I can’t speak for everyone, but I suspect most of us have little lies we tell ourselves in order to get through difficult situations. I know I do.

For instance, when I’m in a room full of really intimidatingly attractive people (given that I’m a deeply introverted and committed homebody, this happens to me significantly more often than you’d think), I pretend I’m famous. When I’m walking on the street at night and see a man (it’s always a man) whom I suspect of being a homicidal, sex-crazed, puppy-kicking kidnapper, I imagine I’m Harley Quinn. I tell myself that, if given enough free time, I could learn any language despite not entirely having mastered my first and only language, English. “I can do anything,” I assure myself, even though just TODAY I had difficulty operating the kitchen shears.

By far, the biggest lie I tell myself is that I’m a complete badass who has zero fear of anything. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a stress-case with clinically-diagnosed anxiety disorder and a ridiculously high startle response, I’m afraid of EVERYTHING. The list of my low-level phobias is practically endless: bodies of open water; injuries (when my children skin their knees, it’s all I can do not to throw up and pass out); elevators; biscuit cans; escalators; my Instant Pot; ladders; Champagne bottles; people wearing face paint; monkeys; aircraft; choking to death; attics; dying alone in my house and my pets eating me; accidentally leaving my kids in the car even though they’re 7 and 11 years old; germs; and, worst of all, spiders.

I maintain that one of the hallmarks of a healthy and functional relationship is not having the same fears, and, thankfully, Charlotte, in sharp contrast to me, is afraid of very little. She’s climbed the Continental Divide, hang-glided, flipped all six feet and three inches of herself off of a bridge, body-surfed in the ocean, held a tarantula in her bare hand and taken the Patent Bar, among many other adventures. In all the natural world, the only thing that really freaks her out is roaches. While I definitely don’t want to cuddle up to a roach and give it a goodnight kiss, I’m not particularly fearful of them. Unfortunately for her, Louisiana is pretty much Ground Zero for the enormous, flying roaches some people call Water Bugs.

This morning, like most, Charlotte awoke before I did and slipped her feet into her house shoes, one of which a roach happened to be using as a very plush hotel bed. Impressively, she didn’t scream – if I stuck my foot in a slipper that contained a spider, she’d still be scraping me off the ceiling. Because she’s so sweet to me, I try very hard to take any and all opportunities to do things for her, so when she said loudly, “Baby, there’s a roach,” I leapt out of bed in an uncharacteristically Olympic manner even though I was still mostly asleep and, without my contacts or glasses, very nearly legally blind.

Grabbing a Birkenstock (hashtag bisexual), I proceeded to enthusiastically beat the daylights out of what turned out to be a dust bunny. “Did I get it?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” she said, a note of dismay in her voice. “It’s over there.”

Squinting as hard as my Botox injections will allow, I, at last, located the roach, dispatched it, grabbed the corpse in a wad of paper towels and threw it in the trash. “Are you OK?” I asked.

“I will be,” she answered, tossing her slippers in after the roach. “I’m going to take a shower and scrub my left foot.”

Sex and romance are great and all, but it’s the little everyday gestures that keep a relationship strong. While I’m probably never going to join her for a dip in the lake, climbing the sheer face of a mountain, exploring old attics or petting a monkey, I hope Charlotte always knows she can count on me to slay vermin for her.

(Just not spiders.)