Connecting Amid Some Hassles

Over the past weekend, Cam and I were working on a number of wedding plans, trying to coordinate a number of people, details and schedules.

I do not recommend long-distance wedding planning unless it is really, TRULY worth it. It is much more complicated than you might think. I thought.

Fortunately for us, it's worth it.

But at the end of this past weekend, we returned home with a full car, a dog with a full bladder, and a driveway full of snow and ice. So much that we couldn't even get in the driveway to unpack the car and then deal with the snow. After a long, busy weekend and a long, tiring drive we had a long, icy driveway to clear. Long story short, we tried to manage the situation as best we could. But after a puppy accident in the house and the realization that the task of clearing the driveway was more onerous than anticipated, we were not in very good spirits. My irrationally regimented approach to manual snow removal (thanks for that quality, dad!) was rubbing Cam the wrong way.

His response?

Show me how annoying I was being by mimicking my behavior back to me.

It was funny.

So funny that I was slip-sliding around and we were both giggling. We realized it was the first time we were shoveling snow together. I have spent most of my adult life contributing only tax dollars towards snow removal. But now here we were, scraping and shoveling, turning sniping into smiles sharing a task in our home for the first time.

Sometimes connections come from a negative place (or an annoyance!), not always an act of love or kindness. Good thing I always appreciate a little teasing and mockery at my own expense...

Adapting the bid...

Hello again, friends. Alisha here--attempting to keep the Sunday evening doldrums at bay. Fearing the prospect of opening my work email and anticipating the sound of that dreaded alarm clock in a few short hours, I am reflecting on the weekend and trying to get organized. Cam and I spent the Thanksgiving holiday catching up with family and friends in Southeastern Wisconsin and are now facing the start of another busy week.

Yet somehow, I rarely fear that Cam and I will disconnect in the midst of a busy week.

Cam and I have always have to be highly adaptable in our relationship to one another. About a year ago we had gotten into the practice of "Celebrating Disaster" after a particularly challenging few months had caused us to find new avenues to connect in positive ways as a couple. We had to adapt in order to survive our ordeals that added stress to our relationship. Fortunately for us, we have had fewer disasters to celebrate as of late and have been bidding for connection in different ways as we have settled into our new lives on the prairie.

After spending a lot of time together over a weekend, or at the end of the long day, we find that we don't always have much to talk about but we want to connect in some meaningful way. Our solution to this is reading a book together. Rather, I read to Cameron. I have always been a committed reader, and Cameron enjoys books but is not the voracious reader that I am, however we share a similar sense of intellectual curiosity and exploring that curiosity together is a wonderful way to connect. We recently finished the latest Gary Shteyngart novel and are now onto a book about the profound impact social networks have on our lives. Through these connections we have learned more about each others' worldviews, values and perceptions than we would by simply chatting in the hopes that these sorts of issues would arise organically. Indeed, I feel like I know Cameron more as a person and a friend after our ongoing conversations about our books than I would have otherwise.

When we tell people about this ritual, they often ask where it came from. How did we think to do this? It arose from a bid for connection. Cameron and I were on a road trip and I was reading my kindle. The conversation had lulled and I got so excited by the contents of my book that I want to talk about it with him, editorialize, project, discuss how the plot might twist. But I couldn't do that. We were not keen to discuss anything else at that moment, but I was desirous of a connection with him, a need to discuss this experience...and so it began. I started reading to him. We select books together on a range of topics that interest us both, and it has become a source of excitement.

It may seem cheesy, but we have both come to a greater understanding of one another through this joint intellectual engagement. In a way, it's like taking a short vacation from our every day lives; we table the frustrations of the day and focus on something that we are only sharing together at that moment, even if it's only 10 minutes before bed.

My sense is that couples struggle to connect on an intellectual level--or it's something that is not sought by many or considered important to the health of a relationship. Without some sort of regular intellectual connection, I cannot imagine life for us as a couple to be terribly fulfilling at this time.

I think the lesson here is that we have different needs as individuals and couples--those needs evolve over time and require an adaptive approach. We just have to be flexible and creative about meeting those needs. Be attentive and honest with ourselves about where we can find ways to connect and grow. For now, I'm looking forward to our next great read!

Another Happy Couple Challenger

Hello, Blogosphere! Alisha, here. You might know me from my own fledgling blog, but it's more likely that you are not acquainted with me at all. With that in mind, my first post on the Happy Couples Challenge will be an introduction to me and the other half of my happy couple.


