A Culture of Two

We’re standing at the sink together when she gives with the little growl that generally lets me know that I’m being annoying. The funny thing is, I can tell by the growl that I’m being annoying in a specific way. There are several variations to the growl, nuances of timbre, volume, and aggression that communicate specific things. There are ones that are preemptory, warning me not to proceed with a given enterprise; others communicate “What fresh hell is this?” However, this particular one is reserved for the kind of misdemeanors I commit repeatedly, which she finds annoying but knows will never change, if they haven’t in the 18 years we’ve been married.

I look over to see what infraction I’ve been convicted of, and see that she is rinsing out something that I had previously loaded into the dishwasher. This is a source of some comedic friction between us, the competition of who is best at loading the dishwasher and, as a subset of that contest, which techniques of preparation and loading are actually necessary to get a load of dishes clean. I have been grudgingly forced to admit over the years that she has better top shelf technique, but maintain that I am the Shao-Lin master of the bottom rack. In any event, that old roll around dishwasher may seem like a piece of 1950’s technology, but it’s motor sounds like a jet engine that McDonald-Douglas would be proud of, and it can blast the paint off dishes. There is absolutely no need to rinse any dishes, so I don’t. Lindsay doesn’t see it that way, so when I see her rinsing out the glass of orange juice I respond to her subvocal growl with a practiced eye roll and chuckle. It occurs to me that a whole drama has played out in a moment’s time, representing years of discussions and arguments, without a word ever being spoken.

Which gets me to thinking about how anyone else in the world would have perceived these events, had they been a fly on the wall. A low growl from her, and I instantly break up in laughter? We’d look crazy to just about anyone. They say that 90% of communication is nonverbal, but around here that’s a little on the low side. The kind of reductive shorthand that you develop in a marriage is hard to describe, beyond the generic fact of it. A look, a word, a gesture can be emblematic of thousands of words, dozens of hours of bickering or rambling late-night discussions. Some are hilarious, inside jokes and private narratives, while still others are outliers marking the edges of a minefield of unsettled disagreements and lingering emotions, best left untrodden. This emotional slang is the hallmark of a unique culture. A culture of two.

A culture is, essentially, the shared memories of a group. These memories manifest as traditions and
taboos, values and mores, as well as affected behaviors and communication. In the macro, it looks like the emphasis a culture places on different values, like education and work ethic, or different kinds of communal holidays and celebrations, incorporating classes of jargon and slang. The smaller the group, the more specialized their cultural traits; the jargon used on a construction site differs vastly from that used in the halls of an attorney’s office. The same is true in microcosm of a marriage.

We’ve evolved an argot that would be unrecognizable to anyone outside of we two. A series of catcalls, nicknames, tidbits of movie dialogue, gestures and facial expressions that, if recorded, would be as strange as anything Diane Fossey found cohabitating with those gorillas in the mist. For example, we literally never use each other’s names at home. Ever. My wife is the person in the world who uses my given name the least. One memorable exception came about a dozen years ago on a nice spring evening, I was just stepping into the shower and Lindsay called my name from the living room. By her tone, and the fact that she even used my name, I knew it was an emergency, so I tore out of the bathroom and down the hall, naked as the day I was born, half expecting to have to confront an intruder in the buff. Turns out we’d started a fire with an unattended candle, which is only slightly better to a naked person, believe me.

There are some rules in this culture of course, most of which we set down while we were dating, before we were even engaged, refining and adding to the lexicon as we’ve built our lives together. The Golden Rule is this: no making fun of the other. No put-downs, no name calling, no zingers, no sarcastic asides. There are plenty of things to laugh at in the world, and other people to make fun of; neither of us is fair game. Another basic tenet is that we rarely ever have a conversation in anger, preferring silence in a heated moment and rational discussion after the fact. That can be a tough one, but it’s lead to way more harmony over the years.

For as much as we’ve planned in our lives, other things have evolved outside of any intentions. Like the way the walk together, never hand in hand but arm in arm. The second she links her arm to mine, I change my stride and lock step with her, sometimes with a little hop to land on the same foot she’s leading with –left, right, left- quite unconsciously, so that we move together in sync. Or the division of labor, who could have guessed that I would wind up the decorator and she the tree-trimmer?

It’s the little things like that which define your culture. The nicknames and the inside jokes are all a way of taking ownership and personalizing your intertwining lives. And the more we do this and grow together, the more I realize that our life amongst friends, family, and coworkers out in the everyday world casts into specific relief the unique inner life that exists between us, like a secret history.

We took a professionally administered personality test once, with a group from a church we helped to build. The test was designed to assess your personality in both public and private settings, so as to find the best place for a person to work in a group. Both Lindsay and I scored so unusually that they had us take the test again. It turns out that the disparity between our public and private personas is so vast that it threw the whole test parameter out of whack. It was like Clark Kent/Superman different, like we had secret identities. As I’ve thought of that over the years it occurs to me that that is exactly right. When we are in public, Lindsay is demure and reserved while I’m assertive and ebullient. At home, however, the dynamic is completely reversed. I become quiet, pensive, even philosophical, while Lindsay becomes a complete maniac.

No one believes me when I say this, any more than anyone believes that mild mannered Clark Kent is actually Superman. I can talk until I’m blue in the face about the dancing, the ambushes, the karate chops, the catcalls and chases that run from one end of the house to the other, but to no avail. No one knows this version of her but me. The version that is stubborn as a mule, but patient as the day is long. The one who can balance a checkbook to the cent, and in the next moment get jiggy when Uptown Funk or Can’t Fight the Feeling comes on. And she’s got the moves, believe me.

Of course she knows me equally well, in some ways better than I know myself. Over the past several years she’s surprised even me by being able to predict what I’m upset about when I let out a particular “awwww” in relation to something that I’m reading. There is an “awwww” that means an animal has been injured or killed; an “awwww” that means someone I admire has died; an “awwww” that means something truly awful has happened to us on a personal level. Even I can’t say what the difference is, but she can.

Sometimes I wish that other people knew the person I know, instead of just the facet that is shown to the public and our friends and family. There have been those in my life who wondered why I would pick someone so unassuming to marry, and I can never fully explain to them that I didn’t marry the mild mannered alter ego, but the superhero. Most days though, I’m content to just keep that under my hat. It’s alright with me if this world is just us two.

Happy 18th Birthday to our Marriage.