My Dignified, Not-at-All-Bratty Struggle With My Fiancé's Mountain Dew Addiction
To paraphrase the late Princess Diana, there are three of us in this relationship ...
Me: Hi, my name is Sally, and my fiancé is addicted to Mountain Dew.
Audience, dutifully: Hi, Sally …
As you may know, I've known my fiancé, Dave, for almost fifteen years now. And yet, all of that experience did not prepare me for the fact that, in the heart of my beloved partner, there abides a deep and faithful love for Mountain Dew. Somehow I had missed this about him! It took me a minute (or a few months, or, well, I'll let you know) to adjust to this!
I didn't have Dave pegged as a Mountain Dew guy. And I’m sorry to say that I straight-up judged him for it.
You see, one of the few things my first husband and I did right in our marriage was to have a number of food and beverage tastes in common. He was an adult - like, an adult adult - and though I was not, we’ve agreed for many years now that ice water is the undisputed King of Beverages. It just is! It's the best. (Fight me.)
We also didn't drink caffeine (yep, my love for coffee is limited to decaf), and soda - generally ginger ale or Sprite - was for when either of us had an upset stomach. Feeling pretty smug, we looked down with delight on the masses of ignorant commoners, with their IV bags of Diet Coke and their cartons of Dr. Pepper or Pepsi, thinking they were slaking their thirst without bothering to look at how much sodium is in a can of Diet Anything. Privately, we roasted from here to eternity a friend who could only be persuaded to schlep to the grocery store in person when he found himself out of Mountain Dew, a hill of empty 12-pack cartons sitting pitifully in his kitchen.
This judgment we rendered, naturally, from atop our own pitiful hill of fast food wrappers and cartons, as we finished our meals by puffing on Marlboros.
I know - it was a real blind spot. Still, I thought of Mountain Dew as the beverage of choice only for the basement-dwelling, video-game-playing, Reddit-posting set - or for high-school boys. Essentially, I understood Mountain Dew as the beverage equivalent of Axe deodorant. Yet here was my David, living above ground, not obsessed by video games at all, and blessedly inexperienced with the cesspool that is Reddit. Incidentally, he used a delightfully mild Old Spice deodorant - a world away from Axe. And he loved Mountain Dew.
Okay, I thought. I can try to work with this.
But as the year unfolded, the mad marketing scientists behind the standard green cans revealed a diabolical plan that nobody could've predicted. They would spend the whole entire year releasing as many limited-edition spin-off flavors of Mountain Dew as the market could bear - and maybe more. Sure, they had played with variations on the formula before: Code Red, Baja Blast. But this time, they'd emptied their suggestion box, seemingly determined to fulfill every deranged Mountain Dew fantasy anyone had ever had. It would be a veritable whirlwind of new and exciting Mountain Dew-branded sodas that would take the willing consumer on a truly wild ride of super-extreme flavor awesomeness.
And if there's a more willing consumer than Dave, I'm not sure I want to meet him.
I can't quite remember which flavor came first. I want to say it was the Major Melon variation, a zippy twist on a watermelon-flavored soda. Dave was in love instantly, and he didn't care who knew it:
Next, he encountered the Spark flavor, a kicky raspberry varietal:
We were both astonished, grossed out, and, finally, embarrassingly intrigued to try the Flamin' Hot flavor. Do Cheetos belong in soda? Our hearts and minds were united in screaming no, but this was purchased more than once:
Next came Baja Gold, a pineapple variation he enjoyed, a mango flavor I pointedly did not buy, due to his distaste for the fruit, and the release of Baja Blast into stores. Formerly available only at Taco Bell, when this beloved flavor hit the market, a 12-pack came home with us.
Those summery flavors were followed, in early fall, by Frost Bite, a clear soda whose flavor was decidedly not: after deep deliberation on the subject, it seemed to be a cherry or white raspberry flavor. I couldn't help but notice that this carton hung around the fridge a little longer than I thought it would, but eventually, it, too, disappeared.
After that, I think there was a purple one. Grape, I assumed. Then, when Dave was released from the hospital the second time, in October, I greeted him with a Halloween-branded Mystery Flavor of Mountain Dew. He wasn't nuts about it, but, of course, he drank it all. I don't remember what it was said to taste like.
And that brings me to today. While picking up yet another package of doggie diapers for our girl, Jasmine, I noticed another new flavor of Mountain Dew as I stood in the checkout line at Target: Fruit Quake. A light cola-brown in color, the packaging confirmed that this soda, a holiday release, was a play on the flavors of fruitcake.
I stared for a moment. And then I grabbed.
As I waited in agony for the woman in front of me to pay by check, record the purchase in the ledger, check and double-check her receipt, and then check and double-check her cart, I had some time to reflect.
See, with only one or two exceptions all year, I had been the one who had stood in line to buy all of this limited-edition soda. I run our household's errands, so of course I pick up whatever Dave wants in addition to my own stuff. And I’d felt self-conscious at times with all that Mountain Dew in my cart, especially during weeks when our local grocery store was advertising four 12-pack cartons for $12! I had literally never in my whole life brought four cases of soda to the checkout before. I’d certainly never bought four cartons of goofy, limited-edition Mountain Dew. So yeah, I'll admit it - I was embarrassed.
I'd claim to be throwing a party, or say right away, with a feeble laugh, “My fiancé is addicted to these; ha-ha.” One time, determined to get some good out of the pesky gray roots that keep cropping up under my hair color, I invented a non-existent son: “Oh, Lord, you know teenage boys. Good grief,” I'd said sorrowfully, shaking my head at the shameless soda-swilling habits of the monster I'd created and was still, apparently, enabling.
(Here I should point out that checkout clerks do not care what you buy. I know this; this is a fact. It's also a fact that unnecessary chit-chat makes most people want to die - especially checkout clerks.)
So I was being extremely ridiculous about Dave's Mountain Dew habit - and I knew full well just how ridiculous I was being. But something had changed in between the last time I stood in line with a cart full of Mountain Dew and today. What day was it? Where did it happen? I'm not sure.
Somewhere along the line, though, my fiance's unbridled enjoyment of this overly-caffeinated, radioactive-looking soda had changed in my mind. It just stopped bothering me. It had transformed from something I found weird about Dave into something I found, instead, endearing.
Call me crazy but I like that he likes arcane, limited-edition Mountain Dew. It makes him happy. He, in turn, makes me happy. Therefore, by the transitive property, buying these oddball varieties of soda for him makes me happy. (At least, I think it's the transitive property! I don't know. I'm more of a “words” person than a “numbers” person.)
Anyway, as the checkout girl scanned the 20-ounce of Fruit Quake Mountain Dew, she exclaimed, “Ooh! I want to try this!”
I just smiled. “I think it'll be good.”
And it was.
