Tag Archives: marriage tips

Travels with GenX — Finally

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My husb and I did not grow up blessed with international travel. Husb stayed in a motel with his parents precisely once. It was the Bluebird Motel in Claresholm, Alberta and it lasted as long as it took for their car to be repaired. My family did travel all over Canada and the US, always by car and almost always as part of a grueling long distance move. 

In our 20s — prime backpacking age — husb and I were in school, then in diapers (our little kids were, that is), and deep in debt. For us, big-travel did not arrive until our 40s, beginning as a necessity of my career as a writer and scholar before becoming part of who we are now. 

If you’re not a big-traveler yet, and especially if you’re like us — too young to throw in with the Boomers on the group tour packages, too old for flirty bedbug hostels — here’re some tips. If you’ve already got the GenX nihilism, whatever your age, then, whoa, you’re halfway there.

  • If you’re traveling to try to revitalize a relationship, choose something easy and luxurious like an all-inclusive resort or a cruise. Do not attempt a DIY adventure in a foreign country with someone with whom you do not already enjoy spending a lot of time and with whom you are not really, really comfortable exchanging apologies. I have a sister who has yet to do big-travel but I know she and her husb will be great if they ever do because they happily summit local mountains together every weekend. Find a local “mountain” and take that relationship on a trial run before booking a flight.
  • Give yourself lots of time for everything, especially airport connections. Faster is not always better. Don’t just take it from a girl who has run up stairwells in the Frankfurt airport lugging baggage, take it from the much younger and sweatier man we ran past in time to hear him tell his companions, “Just leave me. I’m not going to make it.”
  • Get over car travel. You go everywhere by car at home where public transit is terrible and expensive but things may be different abroad. A ticket on a train in, say, Norway is a sacred trust and you will arrive at your destination promptly and safely even if the train you booked derails outside Oslo before you even board it. Norway Trains will provide a way. And when the Eurovision song comes on in a maxi-taxi with purple LED lights in the ceiling, blazing through the Swedish border without slowing down, everyone will be singing.
  • Wear your wallet. This is what our 90s cargo pants were made for. Zip or button your passport and cards right into your clothes or get a belt bag and wear it across the front of your body where you can see it all the time, with or without the progressive lenses you should be wearing too. If you leave a bag behind in that Paris restaurant with the distracting wasp problem, it’s just going to be you and your high school French trying to convince the nice, somehow wasp-hardy immigrants who run the place that it’s yours.
  • Be so for real about your not-young body. Sleep. Sit. Leave the pharmacy labels on your medication and bring all of it with you (including—especially—the good pain killers). For me, this has meant traveling with my big, cartoon syringe packed in ice on any trips over nine days. It can also mean lying under an overpass in the West End of London somehow overlooked by hostile architecture with your head in your loved one’s lap, or trying to soak in a bathtub in rural Scotland with your foot pressed to the stopper to keep the hot water from draining long enough for it to have its therapeutic effect.
  • Don’t bring those shoes. Your Docs are too bulky for your carry-on bag. Get some good sneakers, wear them everywhere, and get over the fact that they’re all you see when you look at photos of yourself.
  • Take photos of each other. You’re the only one who expects photos of yourself to look like they would have when you were in your 20s. It might creep everyone out if they still looked like that. And there’s no point photographing empty landscapes anyone could find better shots of with a Google image search. When it comes to my husb’s Instagram, he acts like his sick little old lady companion is a supermodel. I am so not, but I stand up straight, try to open my eyes, dress mindfully, and so far, no one is impolite enough to mention it.

Travel is a privilege no one deserves and not everyone gets. 20s me with the kids and the debt—she never saw all of this coming. Old me is grateful for travel, getting better at it, and wishing you the same.

Marriage Tips of the Angels of Death?

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My Mr. and Me

My Mr. and Me

I wrote a novel about marriage.  It’s a novel, not a manual.  It’s meant to start conversations about love and relationships, not necessarily to resolve them.  Recently, I had one such conversation.  It was a discussion about whether the marriage I wrote is truly a happy one.  Would my main characters actually love each other if they had to live in the real world?

My position, of course, is that they would.  Most of my reviewers agree — but not all of them.

I’m not a marriage counselor.  When I’m writing, my job is not to lecture but to describe what I see in life and in my imagination.  That’s where the marriage I wrote came from – not from relationship theories but from inspiration found in things I’ve seen, heard, felt, and (as one reviewer pointed out) smelled.  And, since this is the Internet, I’ll write some of what I see in happy marriages in a list.  Maybe everyone’s list would be different.  But this list is mine – and ya won’t find anything on it about toothpaste caps or crapping with the bathroom door open.

Quick Disclaimer: I’m speaking of marriages where both partners are fairly healthy emotionally and socially.  I don’t mean situations of abuse or flagrant craziness where self-preservation demands a different list entirely.

What a Good Marriage Looks Like To Me:

1)      It’s Not Dating.  And thank goodness.  During his dating days, I had a miserable conversation with one of my brothers.  He didn’t want to live alone but at the same time he was worried marriage meant being trapped in a never-ending date – having to keep up a stream of witty conversation, fussing over the etiquette of opening car doors or not, orchestrating lavish events – all those company manners stretching on and on until someone in the couple mercifully dies and the other can relax.  Married people can go on dates but we are not dating.  Even if we aren’t holding hands at the movies every night, romantic moments can arise out of daily life – moments much more natural and genuinely loving than stunts copied out of hackneyed, soap-opera-inspired cultural scripts.

2)      It Maintains Physical Contact.  Look, it’s hard to stay mad at someone when she’s sitting in your lap.  The power of physical affection shouldn’t be underestimated.  Between people who love each other, it can take the edge off just about anything.  It can change fighting into flirting.  And it’s easy to use.  Slather it on.

3)      It’s Generous With the Benefit of the Doubt.  Everyone makes mistakes.  In a good marriage, mistakes are handled by thinking, “There is no way he meant that to sound so awful.  We must be missing something.”  When attributing motives to a spouse, it’s best to use a deductive approach – one that begins with the premise that the loved-one truly loves us.  From there, we assume the most basic motive is love.  We may be clumsy and unsuccessful in showing love but we try to see it underlying behaviours anyway.  We use humor and affection and warm, open communication to let partners know when there’s a glitch. We also use tenderness.  Frankness is not always a virtue.  Sometimes, it’s just laziness, malice, and thoughtlessness dressed up in a goofy costume made of 1970s self-help mystique.  Ironically, frankness can sometimes foster more misunderstanding especially when an issue calls for slow, delicate defusing to keep it from detonating and devastating the relationship.

4)      It Doesn’t Keep Score.  A good marriage has no tally sheet.  It doesn’t worry about “love banks” or throw down rules about how love must be proven or earned.  Marriage isn’t a corporation.  Instead of keeping balance sheets weighing good deeds against bad behaviours it just forgives and forgives and forgives.  It’s like a soccer game for 5-year-olds.  Try your best, have fun, concentrate on teamwork, forget the score, and it’s okay if everyone wins.

5)      It’s Not Preoccupied With Boundaries.  Individuality is the human condition, okay?  We’re all different and separate from one another.  Nothing anyone tries to do to us can change that.  For a romantic sap like me, the greatest challenge of our lives – including our married lives – isn’t to find ourselves but to find someone else and make them as much a part of ourselves as possible.  Marriage is one of those transcendent paradoxes about losing ourselves in order to find ourselves.

6)      It’s Open to Miracles.  This item on the list is important enough for me to break the Internet convention of limiting lists to five points.  Like I’ve said before, I don’t really know what makes marriage work.  It just does.  I have a good one.  Without much effort, I’ve been happily married to the same man for eighteen years.  But it’s not because we’re any better or smarter than anyone else.  There’s got to be a lot of luck – or something like it – involved.  A good marriage is not unlike a miracle.  And a miracle, by definition, demands faith that something unlikely can actually happen.  So believe in marriage.  Hope in marriage.  On many levels, marriage in the twenty-first century doesn’t make much sense.  But here we are.