Marriage

02. January 2011 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Mr. Geeky and I have been married for almost 17 years.  We’ve been together as a couple for over 20 years.  When we hit the 2 year mark, I marveled.  It was the longest relationship I’d ever been in.  Every other relationship lasted around 1.5 years, and in many cases much less.  Our relationship certainly hasn’t been perfect over those 20 years.  We’ve had fights.  We’ve had doubts.  We’ve had boredom.  We haven’t always had enough romance or time. But it’s lasted anyway.  Even in our relationship’s darkest moments, I’ve always assumed we’d stick it out.  I really have imagined splitting–one of us leaves–and I can never imagine it to its conclusion because it seems so unlikely.  We’re in this for the long haul.  That whole “for better or worse” thing really has applied.

The NY Times had an article Friday about The Sustainable Marriage.  There was no talk about “date nights” or daily rituals designed to keep a marriage alive.  Instead, the key ingredient involved personal growth, the ability of each partner to contribute to each other’s continued development as a person.  When I read that, I knew that’s what our key ingredient was.  I’m probably more of a benefactor than Mr. Geeky, or at least I can name several specific ways that he’s contributed to my growth and I’m not sure I can think of ways I’ve done the same for him.  The whole two-body problem is not just an issue for academics, but I’m convinced that achieving two fulfilling careers is one of the most difficult challenges modern couples face, especially those with children.  Mr. Geeky has not just been supportive of my having a fulfilling career but has also directly helped my career many times.

The first was just by convincing me to make a phone call that ultimately led to my completing my Ph.D.  And he did a lot of practical things, from taking care of kids to doing laundry, to make sure I had the time and space to do what I needed to do.  And then he supported my leaving a job that was making me (and him, really) miserable.  And he helped me get my current job, both because he knew about the opening and by helping me learn the skills I needed to feel comfortable doing my job.

And those are just the big things.  On a daily basis, we have conversations about our now nearly identical fields.  We’re never without something to talk about.  We may not always like the same movies or music, but we talk about it anyway and continue to learn from each other.   While we certainly have our routines, I’ve always felt a sense of us never really sitting still.  There’s always going to be something new around the corner.   I never feel like I’m quite done becoming something and I know Mr. Geeky is always trying new things.  That sense of potential keeps us both around.

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On being a bad feminist

17. May 2010 · 12 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Bitch, Ph.D. wrote on Friday about feeling like a bad feminist because she’s doing the stay at home parent thing.  Here she has a Ph.D., is perfectly intelligent and capable, but is choosing to do volunteer work, etc. instead.  And that makes her feel like a bad feminist.  A “good” feminist shouldn’t take on that role.  Been there, done that.  Feel the same guilt.

What she suggests is that sometimes fighting the system requires us to go against our personal connections, some of which might actually support the system, like marriage, like parenting.  What would a good feminist do?  Would she go find work in her field even if it might take her away from her family?  Would she insist that said family come with her to wherever she goes for work, even if it might mean her partner would have to take a lesser job or have no job at all?  Practicalities get in the way sometimes of doing the “right” thing.  Some women ten years my junior have talked about seeking out partners that would go into the career thing with them equally.  Many of those women are still single or living halfway across the country from their spouses.  And that’s all fine if that’s okay with them, but I know some of them aren’t particularly happy with their arrangements.

While I look back on some of the choices I made and wonder, well, if I’d done x or y, might I have been in a better place career wise.  And sure, if I’d insisted that Mr. Geeky wait until I was at a point where I could go on the market with him, I might have tenure by now.  But, Mr. Geeky might not be at a place that he likes.  In fact, his career might have just defaulted.  And that wouldn’t have been good for either of us.  And maybe my choices, mostly making the best of wherever Mr. Geeky ended up, looks like I was being a bad feminist.  At the time, however, I was doing the best with what I was faced with, as was Mr. Geeky.  A lot of my decisions and his decisions were actually our decisions.  And that’s what you do when you hitch your life to someone else’s.  Our mutual needs and desires have always led us to make decisions, some of which we’re very aware go against a particular political stance.  It’s always a matter of compromising.  We know what we wouldn’t compromise and unfortunately, an ideal feminist relationship isn’t something that we can always maintain.  It’s good enough for us.  It works for us.  And both of us do work that directly challenges the system that keeps women down.  Nothing is perfect.

