Marriage Isn’t Give and Take... ...It’s Hoard or Toss By Maggie Barnes
“Y
ou aren’t throwing that out, are you?” I truly believe that marriage represents the final frontier of the human experience. The concept of two people choosing to spend a hefty portion of their earthly lives interacting with each other fascinates me. There are just so many places for the whole thing to go wrong. For instance, have you ever noticed that people who are always cold and people who are always hot marry each other and then spend their days fighting
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over the thermostat? The thrifty and the extravagant, the neat and the sloppy, the over the roll and the under the roll…we are attracted to those who row in the opposite direction. In my own domestic bliss, there are two glaring areas of difference. One is packing for a trip. I freely admit that I bring half the house for a long weekend. Meanwhile, Robert could have pulled off the landing at Normandy with two rowboats and a backpack. So, we compromise. I start packing a week before
we leave and Robert allots a full seven minutes to throw a bag together and we are out the door. It works. The other point of conflict is more difficult to manage, as ours is a mixed marriage. He hoards. I toss. When we bought our hilltop home, we suddenly had four times the house and ten times the land. We went from a co-owned two-car garage that was deeded down the center (I don’t recommend it), to a four-vehicle garage suitable for barn