The Royal WE

Last weekend my husband installed stone veneer over our brick fireplace.  It was an ambitious project, but he’s good at that sort of thing, so it turned out well and adds color and texture to the living room.  When friends visited later, I showed them the new fireplace “we” installed.  Ted looked at me and said, “What’s this WE, Kimosabe?”

Well, I did help.  I held the tape measure and I brought him the drill and I made lunch while he worked. I made sure he used the hand-truck to carry the stone so he didn’t hurt his back and I vacuumed up the dust even though there wasn’t supposed to be any dust.  I may have just been the gopher, but I was also the cheerleader during the process and the bragger when it was done.  So I should count as WE, right?

This WE business goes both ways.  When it’s his mother’s birthday WE always remember to send flowers.  WE make donations and write thank-you cards, and WE buy all the Christmas gifts for  the extended family.  When Mom calls to say how much she likes the bouquet, he tells her we’re glad she likes it as I say, “What’s this WE…” with a smirk.

But really, I don’t mind being a WE.  I’m happy that we can do handy home projects and, oh yeah, have a good job.   And he tells me he appreciates that we have birthdays and Christmas and doctor appointments and school conferences covered so he can focus on the things he needs to do.  And then there’s that having-someone-to-love part, and a standing date for New Year’s Eve.

It seems a bit old-fashioned on the surface, but over the years we’ve arrived at a division of roles that works for us.  Not everything tracks along traditional gender lines—I handle our finances because that’s what I’m good at and because I’m a miser and he does a lot of cooking because that’s what he’s good at and I’m always on a diet.  I can’t handle rodents; he can’t handle puke.  So it’s a good partnership.  We’ve got each other’s backs.

The scene of the proposal, 20 years later. 
It's still a body shop, on Melrose Avenue in L.A.

This week marks the 23^rd anniversary of our engagement, and I credit this WE thinking for helping us make it this long when so many couples we know haven’t.  We count the years from our engagement, not just the wedding, because that’s when the WE really started.  From the day he bought my engagement ring on Zale’s deferred billing and proposed on the sidewalk in front of an auto-body shop, we’ve been in this thing together. The WE didn’t displace the ME overnight, but somewhere between the second cross-country move and the dog, the mind-meld happened and now we’re stuck.  There are things we know about each other that we’ve never told another soul, and the scariest thing either of us can imagine is internet dating.

All this is not to say that we always think alike, or even agree.  More often than I’d like to admit, we resemble a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde monster that doesn’t know what it wants.  He turns on the light while I’m still sleeping and watches too much mindless TV.  I overreact to petty slights and don’t buy everything on the grocery list and then he has to go back out to the store before dinner.  We butt heads daily over little things and one of us always ends up giving in, though not always with a glad heart.  And I’ll bet we will probably even disagree about this story.  Sometimes it takes us a while to get from ME to WE, but so far, so good.  We may not be speaking, but we’re never far apart.