Seven Quick Takes -- Mwarriage and Other Extreme Sports (Anniversary Edition!)

As of today,  my husband and I have been married for five years.

We celebrated by taking the kids to the beach yesterday, and tonight Chris and I are going to go to a nice dinner by ourselves (!!!!). It's going to be LOVELY to be able to eat without trying to distract a toddler. We'll have so much extra time, we won't know what to do with ourselves.

We are officially no longer "Newly Married." But neither are we "Oldly Married," because five years isn't that long.

I guess we're just "Married."

For whatever they're worth, here are seven things we've learned since we've been hitched.

1.) Communication is actually WORK (who knew?)

Turns out that you often have to explain more than you thought you did, clarify things you thought were obvious, and repeat yourself WAY more than you'd think you'd have to while talking to an adult (I'm working on listening better Honey, I promise).

An example of what I mean:

Spouse A: "Honey, I need you to leave the towel on the counter" ((goes off and deals with whatever mess the kids have gotten into"

Spouse B: ((Leaves a bath towel on the counter))

Spouse A: "Why on earth would you leave a bath towel in the kitchen?"

Spouse B: "You said to leave the towel on the counter!"

Spouse A: "But...it's a bath towel"

Spouse B: "Yeah....?"

Spouse A: "I meant a dish towel."

Spouse B: "Ohhhh kay. When I hear 'towel', I usually think 'bath towel.' Could you specify what kind you want next time please?"

This particular conversation didn't happen, but we have ones identical to it ALL THE TIME. I tell Chris that sometimes it feels like we need to hire a translator just so we can stop going back and clarifying so much. It takes a lot of patience with one another (and extra time re-defining what words we just used) simply to have a conversation some nights.

Of course, other times we're able to communicate with just a look. But that's usually just about one thing in particular.



Ahem.

2.)It's Unusually Entertaining to Pop Hard-to-Reach Zits on Someone Else 

Maybe we're just weird this way. But for us it's become a bonding ritual of sorts to brag about our zits (how big, how gross, etc) and to help each other pop the hard-to-reach ones. It's grossly satisfying, somehow.

3.) Learning to be Physically Intimate is Actually an Acquired Set of Skills

There's a well known song by the band Foreigner that plays on the radio from time to time with the refrain--

"Feels like the first time...feels like the very first time!!"

I genuinely don't understand why the artist sings it like it's a good thing.

Chris and I both came into our marriage as virgins. I'll spare you the details of our journey towards bedroom proficiency (you're welcome), but I will say that on our wedding night, we looked at each other at one point and said, "HOW THE HECK DOES THE HUMAN RACE EVEN EXIST?!?"

 It wasn't that we weren't, you know, interested, so much as we were taken aback that we didn't automatically know what the heck we were doing.

Seriously, it does NOT look that hard in the movies. I kept waiting for this latent animal instinct to kick in that would magically drive us to whatever it was that you...do to get to do that, only to learn that, no, it's a set of acquired skills you learn through trial and error.

Lots of error. SO much error.

Jason Evert talks in high school didn't prepare me for this.

4.) Common Interests Help Keep Friendship Alive

Other than popping each others' zits.

Lately we've been getting into RPGs (Role Playing Games-- think Dungeons and Dragons). Not a hobby I expected to get into in my 20s as a mother of two small children, but I'm actually enjoying it a lot. It's a very creative process to come up with a character and participate in what basically amounts to an epic game of pretend. There's a lot of technical stuff that comes with it too, which Chris is fantastic with. Between the two of us we find a lot to share and talk to each other about.

We're also working to build our homestead together. We work together to do things like care for our chickens, improve the garden, and improve and fix things around the house.

We usually have a fair amount of fun doing it too. Last time we slaughtered a batch of meat chickens, Chris used the one  he had just finished skinning as a puppet to perform 'Herod's Song' from Jesus Christ Superstar and it was hilarious.
Hilarious in a rather disturbing way, granted, but hilarious nonetheless.

It also helps to have a similar warped sense of humor.

5.) We Both Snore 

Loudly.

6.) NFP (Natural Family Planning) is Marriage Building in the Same Way that Two-a-Day Summer Training is Team Building-- Through Mutual Pain and Suffering

In Texas, high school football training starts in the summer.

While the rest of their classmates are enjoying a couple of months off, football players are out in the Texas summertime heat and humidity running laps, pushing around those heavy tackle dummies, jumping around in tires, practicing plays, and otherwise doing strenuous physical activity. They're out there twice a day, usually for a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the late afternoon.

Football teams tend to be fairly close-knit by the fall. They have one another's backs' and trust each other. Not because they've had a great time together all summer, but because there's a mutual suffering that they've been through. When your sweat and blood mingles with that of others on the field, your connection to them grows stronger.

However, if a teammate did nothing but complain, groaned, slacked off, or otherwise didn't commit fully to practice, his connection to his teammates isn't going to be nearly as good as those who did commit and gave it their all. In fact, his relationship with his teammates might be downright bad.

Practicing NFP is basically the two-a-day football practice of marriage. You might go from it stronger as a couple, but if you do, it's because you've been through something that entailed a fair amount of shared work and suffering. If you share the suffering with the idea that you're a team working towards a goal together, than yes, NFP can make your marriage stronger.

But it does NOT make your marriage stronger by making it easier for you to communicate or easier to appreciate one another. It makes it stronger by putting you both through the wringer and giving you a chance to do those things in a more difficult situation. If you both commit to helping each other through it, you will emerge stronger.

If you don't, it could likely seriously damage your relationship.

(For those unfamiliar with NFP, it's a method to space children by abstaining when a woman is fertile in her cycle, and fertility is charted by observing the woman's fertile signs. It's the only method of child spacing or avoiding children that the Catholic Church allows other than total abstinence. . When the woman is fertile, or might be fertile, you have to abstain from marital relations.Fertile signs can be hard to monitor sometimes, such as right after having a baby, or because of certain health conditions. When that happens, you have to wait, sometimes for several weeks.

 Hence the suffering).

7.) It's Beautiful Seeing your Spouse as a Parent

There's a side of them that you'd never see otherwise.

Sometimes it's funny, like when the other spouse discovers the foot long poop your toddler decided to leave under the table.

Other times, it's sort of like discovering a gem, like when you see how patient they are explaining something for the millionth time or when you see them care-ful-ly standing up while holding a sleeping baby.

And there's nothing quite like standing together on a cloth diaper, soaking pee out of the carpet, looking into each other's eyes and your husband says, in a sultry voice, "Hey...you look sexy getting the pee out of that carpet."

 (Yes, that's a true story).

That's all Folks!

Check out the rest of the Quick Takes for this week.