhodes Scholarship finalist who was sung to by President Clinton, sung about by Ludacris, and serenaded on Sesame Street by a chorus of Muppets. But it wasn&amp;#039;t until I saw her basketball jersey in the Smithsonian \u2014 opposite Dorothy&amp;#039;s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz \u2014 that it finally hit me: I, without a doubt, married up. My wife&amp;#039;s name, Rebecca Lobo, is on sandwiches and street signs in New England. It adorns the arena rafters at the University of Connecticut, where she first became a basketball star. Her high school in Massachusetts is on Rebecca Lobo Way, a nice trump card to play at reunions. So people naturally assume that I took her name when we tied the knot eight years ago. I saved the UPS mailing label from our first wedding present, which was addressed, without irony, to &amp;quot;The Lobos.&amp;quot; Because I&amp;#039;m a bald, dim-witted writer, people think I couldn&amp;#039;t possibly be her husband, so they occasionally confuse me for someone more glamorous. At O&amp;#039;Hare airport, a man asked if he could take Rebecca&amp;#039;s photo. When I reflexively stepped away, he said, &amp;quot;No, no, no. I want your picture too, Andre Agassi.&amp;quot; But more often, photographers, with their eye still pressed to a viewfinder, frantically wave me out of the frame.  People assume that my diminished marital stature is reflected in my height. My wife is 6-foot-4, but I&amp;#039;m an inch taller than she is, a fact that always surprises people, who expect to see her unpack me out of a trunk, like a ventriloquist with her dummy.  But she does love me, she did marry me, and she is proud of me, I&amp;#039;m sure. It was Rebecca who urged me to write a novel, and when The Pint Man was published last year \u2014 it&amp;#039;s about a man dating up \u2014 she threw a party. She was more excited than I was. And just the other morning, when I woke, she said, &amp;quot;I need you.&amp;quot; Okay, what she really said was: &amp;quot;I kneed you. In the groin. By accident. Go back to sleep.&amp;quot; But a good marriage requires selective hearing, and I think we have a good marriage. There are plenty of men, I&amp;#039;ve discovered, who literally want to marry up. A few summers ago, a very short man approached Rebecca at a Houston Astros baseball game. &amp;quot;Rebecca,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You gotta marry me. I want tall kids. You&amp;#039;re my only hope.&amp;quot; Rebecca&amp;#039;s reply, in its small way, moved me unexpectedly. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I already have a husband.&amp;quot;  She&amp;#039;s So Cool it Hurts By Joel Stein When I met my wife, Cassandra, in 1997, the first thing I noticed \u2014 before her beauty, her height, or her stylishness \u2014 was her coolness. I do not dabble in the cool arts. At the time, I listened to Counting Crows, had cut off my mullet only a few years earlier, and still had all of my Dungeons &amp;amp;amp; Dragons manuals.  Cassandra, on the other hand, was the first person I met who listened to indie bands because she likes indie bands. She was also the only person I knew who used the F word to refer to the thing the F word is referring to. She had tiny holes in her face, from piercings. Face piercings.  Coolness is supposed to have a very short half-life. The high school quarterback, the sorority mean girl \u2014 they turn into suburban dorks who mix with the rest of us. But despite moving to a new city, having a baby, getting older, Cassandra has not stopped being cool. It&amp;#039;s an enormous, never-ending pressure, like being married to Patti Smith, mostly because she hasn&amp;#039;t made me any cooler. I still over-talk at parties; she says much less but has great impact. Take the time she ended a long, boring conversation at a get-together on Valentine&amp;#039;s Day by telling the group that we had to go home, since this was the one day a year we have sex. (It&amp;#039;s not, by the way. That would be very uncool.) Cassandra will be eternally cool because she actually doesn&amp;#039;t care what people think of her. That&amp;#039;s why she doesn&amp;#039;t smile when she meets someone. Or in awkward situations. Or when she doesn&amp;#039;t like your joke. There&amp;#039;s no phoniness to her. She does smile, though, when you say something that&amp;#039;s actually funny. And it&amp;#039;s the softest, warmest smile I&amp;#039;ve ever seen... even though there&amp;#039;s a tiny hole on the right side of her bottom lip. She&amp;#039;s Better at Everything (Except Eating Doughnuts) By Adam Platt I asked my 11-year-old daughter, the other day, to name one thing that her father was better at, more accomplished at, generally more talented at than her mother. She knitted her brow in serious concentration for a minute or two, before giving her thoughtful, carefully considered answer. &amp;quot;Daddy, I think you&amp;#039;re better at eating doughnuts.