Pembirdie

Tag: husband

  • I’m almost eight years older than my husband

    Growing up, I thought that the husband was always older than the wife. After all, my dad was older than my mom. It made sense.

    I wised up as an early teen, when my dad’s youngest sister met the man who would become her husband. I’m not sure how much younger he is than my aunt, but it’s a few years. She is not ashamed of this and says it is the best thing ever.

    I’m not exactly in a position to disagree anymore.

    I was not sure how old my husband was when we started dating in November 2019, but I knew he was a fair bit younger than me. One of his older sisters is my age, and there’s another sister four years younger than me between us. On my flight home for Christmas, I amused myself by calculating the lowest acceptable age he could be. I was thirty at the time, so the bare minimum for him was twenty-two or twenty-three. (The rule is half your age plus seven. I preferred using a more conservative eight.) As it turns out, he was twenty-two. He turned twenty-three in January.

    I’ve had time to get used to it, but contemplating the age gap hasn’t lost its power to astonish me. When I first met my husband, I was twenty-eight and he was twenty. (At that point in our lives, the age gap would have been unacceptable according to my calculations.) I’d graduated college before he started high school. I was driving independently when he was six. At our wedding, my sister joked during her maid of honor speech that she used to pray that God would find me a husband, but “God was just waiting for your relationship to be legal!” I still feel the urge to blush when I have to disclose our birthdates to someone we don’t know.

    Fortunately for me, my husband doesn’t mind. His mother is older than his father, so he’s used to the concept. And, truly, it doesn’t seem to make a difference most of the time. There are life experiences I’ve had, living independently, that he hasn’t – I think the influences some of his disinterest in money. He’s emotionally mature and level-headed. The other day I made a juvenile joke and he said it’s hard to believe I’m older than him sometimes.

    One of my more superficial but nevertheless very real fears is how we are going to look as we get older. People say we look similar in age now, or even that my husband looks older. (It’s probably the mustache.) But as they say, “Black don’t crack.” They don’t say that about white people. About a year ago, I cared for a late middle-aged (but still suave) Black gentleman. With him were three lovely young adult children and his white wife. Sadly for me, she looked old. White cracks. She didn’t seem to mind.

    Maybe I won’t then, either.

    SDG

  • All you need is love?

    I have two memories about Moulin Rouge before I saw the movie.

    The first memory involves me riding in a car with one of my more pop-culture aware cousins. A song was playing, and she said that it was from the movie Moulin Rouge, and in the movie the moon is singing that part. Obviously, this sounded bizarre.

    The second memory involves a senior in the class ahead of me and the final show choir concert of the year. Every senior in show choir could choose a song to perform at the concert, and she chose “Your Song,” by Elton John. Only she didn’t say it was by Elton John, she said it was from Moulin Rouge. I didn’t know any better, but I thought I was a nice song.

    After watching the movie, I can confirm that the singing moon is bizarre but overall makes sense in the movie world, and that Your Song is a good song. If one song pops into my head when I think of Moulin Rouge, however, it’s Ewan McGregor crying, “All you need is love!”

    Well, I don’t buy it.

    My husband is a long-time gamer. He is also much more interested in music than I am, so in the car we’re usually listening to one of his playlists, which contain a lot of video game music. One of those entries is “You’re My Number One,” a song written for a Sonic game and sung by the very soulful, very white TJ Davis. It includes the lyrical gem

    All I need is you

    For always and forever

    All you need is me

    Remember when I say

    All we need is love

    For us to be together

    Cause you’re my number one

    It’s a catchy beat but definitely not winning any awards in the songwriting department. The last time I heard that chorus, I turned to my husband and told him, “You aren’t all that I need.” It was a nice romantic moment.

    Finite, fallible humans and the love they can give are no match for our needs. For one thing, they die way too easily. What if the only person you need, whose love is all you need, dies in a car crash? What then? And, how can they possibly fill up the hole if your heart? My husband and I love each other deeply, and that doesn’t keep me from having moments of discontent and restlessness. I’d like to say that it’s not because he’s not enough, but of course he isn’t enough. He’s human. None of us are enough.

    God created us to be dependent on him. He’s the only one who can make the love songs true – all we need IS his love; if he’s our number one, we have all we need. He can fill the hole in our hearts.

    SDG

  • Easier money conversations with a budget

    I think about money a lot. I’ve read articles with stats saying that poor people think/stress about money more than anyone else, what with having to creatively come up with ways to pay the bills and etc. I am squarely in the upper middle/rich category, but it kinda feels like thinking about money is a hobby. A boring one.

    My husband, on the other hand, seems to think about money hardly at all. Part of this may be his disdain for math or numbers in general (unless they happen to be measurements for his woodworking projects… and even then he seems to find them tedious). Part of it may be that his family didn’t engage in long-term financial planning as he grew up. Whatever the reason, for my husband, money talk is a boring and painful chore that he’d prefer to avoid.

    He loves me, however, and so agreed to my request/demand for a “Financial Friday” every month, where we talk about our financial situation and strategize about short and long-term goals. I’ve tried to sweeten the deal with take out, with limited success. Initially, our money dates mostly consisted of me explaining a detailed spreadsheet containing meticulously compiled inflows and outflows with cells containing our savings targets. My husband played along, but Excel makes his eyes glaze over.

    Overall, it felt lonely. My husband was supportive, but despite politely listening to my explanations didn’t seem to have a meaningful understanding of what was going on. Even worse, at times I felt like the budget police, telling him how much or how little he could spend in a particular category.

    To solve this problem, I did something past me would never have imagined doing: I paid for a budgeting app. And after using it for the past five months, I plan to continue to do so.

    There are lots of apps available, but the one we use is called YNAB. (It used to stand for You Need A Budget, but this has now gone the way of the erstwhile Young Men’s Christian Association.) We each have the app on our phone, which allows us to see the available amount in each category and enter in expenses as they come up. (I am better at doing this than my husband, but he participates.) More revolutionary, each category has a green bar than depletes as money is spent, which is incredibly helpful for his visual mind. As a numbers gal, I couldn’t care less, but it allows him to stay focused during our finance talks instead of unconsciously checking out.

    As a result, we actually spend less time discussing our finances on Financial Fridays, because I have less to explain and he understands it better. I feel like I’m not doing all the work because he’s more involved in the day-to-day stuff, and his contributions to our conversations are more informed because he understands it better. I still think about money a lot, but I fret about it a little less.

    SDG