Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Opposites Attract

We've all heard the expression "Opposites Attract", and I guess it's true. Take my wife and me. We could not be more polar opposites. In fact, the areas of similarity are miniscule, and yet we just celebrated our twelfth anniversary!
I am a man who likes order; she is comfortable with a desk that looks like a dumpster. I prefer to read the Sports section first on Sunday; she goes straight for the comics. She grew up as The Beatles ruled; my childhood fell during disco and then hard rock. Therein, I believe, lies the source of our differences.
My wife is 16 years my senior. She was born during the 50's, me at the very end of the 60's; she's still angry that she wasn't old enough to go to Woodstock. I attended a couple of rock concerts, I think.....not sure.....hard to remember. (Just kidding.) She wanted so badly to be a flower child and haunt the Haight; I was perfectly satisfied to attend college in a major party town - Columbus, Ohio.
My wife is definitely a Vietnam-era woman; her brother served there, and when her parents ran a Greyhound Bus station, she saw tear-filled goodbyes between soldiers going off to war and their families. My early years were spent in blissful ignorance of war, except for the stories my father's friends told me.
I'm a numbers man. Math came easy to me; I majored in Finance in college. My wife is a words person (she believes numbers are a foreign language and she should have gotten credit in that area when she was forced to take geometry in high school). She has written poetry and short stories (her preferred forms of writing), and has been published online and in print. Though my career is in finance, I have also become a writer, with two self-published novels available. Words are not my friends; I feel I conquer them every time I write a novel. I am grateful for spell-check; spelling is not something I do well.
Our writing styles are very different. I schedule time to write; she writes when the Muse strikes. This means she has a purse full of notes scribbled on restaurant napkins, the backs of receipts, and pages torn out of her address book (later she can't remember why the R's are gone...). I sit down in my recliner, turn on my laptop, and write for one hour. I take a break. I edit my books the same way. I have a certain number of pages I commit to in one day, and I'm not satisfied until I can cross that off my "to-do" list.
In spite of our differences, my wife and I get along great. We don't always agree on things: sports, politics, religion, or where we should go on vacation, but we always agree on one thing: neither of us can imagine spending the rest of our lives with anyone else!

We're very different, but it works.

1 comment: