ChangeThings up to Keep the Marriage Fresh

It's an old cliche', I know. Every marriage needs to be spiced up a little to keep it interesting. There is something about cliche's, though, because there is often a lot of truth to them. My husband and I have been married almost twelve years, and we are at the stage in our marriage where it is easy to get into a routine rut. We have school-aged kids who require supervision and chaperoning. They are not able to drive themselves places yet and they are at the stages in their lives where scheduling is tricky. There is a lot of child-maintenance, and there is not a whole lot of time left in a day for marriage maintenance. It takes effort to work at that most important relationship in our house, but I remain committed to prioritizing the marital relationship first.

My husband turns forty this year, and although I am younger than he is, we are most definitely at a mid-life stage in our marriage. We've created habits that are just "the way things have always been." In the hours after the kids have been put to bed and before we retire for the night, we hang out in front of the tv with our laptops. We rarely have time for dates because our jobs keep us busy on the weekends and the kids' schedules take up much of our remaining free time. We know that we need to change things.

So, what are we doing to keep things interesting?

Well this week, we moved furniture...

We spent the last day and a half moving furniture from room to room and inside the rooms too. We moved my husband's office to a bigger space and the kids are now each in their own rooms. In our room, we moved our bed to a different wall, and it is amazing how great it feels to have new spaces to occupy.

We focus on relishing the seasons...
My husband and I have three jobs between the two of us, and all three of the jobs are seasonal jobs. It is important to us that we are not in the mundane routines week-to-week, and when things are seasonal, the seasons regularly change. When my husbands' hockey season is over (he is a college coach) we move easily to that next stage. His second job is as the operations manager for the Renaissance Festival in Colorado, and although his summers are busy, it is a season that we enjoy with the new spaces we occupy there. I coach college soccer in the fall, and the strategies to survive that incredibly busy time makes and keeps things interesting, albeit a little stressful.

Recognizing our life as a choice...
There truly is no such thing as being stuck. As much as we may feel like our lives are at the whim of children or schedules or relationships that suck energy out of us, we ultimately control what and where we spend our time. It is the attitude about the things we feel we have to do that provides some control in seemingly out-of-control situations. I have a choice to sit routinely on the couch at night, or to take up a new activity, and if I am bored with certain routines, it is up to me to make those changes. The same goes for the mundane of a marriage relationship. Every human encounter is a fluid one, and as routine as a marriage may feel, it is always a choice to stay that way. Granted it becomes the choice of both people in a marriage to make any real lasting change, but it has to start somewhere, and if I am feeling stuck, it makes sense that I do something about it to make it fresh again...even if just for a little while.

Matchmaker, matchmaker?

My husband and I found each other in college. I knew pretty quickly that he and I were meant for a lifetime together, and he eventually came to the same conclusion, but we both ultimately decided that we were a good couple. When I accepted our fated union, I really never expected that we would be anything but perfectly matched for one another, and I think that expectation has made all the difference.

There are days, I admit, when I question the cosmic wisdom that claims he and I are meant to be together. The days when the differences are more apparent than the similarities, I just remind myself that sometimes opposites complement each other better than if both people are exactly the same.

So, I wonder, now, after twelve years of marriage and sixteen years of being together, whether we would still be compatible enough to survive the guantlet of an online dating service. If we listed that we were single and searching and we could lie about the children who already bind us, would we have the necessary characteristics to be matched up again?

Our individual preferences and dreams likely don't entirely match up with the life that we've shaped through the years. I'm sure he'd list his passion for sports and coaching and I'd admit I do enjoy watching all kinds of sporting events. He'd brag about his handy-man skills and I think I would reluctantly admit my fear of fixing things. I plan and organize and he flies by the seat of his pants. I wonder if that would move us closer together or further apart on the matchmaking scale. I love books and writing, and he enjoys creating the musical backdrop to any mood. Does the matchmaking formula look for such complementary characteristics or is the criterion more dependent upon similarities?

We are a mixed bag and some things we share almost exactly, while other aspects of our personalities are so different, I can hardly understand how we could possibly live peacefully in the same house. He's a computer whiz, I'm an impatient user who threatens frequently to give up the computer and just buy a typewriter. He does the bills, I buy the groceries and I am apparently in charge of cleaning the house too, but some things just don't happen at all. We both avoid the laundry, but reluctantly wash clothes when we are working through piles of dirty laundry to locate our children who have become buried in the mess. I take care of health care, and I record our lives with cameras and camcorders while he works to supply financial stability for our house. Would a matchmaking service find our strengths and weaknesses as complementary as they've become? Would it have been able to predict how effectively we would fashion ourselves one around the other?

