The Argument I Had With My Husband

So remember how in the last post I was whining about how we can’t find an apartment in which to reside anywhere in all of Columbus, Ohio? We found an apartment. Barring calamity, we will have shelter from the winter winds and also off-street parking.

And this is where the differences between me and my sweet, witty, and shockingly handsome husband become more apparent. (Speaking of which…Kyle, have I told you today that you are sweet and witty and shockingly handsome?)

Here’s how the conversation went:

Elizabeth: “I totally want to rent this apartment. I think it could be a whole new adventure!”

Kyle: “See, I feel like you have a really weird definition of ‘adventure.’ When I think ‘adventure,’ I think, ‘skydiving,’ ‘bunjee-jumping,’ ‘extreme sports…’ When you think of ‘adventure,’ you think of rundown old apartments in creepy neighborhoods

Elizabeth: It’s not creepy! It was built in the 1950’s! It looks like where the heroine in a Nora Ephron movie would live! It’s quirky and vintage!

Kyle: You mean, ‘old and decrepit.’

This is the point in the blog post where I say it. Men.

Sweet, Witty, and Shockingly Handsome redeemed himself by following that last comment up with: “I can live anywhere as long as I’m there with you. I just want you to be happy.” That’s the answer I was hoping for.



Anyway, we’re feeling hopeful about this place. I’ll let you know when we know for sure!

love, elizabeth

I Don’t Care That You Don’t Care

Alright, time for another serious relationship question. Kyle and I had this talk in the car the other day. Am I the only one who gets SUPER ANNOYED when their spouse or partner says, “I don’t care”?

“What do you want for dinner?”

“I don’t care.”

“Do you want to go see that movie?”

“I don’t care.”

“Which kind of laundry detergent should I buy?”

“I don’t care.”

And yes, I realize that about 93% of the time you say, “I don’t care,” you actually mean that you don’t care.

Here’s the thing. I DON’T CARE!!! I don’t care that you don’t care. You need to care. I want you to care. When you say you don’t care, I don’t hear “Gee, honey, I don’t really have an opinion either way so since this decision is more important to you, why don’t you go ahead and choose?” I hear, “The outcome of this decision is not worth the effort it takes to land on one side of the fence or the other and so therefore, I abstain from caring.”

And quickly, let’s address the other 7% of the time when you actually do care but tell me you don’t. That’s my move, by the way. I never don’t care. So when you fake don’t care, I can totally tell. This brand of not caring usually comes in the middle of a fight (it doesn’t matter who’s winning). This kind of not-caring is also super hurtful because I know you know that I want you to care.

In conclusion, please care. I care. I want you to care. And if you don’t, if you really, really don’t, if you have to fake it…fake it. If I say, “Do you like the teal or red cardigan better?”, just. freaking. pick. one. (Yes, I know that you know that I know I’m going to pick the one you didn’t. It’s part of my process! Go with it.)

CARING IS SHARING. HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING FROM THE CARE STARE??

Alright, thoughts? Does this happen at your house?

love, elizabeth

Ever Had One Of Those Fights…

Ever have one of those fights where you and your husband scream at each other and slam doors and freak out and don’t even stop twenty minutes in when you realize you can’t remember what you’re upset about but instead continue to loudly bang pots and pans around in the kitchen and huff indignantly and roll your eyes like you’re getting paid for it?

Yeah. Me neither.

But you guys…I have discovered the SECRET to conflict resolution.

I swallowed my pride. I opened the bedroom door and I showed him…this.

 

And Kyle, bless his heart, did this.

This is why I love being married.

What silly tricks have you and your spouse/partner learned to help resolve arguments?

love, elizabeth

To You, With Love From Your Television: Grey’s Anatomy

Like I've said before, if you're getting the majority of your relationship advice from Hollywood, you're pretty much doomed to fail. And um, Grey’s Anatomy is no exception. Seriously, how can brain surgeons have these kind of sex lives?? When do they have time to perform, I don’t know, actual surgery???!!