Focusing on what’s important

25. February 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

Sometimes what tragic events do is force you to focus on what’s really important.  When my sister died, I focused on school and friends.  It’s hard to explain, but it almost felt like everything was new again, like I was starting over.  Some of that feeling is with me now, though I think I’ve been on this trajectory since I quit my job 18 months ago.  What’s become most important to me are personal connections: family first and friends.   I’ve known for a long time that keeping those connections is hard work, and hard work is easy to push off to another day, especially when there are no direct consequences.  Back at home, I became aware that my dad had plenty of close friends from years of living and working in a fairly tight-knit community.  I had escaped my hometown as fast as I could and let my old high school friendships fade.  Not all of that is bad.  Certainly it’s good to make new friends and life’s circumstances often dictate who one becomes friends with, but it’s a shame I let so many go.  I did the same with college.  College, however, was different in that I think I didn’t always pick the best of friends and there are only one or two people I can say that I felt close to at the time.  In high school, there were plenty of people I felt close to.  Many of my college friendships were superficial while I feel that most of my high school friendships weren’t.  But like high school, I pretty much left town and didn’t look back.

Perhaps some of my best friendships were formed in graduate school.  Some in my first grad school, and many more (for me, at least) my second time through.  Again, though, I haven’t been as good at maintaining those relationships as I should.  As I said above, it’s easy to put off making the phone call or sending the email for another day, and before you know it, months (or years) have gone by.  And I haven’t been terribly successful at establishing new friendships locally.  Some of my best friends are scattered around the country.  They are mostly people I’ve met online initially, but whom I’ve spent time with face-to-face and to whom I now feel a close connection.

The last few days have made me want to give more attention to building and maintaining connections to people.  So that’s the first important thing.

On Jon and Kate or Jon and not Kate

27. May 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Lisa Belkin reminded me that I, too, got sucked into the Memorial Day Jon and Kate plus 8 special. I must admit that Kate has always annoyed me. I understand that organization is key when you have 8 kids to manage, but she is a serious control freak. I think she’d be that way with one kid too. Despite my dislike of her, watching the show was pretty painful. It’s not pleasant to watch a relationship seemingly fall apart right in front of your eyes. Jon seemed quite bitter about the path he and his family had ended up on while Kate seemed to be generally happy with where things went (aside from potentially losing her husband). Belkin suggests that the success of the show itself is partly to blame for their downfall. I certainly think it’s true that they didn’t seem to have a conversation about how to manage their success as a family. They moved into a huge home, and it’s likely that they need the revenue for the show more than ever. I wonder, if they stayed in their smaller home, could they have let the show peter out and return to normal lives?

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Online vs. "real" life

16. January 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

I’ve been thinking about this in a number of contexts over the last week. As I’ve moved away from an institutional job, my online life increasingly *is* my life. I work with people all over the country and meet with them via skype, in second life, or just back and forth via a Google doc. The people I interact with online are mostly people I’ve met in real life at conferences or other events. They are people I turn to for ideas, advice, and support. In my physical space, I haven’t yet found the rich support network I have online. I do have friends and former colleagues that I meet up with periodically (some of whom are also part of my online network), but it’s harder to find these people; there are fewer opportunities to “meet” in physical space. I’m working on finding and/or creating these opportunities, but it’s a slow process.

The reality and to some extent, the physicality, of online life hit home for us this week. Geeky Boy suspected that one of his online friends, someone he’d been gaming with for over 4 years, was about to commit suicide. He reported this to Mr. Geeky, who began trying to track down the kid. All we had to go on was a name and a state. Ideally, he might have contacted the parents, but he couldn’t, so he ended up calling the police. Meanwhile, GB was texting his friend and getting no response, which naturally had him worried. The police took the whole thing seriously and did indeed track down GB’s friend, almost simultaneously with the friend finally contacting GB. We’re glad that GB didn’t brush off the incident as some random kid he knew online and took the situation as seriously as he would for a friend he knew in person. The whole situation is an indication, perhaps, that many kids will form lasting and real friendships online. I have hope that the building of these relationships will make the online world more hospitable as people eliminate the distinction between relationships that are “real” and those that are online.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure