Love and Marriage - Still Talking After This Many Years

"Woop, woop, woop..." was the call.

"Weep, wip, woop, woop..." was the reply.

My wife and I were sitting on the back porch of our townhouse just outside of Seattle, Washington, USA smoking cigarettes when I started making strange wooping noises.  She responded with her own woops and wips.  "I gotta tell you, I'm grateful that after this many years of marriage (close to six) that we can still talk shit," I said.  "Me, too," she said in return.  And then we burst out laughing.

I was reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, by Chuck Klosterman and he was talking about the ideals of relationships and love that we get from the media (every girl's in love with John Cusack, but in reality are only in love with Lloyd Dobler, Cusack's character in Say Anything). He went on to discuss that so many people fall in love with the ideals of a relationship or an individual as they see them in Romantic Comedies and on TV, only to realize down the road that they no longer love the person they're in the relationship with when they run out of things to talk about (John Cusack is not really Lloyd Dobler, and worse he's boring and you have nothing in common).

My wife and I don't have that problem.  We discuss books, popular culture, spirituality, friends, events that happened in our daily lives, etc., etc..  This is easy for us because we actually enjoy each others company.  Even if that means that our conversations might sometimes be nothing more than woop-woops and wip-wips.

I think the reason for this is our relationship wasn't built on ideals of who we hoped the other would be, and we held no fantasies. We become close friends in insane travel conditions in a Middle Eastern country where we were truly authentic and saw the best of each other (passion for life, love of our fellow man) and the worst (taking dumps in the private bathroom inside our shared hostel room where the "door" was actually a vinyl shower curtain that did little to cover the opening, getting wasted on New Year's and being a dick).  We were who we were, and are who we are and that's what we fell in love with.

We love each other for that ideal, the ideal of who are, not who we want the other to be.

And we talk about it.  Even if that sometimes comes out as woop, woop, wip, wip.