And still… I was struck by the most recent episode. If you haven’t seen the show, Drs. Grey and Shepherd have been having some problems (shocker).

Source: google.com via Elizabeth on Pinterest

But in a scene that’s sticking with me...

Meredith challenges Derek, “Well, then why are you with me?”
“Because of that!” he tells her, pointing at the post-it note on the wall over their bed. The one with their marriage vows on it. “Because I meant that. I promised I wouldn’t run. I promised I would love you.”
“Even when you hate me…”
“Even when I hate you!”

This just resonated with me so much. The truth is, anyone who is in a long-term relationship knows what it’s like to love someone even when you hate them. And if you haven’t felt that in your marriage yet, you will.

I have always said falling in love is a feeling but staying in love…that’s a choice.

So way to go, Grey’s Anatomy. For once, I totally forgive you for all the slow motion bedroom scenes, bomb threats, pregnancy scares, cancer episodes, and for killing off George O’Malley. Okay, maybe I’m still mad about that last one. I love you, though. Even when I hate you.

Source: google.com via Elizabeth on Pinterest

“To love each other,

even when we hate each other.

No running. Ever!

Take care when old,

senile, smelly. This is forever!”

Meredith Grey

Derek Shepherd

What about you? Have you seen any glimpse of real love or relationships on television?

love, elizabeth

Office Re-Do

Well, all I have to say is, FINALLY. To be honest, I have been in a major blogger’s funk for the last few days. Or maybe just a general funk. I feel like I’ve been stuck in the middle of my office for centuries. But at last, it is DONE. I’m sure I’ll find plenty of things to change later but I’m excited to have a clean, neat space to study and work in for the fall!

I can’t even begin to describe to you the blood, sweat, tears, and threats of banishment to the couch that went into hanging these shelves. If there was any project that has ever PROVED how not perfect our communication skills are, well…this was it. I think, mostly, Kyle has learned how impatient and demanding I am (ie. ‘those shelves are NOT straight…is the level not working?’) and I have learned…how impatient and demanding I am. But our marriage survived the hanging of these shelves and that might be called a small miracle. Thank you, Kyle, for loving me enough to hang them. Again. And again. And again. (Oh, yeah…and those two pictures are my awesome CAPow! prints from the giveaway over at Story of My Life…and I love them like they’re my children.)

My accidental collection of antique thimbles.

My accidental collection of buttons.

Just have to point out that the Dominique Appia print, Between the Gasps of Memory, hanging over my desk was given to me by Sarah in the 9th grade and it’s still my favorite.

Re-purposing is one of my favorite decorating tools. The envelope organizer is actually an old shoe polish box. You can see the slots where the shoe was hung to shine.

I found this sweet old guy languishing in a thrift store a couple weeks ago for $8.98. Someone left their DVR remote in his cushions but he’s still in great shape.This was supposed to be my recliner but Madigan has claimed it. She really likes to eat her breakfast here or sit and judge me for my lack of motivation. Either one.

Kyle and I have a big map of the United States on the wall and we’ve been trying to keep track of all the places we’ve visited together.

Some of my favorite bulletin board artwork.

And this is my favorite picture of Kyle of all time. I took it in Steamboat Springs in the summer of 2005. The summer we fell in love. Can you see it in his eyes? I can.

 

So…I feel like I’ve been not-blogging for forever (or two days, whatever). What have I missed? What are YOU doing this week?

love, elizabeth

Follow the Guest Post Fairy!

That's right. Today I'm blogging over at Fairdale Diaries. If you haven't met Laura yet, please come over and say hi! We're talking about how Kyle deals with my backseat driving so if you have a rant/suggestion for me, you better get over here and share it!

Hope your Mondays are already rockin'.

love, elizabeth

PS: Countdown to giveaway continues...Just 8 more posts! Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your new neighbors (hey, it's an icebreaker - "so glad you moved in above us, please don't hold dance parties at 3 am, and oh, my blogger friend is holding a giveaway and you should check it out").

