Celebrating 30th wedding anniversary - AMA

So here's the story of how we "met" before we met.

We'd effectively "clicked" with each other intellectually for some time before our first face-to-face interaction, and the in-person chemistry just happened to be there from the start.

Spouse wishes he could get me to stop saying self-denigrating things, and denying compliments. There are some deep-seated reasons why that's a stuck habit of mine that's resisted multiple rounds of therapy, and he's tried everything he can think of to help me break it. Including a "swear jar" into which I put a quarter every time I said something nasty about myself (we gave up and bought a pizza with the contents). Or a threat to donate to the odious Senator Ted Cruz each time. By now, he's resigned to it, but keeps saying nice things to me anyway, which is incredibly sweet.

He's very mildly untidy. I've got "clean as you go" kitchen habits, and it irks me to a minuscule degree when I have to pick up bits of trash left lying around or wash garbage out of the sink. Gentle reminders don't do it - it's just invisible to him. By this point, my minimal exertion to clean up after him is just an "I love you anyway" return of all his acts of service on my behalf.

The fact that I can get him to stop snoring by whispering "peanut butter" in his ear, a trick he told me he used on his brothers when he shared a bedroom as a kid. Works for night terrors, too. The combination of care, absurdity, and weird neuroscience is just ridiculously charming.

That's an excellent question! We intentionally have what we call "bar-guments" - teasing Reddit debate questions ("would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or one hundred duck-sized horses", etc.) and unfalsifiable questions of taste, like what's the best sandwich, who was the greatest Motown act, etc.

Dumbest real argument, with feelings running high? Whether the lawn needed to be mowed or not.

I have an unpleasant tendency to put up with anger-inducing things until I don't. It's just an avoidant way of dealing with emotions that I'm not very adept at naming in the first place. Learning better is a work in progress.

Spouse half-jokes that he's more patient, and I'm more tolerant.

We agreed early on not to "stuff" our feelings. We've watched people in relationships (including our parents) walking around seething with unspoken resentments, aching with needs they've never had the strength, courage, or conviction to voice.

We don't always sit down and have the uncomfortable conversations immediately, but we make a point to hash out what's bothering us and try to work on solutions instead of just trudging onwards feeling worse and worse. We have the understanding that the discussion doesn't have to stay "rational". We acknowledge that we're not actually telepathic and it's necessary to use words, explain what emotions are involved, give best guesses at what behaviors and events evoked the feelings, and elaborate how we can behave differently and support each other's needs more effectively.

This can be a heavy lift for each of us for various reasons. We were both raised to prize rational arguments far above feelings, I don't have the neurotypical gifts of intuition about social signals, he doesn't have the feminine socialization to smooth out and absorb angry differences. We've both gone through enough therapy and meditation exercises over the years to gain a better grasp of our internal workings, and the distance to examine what might make us happier with each other.

Watching other people struggle with this process is difficult. There's no "this one trick will fix your relationship" piece of advice - it's all process, practice, and commitment to the outcome of staying together with care, concern, and compassion for all the involved parties.

Also, we admire each other tremendously, sometimes with a foolish fondness that others might find embarrassing. There's a kind of soft narcissism in "This amazing person loves me, I don't understand it, but it's cool."

I've heard people voice shocking levels of disgust with their partners, like "why did you get together in the first place with someone you dislike" levels of disparagement. Even when we're disappointed with specific actions or disagree vigorously, we still like each other, and would remain friends if we had to separate. Meanwhile, there's always more to discover and share, we take joy in each other's enjoyment, and respect differences for showing us new ways to learn and grow.

You're going to get a complicated answer that's not universally applicable.

I suspect it helps that we both come from families where the parents were together for 50+ years, until death. Neither of us hold to a religion where marriage is a sanctified undertaking, but we had the models (not always healthy) for relationship longevity to work with.

We also went into this as relatively mature adults (late 20's) with experience of prior relationships and a good understanding of what we did and didn't want in a partner. We knew that the chemistry of infatuation and wild sex is passing, and that durable bonding requires communication, shared experiences, dependability, trust, and intentionality.

We also had a fair amount of independent financial responsibility beforehand. Money issues often cause relationship disharmony, but we've rarely disputed anything about spending or saving even in the years we were negative broke. We've been able to trade off periods of supporting each other financially for school or work changes without much hassle.

We've had our "frozen" phases, where we were angry, frustrated, or bored with each other, but just kept going through the motions until the spark kicked off again. Some act of care or support, some moment of vulnerability, reminded us to truly be there for one another and of what brought us together in the first place, and that was enough to banish habitual indifference or disgust.

I won't deny that we're now uncomfortably in a state of existential terror at what life would be like without the other partner - too much of who we are is built with and around each other.

It's not really a secret - we have one Golden Retriever of a cat who's friendly to everyone, a complete sybarite for being petted and lap-sprawling, and generally easy. We have one psychologically complicated, probably abused cat who's anxious and easily startled, nips and yowls and scratches the carpet for attention, is super-territorial and swats the friendly cat (who still adores her in spite of the attacks). She doesn't like being held, doesn't like sitting in laps, and though she wants to be petted, she expects us to walk over to where she's sitting to do so. We love them both, but the challenge-mode cat can be a pill even when she's sleeping on my feet at night.

Friendly cat is friendly to anyone with a lap, but he's taken to nesting in my armpit every morning before my alarm goes off. I don't know if I've got "Favorite Human" status, or if he's just waiting for me to provide the morning meal.

Unfriendly cat loves my spouse more because he sneaks her bits of human food when I'm not around. He didn't realize he was training her to yell at him for treats, so that's him punished.

Our schedules are disjointed right now, with me working regular 8 - 5 days and spouse usually working 11 - 8 or 9 in the evenings. But there's always time for a solid hug at either end of the day. We also make a point of ensuring we get to spend at least one weekend day together, even if it's just grocery shopping and cooking.

There are habits from our respective years of work travel. We'll routinely text or e-mail each other entertaining or edifying material during our respective workdays, and share images with each other on Tumblr as fun little Easter egg surprises. The Venn diagram of our interests and tastes has substantial overlap, but the areas where we differ have lots of room for new discoveries to share.

The big annual event was always a trip to northern Michigan in autumn, to see the gorgeous fall colors around the lakeshores and go wine tasting. The first of these trips cemented our determination to spend our lives together. Now that we live here, it's not a novelty, but a kind of daily comfort where we'll turn to each other after looking at some spectacular bit of nature and giggle that "We did the thing!".

Many thanks, and I'm delighted that you and your spouse are also in the enduring family bond tribe!

It was such a natural progression of our relationship from the time that we met that I don't know if there was a single point of decision. We were more or less inseparable for the first couple of years. One day, we were browsing in an arts and crafts gallery, saw silver rings crafted to look like tangled oak tree roots, and just said to each other, "Those would make great wedding rings, let's try them on." Bang, our sizes, and we walked out wearing them. By the next weekend, we'd let friends and relatives know about the engagement and started writing our comedy wedding ceremony. We got two friends ordained in the Church of Universal Light (a mail order ministry often used by atheists and the unchurched to circumvent old-school laws requiring ministers to preside over marriages), booked a Unitarian Universalist location, and set about scandalizing our respectively Jewish (-ish) and Catholic families. A great time was had by most. Especially us, since we solemnized our vows with sushi and shots of Maker's Mark bourbon, gifts of experience that we'd each exposed the other to.

We'd always agreed to be open/poly in our relationship. The first big hurdle was an episode of Shiny New Thing Syndrome - the new partner gets all the attention and an existing partner (me) starts feeling neglected. Spouse and I danced around the issue for a while. The big blow-up involved the new partner's shine wearing off drastically when it turned out they weren't particularly truthful, or careful about safer sex practices. Lessons learned all around, and we got much better about communicating our boundaries and negotiating our needs.

I've always been prone to creeping episodes of depression, self-neglect, and workaholism. Spouse and I were both walking wounded with heavy burdens of family trauma when we met, and he's been incredibly patient. But it's terribly painful and lonely for him when things get bad, I feel guiltier and withdraw more... The cycle has pushed our relationship to near-breaking a few times. The resolution usually involved me (after spouse threatens to leave if I don't see a doctor) going back through the pharmacology and therapy to get on track and start actually living with him again.

The last few years, we've had some enduring major health setbacks. He's stood by me through a years-long diagnostic odyssey for a crippling, painful autoimmune disease and joint replacement surgeries, and I was there with him through a grueling episode of emergency open heart surgery and cardiac rehab. I don't want to jinx things by saying our relationship has been tried by fire, but we've definitely established that we've got each other's backs in a way that most people haven't experienced.

There is no one favorite book for me, ever, just a long list of shifting rankings depending on what I recall or feel like on any given day. I might have a "Top 100" that I'd have to sit and think about for a while.

A few hits:

Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Visual Explanations, and Envisioning Information. Brilliant and freaking gorgeous books, one of the first things spouse and I bonded over. We've got this poster framed in our house.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, and the related book of his essays, "Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons". I love most of Vonnegut's work, but Cat's Cradle has a humanistic blend of soberness and silliness about the ease of stumbling into Apocalypse that resonated strongly for me. He's also got a recognizably midwestern American voice that combines trenchant observations of human folly with kindness and compassion.

I could really get into the weeds here, but I'm going to cut this short because it's off the original topic and there are other better posts for it.