You know what? It has come to my attention that living with your beloved is a lot like living with a total stranger. Except sometimes you and the stranger make out.
The beau and I are pretty busy people. He travels for work and rugby a lot, and I’ve usually got some extracurricular project going on. The rare hours we are both at home together, we’re in two separate worlds: He’s watching TV or cooking dinner, and I’m tethered to my laptop or straightening up the house. When we do talk, it’s limited to random, brief bursts of chatter completely lacking context or antecedent, like some form of mild conversational Tourette’s. Highlights from yesterday included:
“We need to buy some new, non-shitty towels.”
“You hear that? The wind finally stopped.”
“Did you lock the front door?”
“I’m going to have bacon for breakfast. And then I’m going to have bacon for lunch.”
“Guess what? I have boobs!” *
There’s a downside to reaching that comfort level where you don’t have to make an effort with the other person, and this is it. Days go by where our deepest level of conversation involves who is going to get up to put the next load of laundry in the washer. When exactly did we run out of things to talk about? Who is this strange dude in my house, anyway? **
Oh sure, sometimes I try to jumpstart a little verbal spark. Probe a little bit inside the beau’s head. Root around in his brain. Unfortunately, my fallback method for attempting to communicate beyond “What should we have for lunch?” is to ask him what he’s thinking about. Like, RIGHT THIS SECOND. His standard response, of course, is work and rugby. But no, I implore him. Tell me what are you really thinking. Like REALLY REALLY thinking. “I don’t think,” he says. “I’m a boy.”
This relationship shit is a lot of work.
What do you do to reconnect with your favorite person?
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* I know! It’s SO CRAZY!!!
** I may not know his name, but at least he’s cute.
We sometimes do three day stretches when I work nights and Mrs. W works days, and we only see eachother for twenty minutes in the morning for “Togetherness Time!” As I am getting ready for bed and she is getting ready for work.
We get really strict about togetherness time, I am NOT allowed to fall asleep no matter how tired I am, and we have a crazy fast spead up version of “How was your day/night/last 32 hours since we’ve spoken”. It’s cute and sometimes involves breakfast. If one of us spends too long in the bathroom, the other one will yell, “Hurry up, you are missing togetherness time!” Oh, the joy.
That is too fricking cute. I love that you put in the effort like that.
We dont like many of the same things so it is easy for our conversations to become, “what do you do at work, what did you eat for lunch,” boring affairs. The other day I was so bored of this that I randomly asked, so what do you think about aid for chile versus aid for haiti? We started talking and it was so fun. I realized, duh, I need to be interesting, too. I can’t just ask him about his lunch.
I love that. I need to come up with specific questions like this more often. Get the mental juices flowing.
Hi Lyn, I agree this is an easy rut to fall into whether due to spending not a lot of time together/too much time together/whatever else. Dave and I have a 4.5 month old puppy and we’ve noticed a lot of the attention (kisses and cuddles and mushy talk, oh my!) get directed at her, where it was previously just directed towards each other. We realized this and we both were like “Woah, theah pahtnah” and it led to a great conversation about how we suddenly have to make a conscious, committed effort to put each other first instead of the puppy. Which is hard b/c she is so fucking cute. And every five minutes she does something and we’re all “omgomgomg look the way she put her paw on my leg SHE IS SO CUTE”.
And this in turn led to a conversation about kids. Because suddenly we get it. Before it was so easy to come home to our house after work/gym/errands and have a glass of wine and decompress on the couch together. Suddenly we were all distracted in ga-ga-over-puppy mode and needed to totally adjust our modus operandi. It’s harder than it sounds. But good practice for, like, this marriage thing we are going to be getting into…?
One rule we’ve instituted: kiss/say hello to each other first when coming home at night. Instead of walking in and immediately allowing the puppy to consume us we take a minute to hug and smooch. It kind of re-centers your focus. Also, we sit next to each other on the couch, instead of on opposite ends with the puppy in between. For some inexplicable reason, being 6 inches from each other’s faces, instead of 3 feet, makes us talk more and be more affectionate. Maybe it’s b/c we can smell each others pheromones?!
Moral of this comment: We are way too obsessed with our dog and there are no signs of this obsession calming down.
Hard one. We really focus on *doing* stuff together, whenever possible. There’s only so many conversations you can talk through after “how was your day” but, because we have a similar sense of humor and approach to the world, being active together helps us giggle/smirk/share the joke together and feel closer. Even just taking a walk around the neighborhood helps open conversation and make our limited time more meaningful. I think it’s one of the reasons I’m obsessed with finding adventures and new restaurants around town. And planning dinner parties (requireing coordination and dreaming and fun.) Also, we’ve started playing two-player games a lot.
Gretchen’s comment above was so spot on! We got a puppy a few years ago and fell into a habit of talking to each other through our puppy. Don’t ask. We’re doing better with it though!
Because we’re both so busy we try to have dedicated “we” time. We go for walks or we sit on the couch after work and talk about whatever is going on. I actually think it helps that we have diverse interests because it’s a lot less like I’m talking to myself and we expose each other to new things.
We have 3 kids, so i guess it’s kind of like having 3 puppies, only after a while they start to talk too… 🙂 So yes, it’s been hard finding time alone, and getting into a conversation mode that involves non practical stuff like dreams and aspirations and opinions and stuff.
Every night, when all the kids are asleep, one of us invariably asks the other “so what do you want to do tonight ?” and sometimes it’s “watch tv” or “go to bed early coz i’m just too damn tired”. But sometimes it’s good to say “nothing, i just want to cuddle and *talk*”, no distractions. Coz yeah, if we don’t make it a point to talk to each other about important stuff, we can go weeks without having an interesting conversation. And that, like going weeks with no sex, is definitely not good for a relationship !
But it takes time and energy, and practice too i guess. And mostly for us, it involves not being distracted by electronic equipment of any sort.
Then again, it’s good to sometimes be able to just say nothing interesting and just be loved for being there.
Well, this starts with a concerted effort to have Face Time. Watching TV/Movie? No, your faces are not toward each other, not going to cut it. Doing laundry and frantically cleaning 1.5 weeks of accumulated cat hair and general crap in the apartment at the same time? No.
It’s sad but a lot of time getting out of the apartment and going for coffee/dinner/whatever helps. Every time we have Face Time we are happy that we had a real conversation. At the apartment there are cats there is work to do (kitchen/cooking/whatever) and also there’s a bed/couch to collapse on. It’s okay, we need to collapse. But spooning without talking is not Face Time.