After nearly 10 years of marriage, my wife doesn't want me wearing her clothes anymore. She's even taken to hoarding some of her favorite garments.

One of the many great fringe benefits of hooking up with a tall woman has been the abundance of large T-shirts. We have shared a few sweatshirts and sweatpants, too, but especially T-shirts.

The romance between Sharon and me actually began the first time she gave me something to wear.

It was during a trip to Key West with a group of mutual friends. When I ran low on clean shirts, she handed me one of hers.

"Where I come from," I told her, "if a man and a woman wear each other's clothes, they have to get married."

Three years later we did just that, and we've been wearing each other's gender-neutral casuals ever since.

But our stock of T-shirts is not being replenished the way it was during our young-and-single days.

Before our three daughters were born, I attended more music festivals, NASCAR races, 5K runs, NBA basketball games and other events that produced some of my favorite old tees.

During a pre-marriage trip to Mexico with some buddies, I learned that American T-shirts, especially those depicting professional sports teams, are as good as cash in regions south of the border.

Some boys selling ironwood carvings on a beach asked if we had T-shirts to trade. When my friend Paul Lockhart returned with a shirt from a Charlotte Hornets playoff game, the boys gleefully offered up their finest carving of a majestic marlin.

I didn't do so well. Sharon and I were dating then, and I had packed one of her T-shirts from the Mexican restaurant where she worked.

The boys seemed downright insulted by my selection, printed with a Corona beer ad and the words "Cinco de Mayo."

Nothing feels better against the skin on a dog day afternoon than a well-worn, cotton-knit T-shirt. Most of mine have disintegrated, and Sharon has suddenly become overly possessive about her own dwindling supply.

Some of her favorites are from volleyball tournaments she played in during her college days at East Tennessee State University.

Sharon is an audiologist, so there are shirts from hearing aid companies and some that say "ETSU Department of Communicative Disorders." One has a large diagram of an inner ear.

I have traditionally shunned the audiology-related varieties, which has made them the most preserved among our remaining stock. Sharon aims to keep them that way.

She has taken to rationing my drawer with two or three old volleyball tournament shirts and one threadbare-and-holey covering from a 1980s Jimmy Buffett concert.

On the Buffett shirt, you can almost still read the words: "changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes, nothing remains quite the same."

Ain't it the truth?

Mark Rutledge can be contacted at mrutledge@coxnc.com