Fixation

As a married couple, there’s something inspiring and invigorating about being a part of a wedding. This last weekend Katie Lohuis, one of our best friends, was married happily ever after to Matt Stott. Amy was actually a bridesmaid so the last few weeks have been busy for her with the bridal shower, bachlorette party, and rehersals. All the planning and arrangements payed off though, as the ceremony was breathtaking and the reception was a blast.

I had a chance to write down some words of encouragement and advice for them at the rehersal dinner, but I used up my piece of paper saying how excited I was to see this day come and how they could stay with Amy and I any time. I don’t regret the words that I wrote, but thinking about it in retrospect, I wish I had passed along a little more advice. If I could sum up all the things I’ve learned so far in marriage into one statement, that would be “Don’t expect to fix everything”. There have been so many times in Amy and I’s relationship when Amy has presented a problem or an issue that I’ve wasted time trying to fix. Most of the time, communication isn’t about hearing a problem and trying to solve it, but about listening, feeling, and communicating back. In many ways, Amy and I are the opposite of typical couples. She’s the organizer, the brains, and as far as our job roles go, she wears the boots in the family. I work at home, I’m a creative, and I tend to take a very non-systematic approach to most tasks. When it comes to communication though, I fall into the same male pitfalls as all of our other young-married friends. That is, I fail to communicate.

Take tonight’s problem for instance. Amy wanted to play Word Racer on the mac for a few minutes tonight. It used to work fine in Firefox, but now it crashes the browser. Since the last time she played, I’ve upgraded Firefox from 1.0 to 1.0.4 and upgraded the Mac OS to Tiger. It does work in Safari, but all the letters become incoherent blobs for some reason. Well, I’ve been working on trying to “fix” that problem now for several hours and although Amy definitely wants to be able to play Word Racer on the mac, she probably would have preferred that I stuck to some kind of deadline so we could have spent time together working on a project that we need to get done. If I had just spent 30 minutes to an hour and told her that I’d come back to it later it would have been fine, but instead I’ve wasted most of the night trying to fix a problem rather than communicating. I’m such a creature of habit.

PS: If anybody has had any luck playing Word Racer in OSX Tiger, please let me know. After spending all this time, I’m still frustrated that I haven’t been able to get it to work.