&amp;quot;  My daughter&amp;#039;s right, of course. Mrs. Platt is a sunny, positive person (she&amp;#039;s from a family of eternally sunny, positive Midwesterners), while I tend toward worry, pessimism, and gloom (I&amp;#039;m a writer who grew up on the gloomy East Coast). Being an architect, she is practical, optimistic, and terminally well organized, while I tend to be distracted, disheveled, and a mess. My wife is beautiful, slim, and energetic. I&amp;#039;m slothful, slow-moving, and round as a blimp, thanks to the unrelenting stream of sauce-drenched pastas, fine wines, and, yes, doughnuts that I consume night after night, month after month, and year after year as a professional restaurant critic in New York City. Is this a bad thing? Of course not. In fact, I would argue that in any healthy, honest long-term relationship, it&amp;#039;s the natural state of affairs. I come from a long line of lucky slobs who have managed, by hook or by crook, to marry above their station. My grandfather married the very witty and cultivated daughter of a Park Avenue lawyer, and my father married a woman (that would be my mother) who was, by his own happy admission, smarter than he was, more sophisticated (she came from Manhattan, he from the suburbs), and far more beautiful, too. We Platt men know in our bones that survival over the long haul, in life and in marriage, isn&amp;#039;t about harmonious compatibility. It&amp;#039;s about balance, and the perfectly balanced marriage is one where the champion alpha wife outshines her shambling omega husband in almost every possible way. Until recently, there were still one or two things that I did pretty well, compared with my alpha wife. I gave rambling toasts at weddings better than she did, and because it&amp;#039;s my job to eat, I&amp;#039;ve also, historically, been the better cook. But recently she&amp;#039;s begun to encroach on this territory too. My wife enjoys cooking, and sometimes she likes to try a new recipe in the morning when she knows she won&amp;#039;t have time to make dinner after work. This means our apartment is often filled, when I come back from my morning workout, with the enticing smells of fresh baked pies and gently bubbling soups and stews. The other day she cooked a bread pudding in the morning, and left it to cool on the stove, for dinner. This comforting confection was made in the French style, with torn bits of croissant instead of bread, and it was pooled in a sweet stew of raisins, egg yolks, and cream. And I was left strict written instructions not to touch it. Because I work from home, I had a taste in the morning, to make sure it was done. Then I had another slice at lunch. Then at tea, when the girls returned from school, I couldn&amp;#039;t help myself. I sat down with my daughters, and we did what Daddy does best. We ate what was left of this delicious dessert in one happy sitting. My Much Better Half More guys tell us how they lucked out in the wife department. &amp;quot;The moment I realized my wife was out of my league would be the time she came home from a girl&amp;#039;s night out and told me that she&amp;#039;d been dancing with Prince the whole evening. It wasn&amp;#039;t a lie \u2014 she had actually been out at a club dancing with Prince. I was jealous for several reasons. The most embarrassing reason of them all? I would have liked to dance with Prince!&amp;quot; \u2014 Rodney Treweek, married to Jacque Mular, both 37, Los Angeles &amp;quot;When we met, we both drove pickup trucks. But Hallie&amp;#039;s was a vintage hot rod with a Corvette engine under the hood. Mine was a little four-cylinder Mitsubishi. Even more amazing? She knew how to fix them both, and I was clueless.&amp;quot; \u2014 Joseph Moore, married to Hallie Moore, both 38, New York City &amp;quot;My wife is an all-star roller-derby skater, and the last three times I put on skates, I wound up in the hospital. The one time I actually tried to skate at the track with her, I was rapidly passed by an 80-year-old woman.&amp;quot; \u2014 Sean Kenyon, 41, married to Heather Angeli, 35, Denver &amp;quot;I met Libby while we were both working in the Oregon legislature. My big attempt at seduction was to convince her to quit the carpool she was in and join my carpool. To add another level of dorkdom to it, I would show up to the carpool with fresh orange juice for her and no one else. Really subtle. But I like to say that our relationship was the best thing to come out of the 1999 Oregon legislative session.&amp;quot; \u2014 Charlie Burr, 39, married to Libby Upham, 38, Portland, OR "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/relationships/advice/a11562/marrying-up/>