Long Relationships

I am a bit stunned that we are already on question twenty for the Love Questions from Short, Sweet Love Poems. Am I the only one who feels like 2008 is going by fast?

Anywho, we have an interesting and potentially fun question to answer this week, so let’s get right to it, shall we?

Different people tend to have different attractions and turn-offs when it comes to the dating game. For example, when we are meeting someone new, we all focus on different things such as the looks, eyes, figure, legs, clothes or the way the person talks or walks to form an opinion on him or her.

What are the things that you tend to focus on when it comes to sizing up a potential mate during that crucial first encounter?

This one is a bit tricky, given I met my husband on the internet, but I’ll try to cover it from all angles.

The very first things I used to notice when I met a potential mate in person were the eyes, the smile, and the laugh. I just plain have a thing for eyes, and the smile and laugh were important in judging how easygoing and what kind of sense of humor a man had. After that, it was the little things – did he go too fast, did he listen as much as he talked, was he a slob or overly neat.

The first thing I noticed about my husband – and that I noticed in potential online romances before him – was the command of the English language. I was instantly attracted to how much my husband’s sense of humor was wrapped up in wordplay and how we could connect over intelligent conversation. He also had enough respect of me and others not to drop into “n3t sp33k”.

When I met my husband physically for the first time, I pretty much notice ‘the whole package’. I noticed that he was tall (yum), was hygienic, had awesome, awesome hair, very sexy blue/green eyes… True, I was already in love with him, but still.

How about you?

I don’t think anything scares me quite like my husband getting sick. He came home early the other day, which is always a fun surprise, but he had a bit of a tickle in his throat. I wasn’t too worried at that point, as a tickle could have just meant he swallowed something wrong at lunch. But, because it had been a long day and he had the weird throat thing, we decided to go to the pub.

(Nothing will knock a flu out of your body faster than Stones green ginger wine with a bit of whiskey mixed in. I call it The FluBuster.)

So we went to the pub and not much time had passed before Mr. JM started looking uncomfortable. Then a bit out of it. Then obviously in pain. We decided to call it a night and walked back home.

What is usually a ten to fifteen minute walk turned into twenty or thirty. (I wasn’t checking the clock.) Mr. JM was having a hard time doing anything but concentrating on walking and breathing at the same time. By the time we got home, he had consented to taking a hot bath (something he has never done while we’ve had a relationship) and wouldn’t eat. Those two things terrified me.

The bath helped, but he wasn’t long out of it before he started looking worse off again. He had a high temp as well, so I sent him to bed.

Skipping over the rest of the details, it’s now a few days later and he’s almost back to normal. He tires pretty easily still and has a bit of pain, but that’s about it. We don’t have any idea what happened, but he’s feeling better and that’s what counts in my books.

The whole thing was a very scary experience for me (that sounds a bit self-centered, but it is the point of this post) because it swiftly brought into light the fact I can’t drive a manual, I had to think about who I would call in case of a huge emergency (besides the ambulance), and there was the basic threat of the unknown to someone I love.

Have you ever had a moment or incident that made you truly think about your relationship and how much your SO means to you?

Another September Monday morning brings another pathetic attempt by Melbourne at giving us a sunny spring day. Then again, Melbourne does like to tease us by making us think the weather is going to be one thing in the morning and changing her mind about four times before settling down for the evening weather.

Cloudy grey days (even preceded by a partly sunny morning) tend to make me a bit moody and introspective. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ‘A Matter of Age’ series since I put it up.

I’m not happy on admitting this, but as a writer I have to accept when my writing is sub-par so I can work on improving it.

I didn’t do a good job with talking about the topic. I am so close to it personally and sensitive to judgments from others, and that overruled my natural writing abilities and instincts. I didn’t take enough time to truly think about the topic and what really wanted to say.

For that, I apologize to my readers. You deserve better than that, and I usually hold myself to higher standards.

