About a year ago, my wife and I moved from a large urban area to a small island off the coast of Maine. Not surprisingly, a lot of things changed in our lives. One thing I didn’t anticipate was the way our marriage would change.
Like many modern couples, we lived largely parallel lives that didn’t intersect much. We had a brief, rushed time together in the mornings before hurrying to work. We sometimes exchanged a few emails during the day before fighting the traffic to return home late in the evening. Dinner was generally prepared by whoever got home first, prioritizing anything that was easy to make and didn’t take a lot of time. We usually ate a rushed meal, distracted by the mountains of work that awaited each of us after dinner. Our conversation typically focused on catching each other up on the highlights of what had happened while we were apart during the day, which usually meant talking about work. After dinner, we went to our separate home offices and tried to do the minimum amount of work that would allow us to feel okay about stopping to enjoy an hour or so of television before collapsing, frustrated and exhausted, into bed. Sound familiar?
Our lives in Maine are, not surprisingly, quite different, both in what we do and how we do it. Perhaps most noticeable is how the pace of our days has changed. We tend to wake at first light, which means that the time we wake up changes with the seasons. We still work in separate offices, but those offices are both in our home, and the commute through traffic has been replaced with long walks along the coast. We each schedule our first appointment late enough in the morning to leave time for a leisurely start to the day together, taking the time to make and eat an enjoyable breakfast, and relaxing together while reading the news and sharing our concerns about the state of the world.
Dinner tends to be a meal that we put a fair amount of thought and planning into, and we often cook together. We talk on the weekends about what we might enjoy eating during the week, and we go shopping together to local farms and markets to visit with friends and get the ingredients. Although we still spend most of our days apart in our separate offices, the conversation at dinner tends to be more about the far more substantial parts of our lives that overlap now. We still talk about our grown children, but we primarily talk about the weather (always a big topic of conversation in Maine!), we talk about our home and plans to continue shaping it to suit us, we talk about our garden, we talk about news from our friends and the neighborhood gossip, and we talk about what we would like to do together that evening.
It occurs to me that our marriage has become more like the kind of old-fashioned marriage I imagine my grandparents might have had. My grandparents emigrated to this country and then worked together to build a life for themselves and their children. I think they felt a sense of partnership with each other, a feeling that their lives were a project that required teamwork and cooperation. Even at times when they maybe didn’t like each other so much, I think there was an enduring sense of partnership, a necessary interdependence, of being in it together. I believe they thought of their family as the central project in their lives, and their jobs as means to an end, something they did to support their family. I don’t think they talked a lot about work at the dinner table. I imagine they talked about the meal they were eating, and asked the kids how they were doing in school, talked about extended family and neighbors, and maybe about what they planned to do that weekend.
I think back to the time when my kids were young and remember that most of the conversation at dinner was about the kids. I wonder if couples today focus so excessively on their kids, in part, because it is the only part of their lives that overlaps, and talking about the kids is the only time they feel a true sense of partnership.
It’s always risky to look back with rose-colored glasses to the past and imagine that life was better then. I’m certain that my grandparents would have traded their very challenging lives for mine without a moment’s hesitation, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t find value in looking back to what did work about old-fashioned marriages and what we might incorporate into our modern lives.
While not having enough time in the day is perhaps the most common complaint of our age, there are still the same 24 hours in a day there were 100 years ago. I’m often shocked to hear how many people do not regularly share meals together as a family, or if they did, it was a rushed affair, lasting only as long as it took for everyone to gobble down their food while staring at their screens.
Try talking with whomever you live with about meal planning for the week, and then go together to do the shopping in the neighborhood where you can meet and develop relationships with local business owners. If you have kids, make it a habit to stop for a treat on the way home.
In our rushed lives there is not always enough time to prepare a nice meal together in the evenings. Try making time on the weekends to prepare some of the meals for the week in advance together.
Make dinner a “screen free zone,” and a time to talk to each other. Some families like to do a “highs and lows” activity, in which each person shares a high and a low point of their day.
Try not always prioritizing the efficiency of each person taking care of certain tasks by themselves, and look for ways that people can work meaningfully together on things. For example, it’s autumn; get everyone outside to rake leaves and then play, jumping in the piles and burning them that night and roasting some marshmallows.
I hope you will find some of these suggestions helpful, and that you will have a family meeting and come up with some of your own. I wish my grandparents were still alive to enjoy my finding such value in their old-fashioned marriage.
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This post was originally published on Psychology Today and is republished on the author’s Medium account.
Scroll down to read the author’s bio with information about his recent books related to relationships.
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