4.

We got married four years ago today. Last year when we celebrated our anniversary and exchanged our annual anniversary letters to each other, I didn't know we wouldn't have a lifetime of anniversaries to share.

I thought we would one day be a little old couple walking down the street holding hands. I never ever imagined the possibility that any of this could ever happen. Ever. Let alone before our fourth wedding anniversary.

Digging in.

This is my second year to choose a verb as a theme for the year, inspired by my blogger friend, Fiona. In January, after thinking about my artistic goals and dreams, I chose "dig in" for 2013. I had been trying to pursue my dreams here in Quebec these past couple of years I've lived here. But on New Year's Day, after another grant rejection letter, I realized that this was the year I needed to really work to try to make my dreams happen. Even harder than the hard work I had already been doing throughout 2012 and before that. I knew that more determination and persistence were called for if I wanted a crack at the life I envisioned. And I knew that if I didn't give it my absolute best effort, I would regret it forever.

Dig in.

So I made choices to do just that. I stopped some part-time work I did on the side (that I was doing in addition to my main day job) so that I could focus my energy and time on the artistic pursuits. And wouldn't you know, somehow I got a few paid artistic gigs that balanced out the financial side of having stopped the other non-artistic work. In June, I looked at the past half-year and felt good about my progress and excited to see where the rest of the year would lead.

Then July happened. Overnight, my life became a landslide.

I have spent the last two months holding on so that I won't be washed away by it all. Or, much more accurately, it's my friends and family that have been firmly holding onto me. Abandonned and stunned, all I had enough sense to do was reach out. And they grabbed me and held me tight as the debris thundered by and the rain beat down.

An update of sorts.

• Earlier this summer I was fired up to write a post about how I was seeing a lot of rudeness in society these days. But....eh. I decided not to.
• This is partially because we escaped away from it all and spent a month in Australia. A month in Australia can do remarkable things, including reducing levels of annoyance.

Photo credit: S

Photo credit: S

• See? It does wonders.
• The jet lag I had after coming back was the worst I've ever had. It took me ten days to get back on our Canadian time zone. But hey, it was fun staying up to dawn again; it had been an unbelievably long time since I'd done that.

Well, I'm still here.

Hello! It's been a while. Nothing dramatic has been going on here; it's just been cold and wintry and I guess I have been hibernating a bit. Or maybe it's that I blog so much for work? Who knows. Or quite possibly, it could be the impending deadline of a big project I'm working on. Which reminds me...I should probably be working on that now.

Anyhow, before I go back to that project, I wanted to share some links of a number of interesting articles I've recently read that address societal changes in regards to marriage, singlehood, and concepts of community. Enjoy!

• The Atlantic's All The Single Ladies
• The New York Times' The M.R.S. And the Ph.D.
• The New York Times' One's A Crowd
• The New York Times' Alone Again, Naturally
• The New York Times' Room for Debate: Being Alone Together
  

Deux.

Photo credit: Martin Dallaire

Today is our second wedding anniversary.

And we are approximately 4589 miles apart (as the crow flies) with an ocean between us. S is scheduled to return tomorrow (unless, you know, transportation strikes in Greece prevent that), so we are going to celebrate after he is back home and after we decide what we want to do exactly. The only thing nailed down so far is the exchange of anniversary letters/notes, which is a tradition we started last year.

It's hard to believe it's been two years already. Sometimes the wedding just doesn't seem very long ago. I mean, we only recently got some wedding photos printed, put in frames, and hung because I finally became convinced that it needed to be done before our second anniversary rolled around. And I must say that I love wandering by and stopping to look at the photos. Unfortunately, the same determination did not carry over to the (still non-existent) wedding album. Maybe I can manage to do that before our third anniversary? Oh, and we still want to take a (belated) honeymoon sometime. (Though I wonder if we can still even call it that, this far into the game?) Now that I can come and go from Canada without the risk of being turned away at the border, we can start thinking towards this more concretely...

Twenty-five-and-a-half months ago, I was in Chicago, on the verge of moving to Québec and marrying S. It was an intense time of change. Since my move, we got engaged, got married, had a 10 month-long back-and-forth-between-two-cities living arrangement, did our first international travel together (Italy), made two more (in-country) moves resulting in us finally living in only one apartment together, established our combined home together, tried to potty-train our cat, prepared and submitted my immigration application, waited through seven months of unknowing which made for a challenging winter, and then received news of my approval for permanent residency while on our second international trip together in Paris this past May. That was monumental in that it removed the undercurrent of fear that I had felt when I would think about the possibility that we could be separated from each other. It also felt like I finally could begin putting down roots here outside of the walls of our apartment, and start integrating more with the community. I looked for work and then got two jobs, which I started this fall. When I think through the last 24-ish months that way, I realize that these first two years of our marriage have been chock full of change.