At this point, I am grateful for the discussion that was able to rise out of those posts. I think I could have made it easier to talk about, but I think that’s enough of the woulda, coulda, shouldas, don’t you?

I’m going to leave the topic alone at this point and perhaps come back to it at the future. Now I’m going to focus on waking up the professional part of me that apparently fell asleep last week and get back to myself.

When I first came to Australia, a man my husband works with and is friends with was suspicious of me. He treated me nicely, but there is no doubt in my mind that he thought there was a possibility that I was after my husband for reasons other than love.

As a friend to my husband, he would have had suspicions anyway, but I think he had even more doubts because of how much younger I am than my husband.

That is well and truly behind us now and he has no doubts about me now that he has gotten to know me. All the other people who have gotten to know me also don’t have any problems with my relationship with my husband. Sometimes newer people stop and blink for a moment, but they are always polite and the moment is forgotten later.

However, my husband and I – and Alex and Jenny – can’t get to know and become friends with everyone. Some people will simply never accept such relationships and others, well, there just isn’t time to make friends with the rest of the world.

Thus, we continue to face some scrutiny and sometimes even outright disgust. But such is life and such is the price we pay for our love for each other.

Most of us say that ‘as long as you love each other, that’s what matters’, but is it? Would it begin to matter to you if a couple had ten years difference between them? How about twenty? Thirty? More?

When does it start to matter? Does it ever reach the point of being ‘wrong’? Who, if anyone, gets the authority to decide?

While walking down the street or in the shops on any given day with my husband, we can encounter everything from second glances, confused looks and even outright staring. I tend to like to have fun with those people and give my husband a peck on the cheek or pat on his bum, it’s perhaps a sign of my world that I’m starting to notice the looks less and less.

But Alex and Jenny have endured the glances and stares as well, perhaps even more so as an age gap couple of a slightly different kind – a younger man with an older woman. Either way, they both knew exactly what my husband was talking about when he asked them if they received ‘the look’ very much.

We pondered the strangeness of it, given that there are still traditional age gap marriages and that it wasn’t so long ago (in the grand scheme of things) that a ‘healthy’ gap between the two people together was considered the norm. While none of us condone minors being forced into marriages they don’t want, we all agreed that as long as both partners are both legal adults, there shouldn’t be a problem.

And yet, there seems to be for some people. The stereotypical images of the gold-digging trophy wife and the ‘cougar’ going for a young man with more stamina come to mind.

Alex wondered if, perhaps, so many celebrity couples breaching age gaps would help generate more acceptance among the general population for age gap couples.

Sadly, my husband and I didn’t (and don’t) think so. While others attempt to emulate celebrity life, age gap relationships probably won’t come ‘in fashion’. At least not for a while yet.

A couple weeks ago, my husband’s and my friend Alex approached us with an idea. He had a project to do for one of his classes: a human interest article. The article could be on any subject as long as it had the ‘human’ touch. He asked if he could interview us.

The subject? Having a significant age gap in your relationship.

He revealed that he has a girlfriend – ‘Jenny’ – and they are like any other couple except for one thing: She is sixteen years older than he is.

He couldn’t write about his own relationship for the project, so he decided to interview the next significant age gap couple he knew. Fortunately for us, that was my husband and me.

My husband and I were aware of the difference in our ages when we first began falling in love. My husband was a bit hesitant at first, but I showed him that it didn’t matter to me and that it shouldn’t matter to him.

However, no matter how much we are in love, we always have the niggling fear that some people will criticize our relationship just for the fact that we weren’t born closer together in time. We have been pleasantly surprised by the number of people who accept us as we are, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t had some strange looks from people.

Talking about it is one thing, but living the reality is an entirely different matter. While celebrities have the ‘oh, they are just celebrities’ buffers, the everyday people who live in age gap relationships face a different kind of celebrity – and not a good kind.