Cam and I met in the summer of 2005 at a Lindy Hop dance. Over the course of the following year we danced, flirted, got to know each other and became friends. We eventually started dating, but it was not supposed to be anything serious. I was leaving for graduate school in Canada in a few short months and we had thought our time together would only be a summer romance. Little did we know then that through great distance, major life changes and a couple of cross-country (and international!) moves later, we would be engaged and preparing to formalize our commitment to each other on May 21, 2011.

Surely more details of our lives will be revealed in the coming month, but that is a pretty good starting point for our lives. Right now, Cam and I are settling into a new life in Central Illinois where I work as an instructor and administrator at a large public university and he works from home as a software developer. We have a little yorkie named Lulu that we lovingly refer to as our "fur-child."

We are in a very busy period right now. Our respective jobs are demanding and planning a wedding long-distance takes careful coordination. But through everything we are trying to remember our spirit as a couple and to bid for connections even when other commodities are in high demand.

I had originally approached this post with the idea that I would start at a particular time or date with a particular set of ideas, stories or incident to share. However, I realized that waiting for a blog-worthy event was contrary to the spirit of this arrangement. Relationships are made of the daily lived experience, not the periodic highlights. Cam and I choose each other every day and our connections are unpredictable, our course unforeseeable but somehow it works. I think this is how most happy couples function: minute to minute, day to day. Suddenly those days have become years and before you know it, you have built a life together.

In that spirit, I look forward to this journey and sharing the giggles, hiccups, connections and misinterpretations that ensue!

More to come...

A

History and Context

This morning on the way to daycare we heard a story about whether or not it was wise for people to blog about their personal relationships. The overwhelming response, from both lay persons and "experts" (I don't know who these experts are) was that, no, you definitely should not blog about your personal relationships. In honor of this morning show, I am kicking off this Happy Couples Challenge where I will be blogging exclusively about my relationship with husband for the next month.

Some of you may wonder what my husband thinks about the fact that I have taken on this challenge. Well, for those of you who are familiar with my other blog, Showering With Sharks, you know that I blog about my husband all the time and that he is used to it. In addition, I teach communication at a small college in Minneapolis. Mark, my husband, also knows that he is frequently lecture and example fodder in my classes. He is at least resigned to the fact that I will continue to write about and talk about our relationship.

I'm a big believer in context, so I am going to use this first post to give a little history about our relationship. Mark and I started dating in September of 2000. We both worked at the campus newspaper. We got married on December 21, 2002 (I will admit that I just had to do math in my head to figure out what year we got married). This blog challenge will be happening during the month leading up to our 8-year anniversary. I'm hoping my gift this year isn't a divorce as a result of this blog. Just kidding.

Mark and I have one daughter, Harper Jane, who was born April 11, 2009. Of course, I expected that having a child would change the dynamic of our relationship. In some ways, it has. But it some ways, having Harper just reinforces all the things I knew I loved about Mark. He's a great person, a hard-worker, and an awesome Dad. That being said, he's not perfect and neither is our relationship... not perfect, but, I think, it's kinda perfect for us.

The purpose of the Happy Couple Challenge (as I understand it) is to bid for connection with your partner. My most recent bid for connection with Mark was attempting to arrange a fun date night out with Mark's brother and his wife. I really wanted us to have a grown-up night out (where we went to watch the new Harry Potter, of course) and so I attempted to make plans for dinner and the movie and the babysitter so that all Mark really had to do was show up. Well, things didn't necessarily go quite as I had planned but we wound up having fun anyway. Planning a date night is something that I would typically do as a bid for connection. I like to plan. Mark does not. I think ahead. Mark does not. I arrange our social calendar. Mark frequently has no idea what day it is. "Do we have anything planned?" is a frequent question in our house. This system works for us. I am certainly not recommending it as a strategy for everyone.

While my date night bid wasn't perfect, it did give us a chance to get out of the house together without Harper. I would say it was a success, even though I was ticked off at Mark for the first part of the evening. I am not going to disclose what ticked me off here... this would be one of those instances where it would not be wise to blog about our personal relationship :). My mad eventually went away and we had a good time. I am looking forward to using this challenge to bid in different ways... perhaps less complicated ways that don't rely on dinner reservations and aren't quite so time-frame dependent.

So, please feel free to question and comment as I dig all our relationship skeletons out of the closet over the next month. I intend to show those radio morning-show folk and their "experts" that blogging about your personal relationship can be something that Happy Couples Do.