Six Not-So-Sexy Things about Marriage

Most of my favorite blogs focus on the very best things about their long-term relationships, the fun and the romance and the sexy/serious/celebratory. And I looooooooove that!

Source: google.com via Marthèlize on Pinterest

But here are a few things about marriage that AREN’T quite so romantic…funny maybe. But not sexy. I’m sure everyone’s list is different. This one’s mine.

1. Bills. The big and the little. The sheer amount of bank statements, insurance claims, and assundry paperwork that ends up on our kitchen table every month is probably my number one annoyance. It’s amazing how much more we get as a married couple than we did on our own.

2. Illness. This ranges from the scary ER visit all the way down to the common, drippy, sneezy, holed-up-in-bed cold.

3. Peeing with the door open. Just sayin’.

4. Bickering. Not legitimate disagreements or even all-out-gloves-off brawls. Just those silly, little
nothing fights, as Dane Cook would say, about ridiculous things like whether or not someone had a tone when they said “whatever” or whose turn it is to take out the dog or empty the dishwasher or whether or not Transformers: Dark of the Moon is worth $19 in theater admission. Like I said…fights about nothing.

5. Boy smell. I’m not even talking about body odor or stinkiness. I’m talking about the sheer MAN SMELL that emanates from sleeping husbands. Man smell. It’s a real thing.

6. Exhaustion. This one is just inevitable. If you are a busy, hard-working person, you are going to get tired. If you are TWO busy, hard-working people trying to make time to be romantic, well…more often than not, you’re going to be exhausted.

In conclusion, marriage is soooooooo exactly like this:



Thanks, Fergie, for so perfectly expressing it. Thanks, also, to Sarah @ Sarahcastically for the totally sincere video suggestion. 

What makes YOUR not-so-sexy list?

Still in love (and still married) despite the occasional non-sexiness of it all,

elizabeth

The Fitzgeralds: Weathering the Storm

I think most of us have an historical period that particularly resonates for us. For me, that decade is the 1920's. I am kind of fascinated by all of it - flappers, prohibition, censorship, women's rights, jazz, art deco, modernism, Freud, the Charleston, the speakeasy, talkies...I'm hoping that at least part of my dissertation will be focused on burlesque and circus in the 20's. There is something about this era of photography and music that totally gives me goosebumps. It's ghostly and almost frightening in its intensity. There is a kind of wild forgotten-ness about the period that I really like.

And my favorite couple of the decade...F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Though F. S. is the famous one for his many novels (esp. The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise), Zelda was also an artist and a novelist. F and Z were definitely the "it" couple at the time and their passionate but tumultuous relationship was well-documented. And even though I'm pretty sure Kyle and I have a healthier relationship than the Fitzgeralds, I sort of relate to them as two people who were very much in love and yet faced a great deal of sorrow and pain and fear. I guess it's not the storm but how you weather it.

"I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder." - Zelda Fitzgerald

"I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

F and Z were buried together and the epitaph on their grave is from The Great Gatsby:

"So we beat on. Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Stay tuned everyone! Tomorrow I will be announcing my VERY FIRST GIVEAWAY!!!

Love is a Habit

		Love is a Habit VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Kyle and I spent a much-needed Sunday together being Columbus-y. After a wonderful church service in the morning, we hit up the Spring Flea, a Short North open air-market that mostly sells vintage clothes, jewelry, and music from local businesses. Booth fees for the flea market benefit the Mid-Ohio Foodbank. I found those sweet (or as Kyle would say, “ugly”) glasses frames. Whatever. I’m a product of my generation.

After lunch, we went to one of our bookstores, Half Price Books to find some fun summer reading. As you can see from the pictures, Kyle (the deep one) ended up with The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and I (the guilty-pleasure one) found a biography on Marilyn Monroe.