A laugh shared over a pint with good friends is a staple of traditional Australian life. The pub is where we meet, where we socialize, and where my husband and I have made many good friends.

As a former barman, my husband knows what it’s like to spend hours on your feet – both on the busy nights and the boring ones. He likes to make friends among the staff of our local pub and teach them a thing or two about bar work – and about life when he gets the chance.

One friend of ours – I’ll call him Alex to give him a bit of privacy – came to work at the pub and quickly struck up a good, fun friendship with us. Alex is my age, studying to be a journalist and has a writing style I’m fascinated by. But for all the months we knew him, we had another thing in common with him that came as a complete – and pleasant – surprise.

Alex is one half of a happy relationship. He and his girlfriend, ‘Jenny’, met at a work Christmas party. Not long after that – after a very nervous text message from Jenny – they sat down for ‘the relationship chat’ and have been together ever since. Both a bit shy but with great smiles, they make an excellent couple.

My husband and I are in a happy relationship as well, but that’s not what we have in common with Alex and Jenny. We share a somewhat unique relationship trait:

A significant relationship age gap.

While we may think of Anna Nicole Smith or Demi Moor and Ashton Kutcher when we think of age gaps in relationships, those kind of relationships certainly aren’t limited to the celebrity world. In today’s world, people don’t often look their age and you might be surprised to find out that some couples have a bigger age gap than you realized…

Saving money in my household hasn’t been extremely hard by any means but neither has it been very easy. My husband and I both grew up in families where money – for various reasons – was something to have as a secret and spend as soon as you can so no one can take it from you. So, while saving money isn’t impossible for us, it’s sometimes hard not to give in to the temptation of going out for the night.

But, like all couples, we have bills, goals and trips to take (for work and for pleasure).

Early this year, after noticing all the change that built up in what we used as the laundry change bowl before we got a washing machine, I thought we could keep on doing the same thing with all our coins. (Australian has $1 and $2 coins as well as five cents, ten cents, etc.) So I left the bowl for the silver change (coins under $1) and set up a jar for the gold coins ($1 and $2).

I have to say, it’s probably one of the better things I have done to help us save money.

For the first half of the year, we saved up money to help pay off the $500+ car registration fee in July. We didn’t expect to save the full amount, but we were very pleasantly surprised to have saved more than half the fee. That really helped us get out of the tight mid-winter financial squeeze we usually go through.

Then I went to the doctor and have since been having such good results that we decided it would be a good idea for my husband to go as well. The first appointment costs $100, so we decided to save up for that. Once again combining the silver and gold coins saved, we already have $100 and the appointment isn’t for another two weeks.

It may not seem like a lot when you’re putting the change in the jar, but it sure can add up fast. Having the spare change jar and bowl has helped us save for important things so we don’t always have to be thinking in terms of money and can think more in terms of what we really need. It’s also getting us easily into the habit of saving more.

Do you find it easy or hard to save money? Do you have any simple saving tricks to help things along?

As I have probably mentioned across my sites hundreds of times already, I am currently on a six week restricted diet. With no alcohol, no chocolate, no mushrooms (I love mushrooms) and plenty of other ‘no, you can’t have this even if you love it because I’m evil and I like torturing people with food restrictions’ –

Ahem. Let’s try that again.

With so many restrictions on what I can and can’t eat and basically losing nearly all my comfort food (both unhealthy and healthy), my recent way of dealing with stress is talking to my husband more. (The poor man.)

We were out having Greek the other night (thankfully I can still eat most of the yummy food they have on offer) and I was talking about how everything was going.

After telling him how much weight I’ve lost so far, etc, I said, “The most difficult part of this whole thing is the eating every three hours. Sometimes I just plain don’t want to eat.”

He thought about it a moment. “Well, you could always eat smaller things. Even a half or a quarter of a banana is still eating.”

“I already make my portions smaller. Sometimes I’m just not hungry anyway and sometimes it’s a mental thing – I don’t want to see, smell or even think about food.”

