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" I&amp;#039;m standing on my front porch with a few friends, enjoying a few cigarettes, a few beers, and some of the delicious pork shoulder that I spent most of the day cooking. Maybe there is a Phillies or Eagles game on in the background, or maybe it&amp;#039;s just a Friday night with friends. We&amp;#039;re getting a little drunk and maybe a little loud. I can feel myself reverting back into my ever-comfortable role of class clown. It&amp;#039;s a scene that has repeated itself many times over the last 15 years of my life. In moments like this I don&amp;#039;t feel my age; in fact, I feel ageless. I have the same feeling of carefree invincibility that I remember having as a teenager. At 17, I was doing the exact same thing with some of the exact same people. And though 15 years ago I wouldn&amp;#039;t have cooked the pork myself, everything else feels mostly unchanged. Well, almost. The one glaring difference is actually glaring at me. My wife, Karel, is destroying my euphoric sense of acting as young as I feel. Her penetrating gaze is entering my skull and working its way deep into the soft tissue of my brain. She&amp;#039;s using this fancy bit of wifely telepathy to tell me that she doesn&amp;#039;t like what she sees: the cigarettes that are rotting my insides (and making me stink and killing me to boot), the beers that are making me slow (and slightly obnoxious) and adding to the size of my newly emerging dad-gut, the pork that&amp;#039;s clogging my arteries and reinforcing the beers&amp;#039; negative effects on my once-average physique. Karel doesn&amp;#039;t share my vision of myself as an ageless rebel blowing smoke in the face of Father Time. Instead she sees a slightly tipsy, balding dad with a rapidly expanding waistline acting like a gluttonous juvenile who&amp;#039;s not nearly as funny as he thinks he is. She then uses her amazing psychic abilities to show me the mathematical equation she is silently calculating in her head: number of cigarettes smoked x number of beers ingested + pork = no sex and a lengthy fight soon after our guests leave.  The beer suddenly makes me feel bloated, the pork tastes greasy, and the cigarette seems unnecessary and gross. I&amp;#039;m not having as much fun as I thought I was, and I don&amp;#039;t feel as cool or funny or ageless as I did before my wife decided to invade my brain. I suddenly feel like I&amp;#039;m playing dress-up in a younger man&amp;#039;s clothes \u2014 someone who can bounce back from a night of alcohol and nicotine with more speed and good humor than a man who might find himself called into action at 5 a.m. by a teething 11-month-old.  And, just like that, I&amp;#039;m done playing dress-up, and I return to my regularly scheduled habit of trying to act my age, which is still not easy. It might seem to an outside observer that my wife is being a telepathic buzz-kill. Part of me wholeheartedly agrees. In another sense, she&amp;#039;s right: acting like an invincible teenager when you no longer are one looks ridiculous. It&amp;#039;s also slightly selfish, especially if you&amp;#039;re lucky enough to have adult responsibilities (like our two kids and our house) to think about. But true as those statements may be, I&amp;#039;m still struggling to reconcile the fact that she fell in love with me at the height of my hedonistic all-about-me phase. The night I met her, I was double-fisting 40s of malt liquor and smoking like a chimney. I think I was wearing a torn Guns N&amp;#039; Roses T-shirt. I wasn&amp;#039;t exactly oozing sophistication or maturity. On some level, the idea of a malt-liquor-soaked future must have appealed to her, because she did end up falling in love with me, cigarettes, malt liquor, bad T-shirt, and all.  To this day, Karel insists she saw someone deeper in me than the guy I imagined myself to be back then. It&amp;#039;s hard to believe, because not only could I not see anything deeper, but I also can&amp;#039;t shake the apparent misconception that that guy was totally awesome. That guy had a full head of hair, a loud, obnoxious mouth, a Marlboro swagger, and a boozy attitude. So when she gives me the evil eye or starts a fight when some of those qualities reappear (sadly, the hair never reappears), it actually confuses me. As time passes, I find it harder to accept that she doesn&amp;#039;t want that cool guy back because... well, I kinda want that cool guy back. I&amp;#039;ve sacrificed so much of that old me on the altar of familial responsibility: I&amp;#039;ve turned myself from a pack-a-day smoker into a once-monthly social smoker; I&amp;#039;ve abandoned the bar stool for a seat next to Karel on the couch. I&amp;#039;ve even conformed to elements of Karel&amp;#039;s healthy &amp;quot;natural&amp;quot; dietary regime, willingly and happily, recognizing that I had found a woman who was worth making sacrifices for. As difficult as it is for me to separate my guilty pleasures from who I am, I don&amp;#039;t love them. I don&amp;#039;t love smoking, drinking, or meats. I love my wife. At some point, most of us stop to think about who we used to be before turning the corner toward who we&amp;#039;re going to be. About two months before the birth of our first child, I went out with a buddy for my 28th birthday; Karel wasn&amp;#039;t in the mood to do anything except lie on the couch. I ended up eating a three-pound hamburger in 15 minutes at a pub. What can I say? Neil Diamond&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;America&amp;quot; was playing on the jukebox, and I got inspired. The place hung a picture of me on the wall and gave me a T-shirt that announced my achievement to the world. While Karel was far from proud of my ability to ingest three pounds of ground beef with a bun, cheese, and all the fixins, I think she understood that at that moment in my life, I needed that well-dressed giant hamburger more than anything. I sometimes wish she would remember that hamburger, and what it meant to me.  There&amp;#039;s a fine line between feeding my vanity by occasionally dipping my toe in the tantalizing mirage of youth and succumbing to the belief that I&amp;#039;ve actually found the fountain. It would be so easy to revert back to the comfortable trappings of my previous life. But I don&amp;#039;t want to be the pack-a-day smoker I used to be, any more than I want to be a guy who drinks too much, or who has a serious weight problem from overindulging, or who can&amp;#039;t let go of his past accomplishments in order to create new ones. In that constant struggle toward the intimidating unknown of the future and the difficult realities of the now, it&amp;#039;s sometimes helpful to have a mind-reading wife to remind me that it was in spite of my immaturity that she fell in love with me \u2014 not because of it.  What do you want to know about men? If you&amp;#039;re looking to figure out your guy&amp;#039;s mysterious or perplexing behavior, our columnist Aaron will try his hardest to explain the crazy things men do (but he makes no promises!). E-mail your questions to him at redbook@hearst.com (subject: Whys Guy). Be sure to include your name, city, state, and e-mail address.  New REDBOOK columnist Aaron Traister lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two kids. His work has appeared on babble.com and salon.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/relationships/advice/a5818/men-acting-like-teenagers/>