When Togetherness Is Too Much
I’ve been pondering a lot of aspects of my marriage lately, probably in part because I’ve been reading Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s new book The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. It’s a really good book. I’ve seen ways in which I did really well, and I’ve seen ways where I really fell down on the job. Whenever I start feeling really bad about a place where I fell down, I remind myself that she says in the intro that the things she has included in her book are written for those who have married basically decent men. Not jerks.
But here’s one thing where I really began to understand the “jerk” part of X all too clearly. The concept of togetherness. Of “oneness” — as the Christians call it. It’s a universal ideal that a married couple will enjoy being together and will grow into “one” — but it’s also widely misinterpreted to mean that they will become little clones of each other. Wrong!
The Right Way Example. My parents. They are so “one” it is scary. Yet mom loves to watch ballet and opera and that sort of thing, and dad doesn’t. Dad loves to tinker around with cars, which mom doesn’t. So when he’s tinkering with the cars, mom’s watching a ballet in the back. Mom loves to work logic puzzles, but dad calls them “time wasters.” So sometimes mom brings her logic puzzle book out to the car he’s tinkering on, and she sits and does her puzzles while he does the car thing. They’re together, even though they are doing different things. Mom loves to go to art museums and take a long time looking at each piece. Dad would rather go to the science museum and spend a long time looking at each exhibit. So when we went on family trips to Chicago or San Francisco, we’d take in one or two of each. I remember loving the Exploratorium, but also taking in the Legion of Honor museum — where we got up close and personal with Rodin’s The Thinker. In other words, they shared. As much as they could. And they didn’t ridicule each other’s tastes or pursuits, but either participated in or left the other alone to enjoy the things that they liked.
Another area was food: mom loves fresh fruits and vegetables, and has eaten a stunningly wide variety of them all her life. Dad was strictly a meat and potatoes man, with green beans on the side. Maybe an apple or a banana, but don’t give him a strawberry. Mom never criticised or nagged at him, she just kept fixing the foods she liked, along with ample amounts of the foods he liked, all their married life. I nearly lost my teeth two Thanksgivings ago, when Dad asked me to pass him the fresh sliced tomatoes. Seems that all that exposure tempted him into trying a few things, and now he eats small portions of a lot of things that he viewed as “poison” when they first got married.
The Wrong Way Example. When I got married, I expected the same sort of arrangement. We’d enjoy a few things together, but there would be some things that were strictly His or Hers, and not both. Imagine my horror and surprise when my groom informed me that I had to give up certain things that I dearly loved. He didn’t like folk-singers like Kingston Trio, Chad Mitchell Trio, or Peter, Paul, and Mary. So I was supposed to get rid of my tapes. No, it was not okay for me to listen to them while he was at work. They were bad, and I couldn’t have them. I love chicken, and can prepare it about 100 different ways. He didn’t like chicken, so I wasn’t supposed to buy it. (I later found out why he didn’t like chicken. His family didn’t cook it thoroughly, so there was this slimy, rubbery pink, raw middle. Nasty! I wouldn’t like it either.) We both liked to read, but he didn’t like the same authors I did. I wasn’t allowed to buy books whose authors he didn’t approve of. I loved music in different languages; he didn’t, so I wasn’t supposed to listen to that either.
If you are trying to make your man, or your woman, a little clone of yourself, you need to stop and ask why. What is so threatening about her liking something you don’t? Why is it bad if you like something and he doesn’t? Just because you prefer rose gardening to mountain climbing doesn’t make you right and him wrong. It means you are different. Tell him to go climbing with his buddies while you spend the weekend transplanting the Rosa rugosa. When he wants to go fishing, pack a picnic lunch and a tote full of books you’ve been wanting to read, and go share with him, even if you don’t want to do what he is doing. It’s still togetherness, but it’s not cloning — which is, after all, just another form of enslavement.