“You could skip a meal. Spread the rest out a bit.”

“No, I can’t, really,” I said, picking at my food with a bit of irritation. “I need to stick with what she says, at least for the six weeks. The whole point of eating so often is to steady out my blood sugar.”

At that point he opened his mouth to make another suggestion but stopped and just grinned. “This is another one of those Mars and Venus things. I want to fix the problem and – ”

“And I just want to complain a bit,” I said and then laughed.

There is a lot to be said for seeing something for what it is rather than simply reacting based on emotions.

This past weekend was a busy one full of making a mess of the flat, doing laundry, building furniture (we bought two new bookshelves and a new bed, all of which we had to put together) and grocery shopping. It was definitely more active than our usual weekend, but as we finally got the chance to sleep on our new bed last night, it all felt worth it.

On Saturday, the man and I were both pretty tired after a hard week of work, so we decided to heck with it and took an afternoon nap. It was wonderful to have the time to rest as well as well as cuddle a bit and just be with each other.

I woke up a bit before he did, though, and I got to thinking about our lives and how nice it was that we could just take an afternoon nap. While it wasn’t a new experience for me, by any means, it was one of life’s little moments that I have come to so appreciate.

After a while of just blissing off, the thought occurred to me that if we had a child, random afternoon naps would steadily go from ‘whenever’ to ‘never’.

While I sometimes feel down about not having a child and starting a family just yet, it’s times like these that I feel good about not rushing things. The maternal instincts are steadily growing stronger but so is the appreciation for the quiet times I spend with my husband.

Hello and happy Friday everyone. (This is going up after Friday, but I hope you had an excellent Friday anyway!)

I recently got to talking to someone who wanted links to all the sites I write at. I’m usually a bit shy about these things - especially to people I know in person - but he seemed quite eager to read, so I shared the links with him.

Thinking about that, I began looking back through all I have written here on Long Relationships and found quite a few posts that I like. So, for anyone who is new here or hasn’t been here since I’ve started writing here, I present you with links to some of my favourite posts (up through April of this year).

Enjoy.

*Family Matters - A post that explores the surface of parental influences on our relationships.

*When You Know It’s Love… - When did you know it was love?

*Stress and Your Spouse - Three quick tips for helping your partner relax.

*Series on Stalking - Stalking, Cyberstalking, Prevent Becoming a Victim, If You’re a Victim

*Series on Sex - Sex, Talking About Sex, No Sex Spouse, No Sex Spouse Part Two, T13 - The Sex Talk Edition

*A Kid’s View on Marriage - Cute marriage Q&A session with kids.

*Paying For Sex - My thoughts on a news story about a woman paying for sex.

*The Bubble Bath - On the importance of ‘me’ time.

*Relationships and Dieting - The Couple on a Diet, Weighty Relationships, Thirteen Things To Do/Not Do When Your Partner Is Dieting

*Kiss and Tell - How much do you share with other people?

*Dealing With Judgmental People

*Not Your Momma’s Relationship

A couple weeks ago for the Love Questions meme, Aud asked about money and relationships. Of course, as with many questions about relationships, the opinions on the subject varied from person to person.

I was later cruising around the net looking at love and relationships articles when I found this article: Is Money the Real Reason for Most Divorces?

In the article, the author states: “I believe that the real reason that most divorces happen is due to the fact that we don’t know how to communicate with each other about money. We don’t know how to talk about money to our spouses and loved ones. It is like a secret behind close doors to talk about money. We are afraid to share that we spent more then we should have to our spouses. We are afraid to share our true feelings about money.”

That got me thinking… And I halfway agree with her.

The article was short and to the point, which was nice, but as is the case with just saying ‘money causes most divorces’, I think the author still oversimplified the matter.

