Arden has a reputation as a hippie commune and a nudist colony. I have yet to see a naked person, but have caught a glimpse of the occasional domesticated hippie. (You know who you are, George Brocklesby.) Regardless of the reality, folks love a good urban legend. They get a gleam in their eyes when you mention the romantic life of Ardenites. While I am not saying that fun tales of spirited marital exploits don’t exist in this small village, this is not one of them. This is the story of a real relationship in the face of life transitions.
Mark and I are coming up on our silver wedding anniversary later this summer. I would love to tell you the ways that moving to Arden has affected our marriage, but it is a little difficult. Scientists will tell you that you should really only introduce one variable into your experiment. We have had several variables at this time, not just a relocation. Right before we moved from Reinholds, both of our kids were still in school. We had family dinners, movie nights. We were going to our son's track meets, our daughter's plays. Jonah had his license, so we were just starting to be freed from the shackles of carting kids to and from activities. We had a house with three bathrooms including a double sink in the master bath. We had a family room as well as a living room, and we had a room dedicated to our home computer and my art supplies.
Fast-forward to Arden. Our kids are both out of the house, at the moment. We are empty-nesters. Even when Maren was here, she was in-and-out, driving on her own, skipping out on dinner. We are down a bathroom and two sinks. Not only do Mark and I share a bathroom sink, now, but so did our daughter, until recently. We have a catch-all room that serves as Jonah's room when he is here, which perhaps accounts for one-eighth of the time since we moved. We have a living room, but no family room, which means we have fewer avenues for escape. As I am typing out this blog entry, Mark is sitting across from me, working on his laptop. It looks like we are playing Battleship. That would never have happened before the move.
Taking all those variables into consideration, I will tell you a little of the ways our marriage has changed since we moved to Arden. We are a lot more social. Even though we lost a lot of kids' activities, it seems we are always running to be with friends or do the various activities we do together and separately in the Ardens. We are together more, but that together time is spent with other people. Quality alone time is less than it has ever been--even with kids. We are less dependent on each other for emotional support. We have other people in our lives who support us. We don't always communicate the way we should simply because we don't have to. Most of our communication comes by way of the almighty iCalendar. Oh, you are going out with the guys tonight? We are in synch but out of touch.
Last week I repaid the wife of couple who bought us tickets to a show. Mark repaid the husband. We didn't tell each other. The other couple didn't tell each other. It was only a fluke that we discovered the duplicate payment. Those are the situations we can laugh off. Sometimes, it isn't so easy. When we fight, it is because we have lost our connection. We have been so busy bonding with the outer world that we forget to ground ourselves in what is the primary relationship of our lives. Time to add date night to the iCalendar. And walks. When the weather warms and it is light into the evening, we have a better chance of walking and talking, just the two of us. But even that doesn’t guarantee communication.
Now that both kids are out of the house, our dinners together feel eerily quiet. Being the more talkative one, I try to draw Mark out. How is it that he can be in deep and animated conversation with our friends the entire seven miles of a Sunday hike, but I have to force feed him subjects to discuss? Maybe we need one of those box of cards you pull out that have questions on them to start conversations. Or maybe we should try asking each other those 36 questions designed to make people fall in love. Ooh, la la.
Those are for the times we want to be together. At other times, we feel as though we are on top of each other in this house. We purposely downsized. I hated cleaning all the house we had before. This house is manageable. We do have different sitting areas where we could sit separately doing our own thing, which is fine if our thing is silent. Having the television at the center of our open floor plan is a strange new distraction. In our old house, we only had one TV, and it was located in the basement level family room, away from it all. If Jonah had the boys over to play video games, we barely knew they were there (once we got them to turn down the volume and the bass). We could ignore them. It is hard to ignore the TV now. We have a sitting area in the bedroom that we go to if one of us or Maren is occupying the TV, but it does seem as though we are being banished. I'm not sure why. Our bedroom is the lightest, cheeriest room in the house.
Haply to wive and thrive as best I may." (The Taming of the Shrew 1.2.56-7)
Next question: How to celebrate our 25th Anniversary here in Arden. Perhaps matching tie-dye T-shirts are in order.
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