We spent the rest of the day at Park of Roses. The gardens aren’t really flowering yet but the weather was gorgeous and the sun felt great. Kyle, naturally, used his super-sonic hearing to detect the only ice cream truck in a fifty-mile radius. We crashed on a blanket under a tree and did some reading. This was heavily interrupted by Madigan’s need to loudly inform us when any number of dangers might be happening by. These dangers might or might not have included: other dogs, other people, small children in strollers, joggers, bicycles, squirrels, a leaf….and so on. It was pretty much glorious.

A lot of today was prompted by a conversation Kyle and I had last night. Without getting into the complexities of it all, I will say here that Kyle’s job is on the third-shift which puts him at work from midnight to eight am five nights a week. It’s been this way for almost two years. And while we are again and again struck by the provision of God, it has not been easy to spend the majority of our nights apart. And lately, well…it’s taken its toll on our relationship. We have been short with each other, cranky, moody, impatient…last night we talked about how this pattern had almost become a habit for us, a defense mechanism for the stuff we’re facing in the outside world. And we agreed that loving each other is another kind of habit, responding with love and gentleness takes practice. We cannot spend 29 out of the 30 days of the month on edge with one another and expect for that 30th day to be loving. Kindness is a habit. Love (the verb) is a habit. Hard lesson being learned and I’m thankful for it.

Today was a gift.

Playing the Stupid Card

A couple of years ago after a particularly terrible fight, Kyle and I instituted what we affectionately call, "The Stupid Card." The card is basically a non-tangible, contractual understanding that the person playing it did or said something stupid and that they realize it.

These are the rules:

1. Each person can play it once a week.

2. If you play the stupid card, the other person agrees to let whatever stupid thing you said/did/didn't do go immediately. It can't be brought up again. They can't be punished for it. The fight ends right then.

3. The relationship is considered healed at that moment.

The spirit of Stupid Card is instant-forgiveness. On the surface, it seems like an impossible idea. I mean, when I'm mad at Kyle for something mean he has said or something he forgot to do, the last thing I want to do is just let it go without any kind of a fight. After all, that's my RIGHT, isn't it, to give him my two cents?

So many times, a little bickering or an overreaction driven by outside stress or worry will escalate into a full-blown, knock-down, drag-out brawl. I asked Kyle once, "Wouldn't it be great if now and then we could just have a get-out-of-jail-free card? If we could just agree, once and awhile, to just let each other's stupidity slide without an argument?

Here's why I think Stupid Card has worked for us:

- Not only does the Card give us that one free pass a week, it forces us to put active forgiveness into practice. When the Bible talks about how God forgives us, it says he has separated our mistakes and wrong-doing "as far as the east is from the west." It's gone. I'm amazed at how much easier it is to let things, in general, go than it used to be. Stupid Card teaches you to let things go and not bring them up again.

- It makes forgiveness a habit. At first, we stuck hard and fast to our "one stupid card a week" rule. But occasionally now, Kyle will offer me a second chance. Once, in the middle of an argument that had no point, his mouth started to twitch. "Can I play my stupid card again?" he asked, trying not to laugh. "Only if I can play mine!" I told him. The Stupid Card becomes a rehearsal for every-day forgiveness.

- Sometimes, it's a relief. It's a relief for me when I play the card and Kyle says, "Sure. Of course." It's a relief for me when Kyle asks to play his. Staying angry is draining. Sometimes it's just wonderful to NOT have to talk through every little thing that went wrong, every little "you said this and that's why I did that and then you said..." When the rest of the world is loathe to let the stupid things go, it's such a comfort to come home to someone who says, "Let's just let this one go."

Has the card always worked? Does it stop every fight? Absolutely not. Occasionally, one of us will break the rules and refuse to accept the card. And the fighting usually continues.

But in the last two years, I think The Stupid Card has probably ended hundreds of fights (or potential fights). And that's more than I can say for my VISA!

So what about you? Anyone have a tip for resolving conflict in their own relationships?