The Merging of Lives

If I do say so myself, I have to give Shaun and I some major credit. It's hard to begin merging your lives when one of those lives is mostly in Texas. He comes home to Michigan on March 15th (probably) by the way. In time for St. Patrick's Day, which he is particularly excited about.

The day to day business of sharing your life with someone is a lot easier when you can just turn to them while you're both sitting on the couch watching tomorrow's weather and say, "Did you remember to pay your cell phone bill this month?" When you never share a couch you tend to forget to ask, over and over again. Then one day you write it down on a post-it while at work, by some miracle of nature you remember to bring the post-it home, and then you go to call them to ask, "Hey, did you remember to pay your cell phone bill?" -- only when you call you get a message that says their phone has been temporarily disconnected. Ostensibly due to non-payment of the aforementioned bill. Thereby rendering the reminder post-it useless. And wasting paper, apologies Mr. Gore.

This situation is hypothetical, of course, as I pay our cell phone bill every month -- mostly on time, when AT&T isn't pissing me off. (They recently overbilled me by $400, took SEVEN phone calls to get it fixed. Oh for the love. Never ever change your plan if you can at all help it.) It's meant to exemplify how difficult it is to communicate about every day matters when you don't see each other every day. But money in particular is an area where Shaun and my communication skills have always seemed to fly out the window at the last second, and leave us screaming at each other, and I find it to be an even more daunting task over such a distance. We resolved to not let this happen anymore (the screaming part), but we definitely still think very differently about that stuff that can't buy love, as Sir Paul once sang.

It boggles my mind a bit how much a calm, honest conversation can accomplish. Shaun and I have had many of those in the past week - we also had some blow up arguments, some of which were through text messaging, which I've determined is the *worst* possible form of communication in existence today. Smoke signals are probably more effective. But I feel like progress is being made. One of us gets upset and we are almost forced to talk about it because we can't do anything else except talk! In that way it's good that we have to speak on the phone so much, but I think we will both appreciate the face to face discussion a lot more than we used to once he is back in Michigan.