I say tomato, you say to-mah-to

There is a certain group of actors that enthrall me, simply by opening their mouths. Alan Rickman. Colin Firth. Hugh Grant. Ralph Fiennes. Kenneth Branagh.

Are you noticing a theme here? ;)

Like so many women around the globe, I’m a sucker for a man with an accent. Hell, I’m married to a Brit. The first time we had a telephone conversation, I missed at least 75% of what he actually said because I was too busy swooning over his voice. And that accent! Guh…I used to describe it as molten lava down my spine. I swear, all he had to do to get me in the mood was utter a single word in my ear, and I was putty in his hands. Very wet putty.

…

Ahem. What was I saying again?

Oh. Right. Men with accents.

You would not believe the kind of attention my husband Craig gets. We were actually married in the UK, and I lived over there until summer of 2004. There, I was the novelty, with all of Craig’s male family and friends asking me to talk, simply for the sake of hearing my American accent. Strangers coming to the door would stop and talk with me, based purely on my accent. Here in the US, our positions are reversed. People hear my husband talk, and everything just seems to stop. Women are constantly chatting him up, and even men will comment to me that they love the way he talks. (I’m completely serious with that; my daughter’s softball coach couldn’t stop going on about Craig’s accent the entire time I first met him.)

There’s a downside to it, of course. Often times, people won’t understand something Craig says. It’s quite common in our household for him to stop in the middle of a phone conversation and hand me the receiver where I then have to give our address/phone number/some other information that the other person needs and can’t quite get right because they can’t figure out what he’s saying. Even my mother won’t talk to him on the phone because she says she can’t understand him without seeing his lips moving. And one time at an amusement park, he had to deal with a young girl at a frozen lemonade stand for nearly ten minutes before she got his order right. (She kept thinking he was saying “full” instead of “four” and kept scooping more frozen lemonade into his cup before finally exclaiming, “I can’t get any more in!” Craig had to hold up four fingers finally to tell her what he wanted.)

But why is it? Is it the grass is greener theory that makes people go all gooey at an accent? It doesn’t even have to be a foreign one. I had a guy friend in college who was born and raised in New York. Without fail, every single girl he dated (and how he found them all, I don’t know, because we went to college in Michigan), had a Southern accent. Because he thought Southern accents were so exotic. To each his own.

Give me your theories. Because I still haven’t figured out why it is that even my husband whispering the words, “hand me the remote” in my ear can turn me into putty, even after being with him for nine years now. Other than, you know, the whole loving him madly thing. :) As a bonus, everybody who comments today will be put into a drawing at the end of the day for a DVD of “Love Actually,” one of my favorite romantic movies, chock-full of English accents.