My husband and I are by no means afraid to talk about money. In fact, we talk about it often because we’d like to buy a house, have children, etc in the future. With bills and the housing market here, it’s hard not to talk about money. But does that mean we’re free and clear of stress just because we can talk about it?

Of course not. Not being able to do what we dream for lack of money is hard and can get upsetting, which leaves us both feeling less than happy.

Have you ever fought over money? Does money put (ever put) a strain on your marriage? Do you think that money causes divorces or a lack of communication about money?

Is it Monday already? Bah.

Thank you to everyone who wished me a good birthday. I had a great time and a lot of fun.

The morning started out with kisses and presents in bed after a nice sleep in. My husband got me an absolutely gorgeous ring (I’ll have to see if I can take a nice picture of it) as well as a cute little toy that I have been after. I always wanted one as a kid and I don’t see why something as silly as age should keep me from having fun.

That was followed by a bit of a lazy morning before we headed off to a wonderful lunch. Because of my current diet restrictions I couldn’t have cake or anything like that, but I still enjoyed myself with the yummy healthy food that was on offer.

We planned to go see a movie, but we had a little time before we needed to be there, so we went for a nice, leisurely drive around the area – something I absolutely love doing because there are so many gorgeous sights around here (and around all of Australia) – and then came back home for a little bit. (To play a few moves on our games of scrabble.)

Then it was off to see Hancock, which we both enjoyed. Again, no movie treats, but I didn’t get stopped for bringing in non-theatre stuff (it was from just downstairs) so everything was fine. (I am supposed to eat every few hours, so it was necessary to bring something.)

After that, back home to more scrabble, a movie, and a wonderful night.

What a lovely day. I hope you all had an excellent weekend.

While talking to one of our mutual friends, a woman, my husband said that “guys don’t like their lives put out on display”. They like to keep things private when and where possible when it comes to personal and family things. While every guy can be different, I have to admit that pretty much every guy I have ever known feels the same way.

The person he was talking to writes about anything and everything – and that’s one of the things I love about her and her blog. However, I know that I would never blog to the intimate detail she does when it comes to the negative times in her relationship.

I have learned the negative side of blogging about your life, no matter how ‘anonymously’ you think you’re actually being. Even if my husband and I go through the worst of fights, I don’t blog specifics and rarely blog about the fight. I do blog positives, but again, I leave out details whenever I feel it might be something my husband doesn’t care to have the public to know.

BUT, I don’t hold it against people who do. The temptation for ‘blog therapy’ can be strong and it’s so easy to do… I don’t think it’s wrong at all if both you and your partner are okay with it, but that is a discussion you need to have before you just go ahead and do it.

How do you feel about blogging about your personal life (and your partner’s life)? Do you believe ‘as long as it’s anonymous’ or do you think ‘what happens in Vegas…’? Somewhere in between?

Last Friday I went to see a naturopath so I could get a diet sorted out. I have a lot of difficulty losing weight for a number of reasons and so got allergy/intolerance/sensitivity testing. All in all, it was worth the money I spent (it wasn’t covered by Medicare) and quite enlightening. However, it means that for the next six weeks, I’m on a very restrictive diet. (So I can get back to ‘base’ before I get tested and lose some weight in the mean time as well.)

Last night my husband could feel my frustration at things as I went through the lists I had. Some things were good on one list only to be listed as bad on the other. Not a lot of fun, but I figured out things enough to at least be able to eat for the next few days.

This morning I woke up to an email that said “Welcome to Your New Life” from my husband that was filled with love and support. He let me know that, as always, he is 100% there for me and also reminded me why I’m making these sacrifices (weight loss, confidence, healthy body for children).

I couldn’t help but smile and feel great about what I was doing (even if I did have to eat oats for brekkie…) and what I wanted to accomplish.

As much as he’ll refuse to admit it, my husband can be quite romantic and thoughtful.

What are the most memorable little shows of support and love from your partner for you? What did s/he do and why did it mean a lot to you?