The smartest thing I never said

My wife starts a new job on January 7. The company has their annual holiday party in January rather than during the Christmas rush. It's a little weird, but whatever works for them will have to work for us. We did decide that it's important for us to go and were thinking through wardrobe options when she pointed out the event was "Black Tie Invited."

Great. She's lost a ton of weight since the birth of our little girl, and frankly has a dearth of options available in her wardrobe, formal or otherwise. With that, we go out on the great dress hunt such that we can have the right dress for this event. This is a totally sucktastic affair, quite frankly, as we go searching for the mythical "perfect dress."

At Bloomingdale's, she found a dress that I thought was rather nice. A little purple thing that was "not too sexy" and "not too horrifying on the budget." She opined in a fashion that makes men shudder.

It makes my butt look huge.

"No dear," thinks Bill in his best wiseass mode. "Your butt makes your butt look huge."

I chose not to make that comment, no matter the self-perceived comedic value of same. The instinct toward self preservation is apparently much stronger than my pathological need to be unnecessarily smart-alecky. Instead, I told her (truthfully), that the dress was spectacular on her. She decided that instead she liked a dress from another shop we'd visited earlier in the day better. We went back to buy it, where she immediately changed her mind and we left. Dressless.

She has ten days to find one.

Update: 12 January
She did find a dress. The same damned dress that spurred this post in the first place. At the same price she didn't want to pay.