I don't know, and, as tempting as it is to see if a matchmaking service would match us up again today, I am too chicken to find out. It would be a dangerous game to play if we went out looking for our "best" match through a service that claims expertise in pairing couples. We would undoubtedly find other matches who could fit into our preferences and desires, and in all liklihood there might be a number of people who could be potential matches. It would open the door to justified questioning and could cause irreversible damage to the house we've built together.

There is no such thing as a perfect match and there are other people who would satisfy relationship desires and needs, but of course in a unique and different way than my husband does. It is hard to make the argument that it would be any better, because there are always gaps in human relationships. No matter who the two members of any given pair are, the relationship becomes an entity of its own, and the survival of that relationship is completely dependent upon the willingness of both members of the pair to give equally to the union.

I know that we've become the best possible match for the other, whether a service agreed with us or not. I guess I'll stop wondering how someone else might match us up and concentrate more on building up the match that we already have.

Accepting I'm Not His First True Love

This morning it was below zero outside when the alarm went off. We purposefully set it every night so that we can hit the snooze at least once before we have to rouse the troops to get them off to school. As usual, my husband cuddled up closer to me and tightened the covers around us making it even harder to get out of bed. We quickly had company, as our youngest crawled up my side and then on top of the covers and me. I love that time in the morning. Whether it is just he and I, or all five of us, I love when we don't have to be anywhere and we can just be together for a little bit cuddled in the covers of our bed. I knew this morning wasn't one of those times, but my husband joked, "Let's just stay in bed today."

"Ok, and then we can sell off parts of the bed when I am no longer being paid for my job," I reminded him.

"I know, but it's just so cold outside."

We procrastinated for a few minutes, and then with much more energy, my husband threw off the covers and said, "Yeah, you better get going, I have to leave at 3:30, so you need to get to work so you can get home."

I chuckled to myself about the change in attitude because I knew that the new energy happened when my husband realized that he was going to be able to spend some time with his true love.

It is a love affair that I do not yet understand, and I probably never will...completely. He is hardly as passionate about much else in his life as he is about his love. He will wake up at ungodly hours and stay up way too late just to get his fix. He times his haircuts and shaving around it, and it is the only time (aside from weddings and funerals) that you will find him in a suit and tie. He will gladly track down a sitter so he can go do it and if we really sat down to think about it, all of the decisions we have made about the jobs we keep and the places we live are dependent upon his love.

I told him that this morning...that I felt like the "other woman." He acted appalled for a second, and then said, "No, what does that mean?"

"Oh, you know...that seductive tigress. She has so much more than I'll ever be able to give you."

"WHAT are you talking about?" He looked at me really confused now.

"Don't try to pretend that hockee (mockingly and ineffectually pronounced with a french accent) doesn't hold the real keys to your heart." He smiled now, relieved that he hadn't forgotten about a mistress or something.

"Oh, hockey is the other woman, huh? I don't think so."

He's right, she's not really the other woman, but she is his other love. He has loved and identified with hockey for twenty years longer than he has known me. It is an enormous part of who he is, and it's not that I am finally coming to terms with that, but rather I am acknowledging the importance of helping him to foster that relationship.

We spend our winters in Minnesota, complaining about bitter temps and questioning daily it seems our decision to live here. We don't have to be here, but we choose to. Among other reasons, Minnesota is where his love was born, and he is thrilled to be able to share it with his kids.

There were indications that I would probably never be his greatest love. The first year he and I dated, I was hard-pressed to see much enthusiasm from him at all. I know now he was reeling from hockey-playing circumstances that were rocking his world, but at any rate, he was hardly happy about much. When I came to Minnesota with him for the first time, he introduced me to a side of him that I hadn't yet seen.

One of the mornings we were staying at his mom's house, my husband shook me out of bed and dragged me upstairs because I just had to see this. You have to realize that I expected that he and I were going to be married some day, and I was on the lookout for signs that an engagement was pending. I thought he had sprung a romantic leak, and I ran upstairs with him, anticipating a surprise kneeling. He ushered me over to the window and worked to wipe away condensation that inevitably builds when it is cold enough outside. My expectation shifted from ring... to car (because I needed one of those too) and I peered out to see a large city truck spraying water on the snow. My immediate thought was, "what is that idiot doing?" and before I could utter any syllable of confusion my husband yelled (bounding mind you) "They're flooding the rink...they're flooding the rink!!!" After a few years living our winters here in Minnesota, I can see that passion starting to form in each of our children now too. Their eyes light up the same way his did when the rink is being flooded for the first time.

They can do something that I will never be able to do. They can skate and they can play hockey, and my husband can be around a game that formed him and that he loves with literally every fiber of his being. I just know a little piece of him would die, if I ever asked him to give it up, and because I love him, I never will. He deserves a chance to be near what he loves, and to be honest, it gives him the energy to better love the people and life around him, and that includes me. I'm starting to love the other woman, for helping to form the man that loves me too.