We Talked for a Quarter Mile About the Drive Home

Yesterday afternoon David and I were maybe a quarter mile down the gravel road behind the Bear Lake cabin, the sagebrush giving off that hot dusty smell it gets around four o'clock, when he stopped and said, "Mel, that's the whole walk so far. The drive home, the dog, whether we're stopping for milk." He was right. We had planned Saturday's trip down to which cooler rides on whose lap, and then we walked a good while without saying anything, which felt worse than the logistics did.

How do you talk to your husband about more than logistics?

Start by admitting the logistics are real. Somebody does have to know when the dentist is and who has the car on Tuesday, and I get a little tired of marriage advice that treats the calendar as a villain. A calendar is what lets four kids and two adults get fed. After twenty-three years I can still lose an entire afternoon of conversation to who's picking up what, and there are weeks when every sentence David and I say to each other would fit on an index card.

One article I read this week suggests a weekly thirty-minute meeting where you do all the household business at once, so the rest of the week is free of it. I tried that years ago, in a different season of life. We had the meeting. Then at 9:40 on Wednesday night one of us remembered the permission slip and it all came back anyway. Still, I think the idea underneath is sound. If the business has a place to live, it stops wandering into every room.

What helped us more was a smaller rule. At home, David works from his desk in the front room on Thursdays, so he's been at the kitchen island half the morning, and when Ben goes down for his nap we take the baby monitor out the front door and walk the loop around the cul-de-sac and the two streets beyond it. Here we have the gravel road and the lake wind. Either way we're out about forty minutes, and the walk has no agenda items. That's the entire system.

What we leave off the Thursday walk

Money stays home, and so do the kids' schedules and whose turn it is to deal with anything, because the minute one of those comes up we're back at the kitchen island with a pad of paper and a different face on. If one of the children has a real problem we can bring it along, but it has to be a real one and not a Tuesday one. Caleb's baseball is a Tuesday one. Lily deciding she needs a second horse book series is a Tuesday one. Church callings stay home too unless the calling is making one of us sad. The thing from last weekend is supposed to stay home as well, and that's the rule I break most.

What we do talk about is smaller and stranger. David reads one chapter every morning before work and rotates through four books, so I ask him what he noticed in whichever one he's in. Usually it's a verse he's irritated by. Once it was a footnote. I tell him about whatever I'm reading, which this summer is a memoir by a woman who raised sheep in Montana, and he listens to a lot more sheep than he has ever expressed an interest in. Sometimes we play what I think of as show-and-tell for grown-ups, which I borrowed straight from my third-grade classroom, where the rule was one thing, small enough to fit in a pocket, and where the quietest child in the room would sometimes bring a rock and talk for four minutes without stopping. One of us picks a neighbor and says one thing we really like about them. It sounds cheesy and works anyway. You can walk a long way on what you like about Brother Hendricks's lawn, and then somehow you're talking about your own father's yard.

I saw a study this week saying that sharing how you feel builds closeness faster than sharing facts and plans do. That fits what I see in our own walks. I know where David will be at two o'clock on a Tuesday. I couldn't tell you what's on his mind while he's there.

What my mother did when Sam left for college

My brother Sam is the youngest of the five of us, and the fall he left, my mother called me one Sunday evening and said, in the voice she uses for things she's embarrassed by, that she and my dad had gotten through an entire dinner on the subject of the gravy. I could hear her shears going in the flower shed behind the house. They weren't angry. They had looked up and the kids who'd been doing the talking for them were gone.

My father is a dentist, and by six o'clock he has said all he's going to say. But he agreed to what my mother came up with, which was that at dinner each of them had to bring one thing they'd noticed that day that had nothing to do with the house, the practice or the family. It could be dumb.

For the first month my dad's one thing was the weather, and then a hawk that sat on the same fence post near the end of their road. My mother said that by Christmas she knew that hawk better than some of her cousins. Then one night in February he said that before dental school he'd applied to be a band director, and that he'd gotten as far as an interview and a trombone audition in Provo, and she put her fork down. She had known about the trombone, but not the application.

Habits that have lasted

Phones stay out of the walk, and I mean that literally, because mine lives in the cupholder of the van on Thursdays. I wrote about this from the parenting end in the post on Caleb and the phone he wants, and the grown-up version of that rule is just as annoying to follow. When I carry mine I check it. Every time.

Once the week's dinners are settled ahead of time, as in my two-week dinner plan, we stop asking each other about them at 5:15.

And I try to ask a question David can't answer with a time. "What was the best part of your meeting" works about half the time. "What did you think about on the drive" works better. Some nights he says he thought about nothing and I believe him and we leave it.

There's a verse I keep next to all this, though I want to be careful with it. Ecclesiastes is talking about work and about falling down and has nothing to say about conversation, and the Preacher has a gloomy view of most things anyway.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

I read it as being about who gets told. David is the one person who knows what a given week was like for me.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it normal to only talk about schedules after several years of marriage?

I'd say it's close to the default once there are kids. If you notice you miss talking to him, tell him so in those words, with no speech attached.

What if he doesn't want to talk about feelings?

Then don't begin with feelings. Ask what he read or what a coworker said and walk side by side where nobody has to look at anybody. David answers most things better when he's facing a road.

How long does it take before it feels natural?

Longer than a month, which was my own guess and was wrong. The first several Thursdays felt like a staff meeting that had been taken outdoors, so I'd give it a whole season. The ones I remember best came around week nine. I couldn't tell you what we said, only that I was sorry to see the driveway.

Do we need a date night for this?

I like them but they haven't done it for us. A date night puts a lot of pressure on one evening, and we spend half of it deciding where to go. Forty minutes every week outside beats a nice dinner every three months.

I still don't know the right word for what David and I are working on. Friendship is close, except that friends haven't also split a mortgage.

The dryer here takes quarters, and the load I put in an hour ago is still damp, so I'm going to go find two more.

with love, Melissa