But despite that, it's felt somehow stable because we did it together. The best thing has been just living and doing normal day-to-day stuff with my love who is also my best friend. Sometimes I still just can't believe how fortunate I am to have found the person I want to share my life with—and we even get to live in the same place! (Maybe this never gets old for people that go through years of long-distance?) There are times when I can't get over how fun it is just to hang out together doing normal things, and it feels like being at summer camp.

Two years feels more substantial somehow. Kinda like being in my thirties feels different than my twenties, in a really good way.

335.

How does one prove love? Or more specifically, how do you prove to a complete stranger that you and your spouse are in love...using only paper documents?

Creating this "evidence" to prove your marriage is real is what bi-national couples like us have to do just to live in the same country. When you start falling in love with someone, you don't realize that you might one day have to backtrack through the exact development of your relationship, looking for facts, specific dates when you met your loved one's friends and family for the first time, and random saved papers and receipts, with the urgent need to prove your love is genuine....because if you don't, you might have to go back to your own country to live, far away from your spouse.

Over a year ago, we excavated the living history of our relationship, arranged it in a way that tells the story of us, checked and re-checked never-ending pages of forms and supplemental information, and mailed it all in a box to immigration. The large stack eventually landed on the desk(s) of the stranger(s) in the immigration office tasked with sifting through all the artifacts to assess our relationship. There are a number of steps in the process of applying for permanent residency in Canada and a 3-page checklist of what specific forms and documents have to be included, but for the sake of brevity, I'll just say there are three major categories of forms and information that make up the application: sponsor information (the Canadian citizen), applicant information (the one who wishes to become a permanent resident, which was me), and then the relationship proof. The sponsor information is detailed, but not too bad. The applicant section is excruciatingly detailed. Just to give you an idea: One of the questions on the application is to list every organization, club, or group you have ever been involved with in your entire life, with your dates of membership (by month and year) and any positions or offices held. Since I started with clubs and activities as a young child, just this one question took weeks of tracking down information and resulted in 3-page spreadsheet.

Then there was the relationship proof. Do mushy statements show love is real? Or are financial statements and joint accounts more convincing? What about copies of receipts to show major shared purchases? Envelopes addressed to both people with a post mark proving the shared address and date? Thankfully, S and I both tend to save a lot of stuff and our cameras put accurate dates on our photos. We dug up all sorts of old cards, emails, and, unbelievably, even the receipt from our very first date. I still can not believe S had that in a pile of old receipts that I culled through after our last move. Bank account statements, cell phone bills, representative emails covering the span of our relationship, hand-written love notes, dating anniversary cards, wedding cards, Valentine cards, Facebook screen shots, airplane tickets to prove travel to see each other, and more. I compiled it and then organized it in a way I felt it would be most straight-forward for someone else to evaluate. Table of contents, numbered pages, printing labels to indicate exactly what each page was and our names, in case the pages got misplaced somehow. I went through a lot of labels, paper, and printer ink.

We opened up our relationship to a complete stranger. It's weird to think a person out there somewhere has read our quirky notes to each other and knows the nicknames we call each other. He or she has flipped through photos of us sightseeing in Italy and with family on Christmas Eve and exhausted after a big move to a new apartment. This person knows the exact story of how we met and the cookie that brought us together; yet, we don't know this person.

The current discourse on marriage fraud here in Canada is fear-fueled. There is a general lack of understanding of the process of spousal immigration (the act of marriage does not make one an automatic permanent resident, and certainly not an automatic citizen!). Those of us that have been through the spousal immigration process understand that it is a challenging, extremely thorough, and long process. We have heard of couples who have been together for 10 years and have kids who have gotten denied, so we knew to take the evaluation process seriously. Even though I am not from a country that has a high frequency of marriage fraud, we took months to prepare our application because we wanted there to be no question of the genuineness of our relationship. It was one of the most challenging applications I have ever done. Turns out, it takes a lot of paper and a lot of work to prove love.

Anniversary photos.

Photo credit: Alain Dignard

For our first anniversary last October, we hired a local photographer friend of ours to do a photo shoot of us. I wanted some outdoor-in-a-field-type photos that we choose not to do on the day of our wedding in October 2009. We just didn't have time then because of the heavy DIY aspect of the wedding, and the weather was rather cold anyways. We had intended to do some in the week or so after the wedding, but then the snow came and stuck around forever, so we decided to just wait until the snow melted. After spring came, we procrastinated and then it got too hot, so we decided to wait until around our anniversary. October came and we finally did it (because, you know, it was getting rather ridiculous.) We did photos in our normal clothes too, since I wanted the photos to reflect our marriage and day-to-day selves, not just some random shots I wanted of us-in-variations-of-our-wedding-clothes-in-a-field.

We surprised ourselves by how much fun we had in front of the camera, and we have discussed taking photos as an anniversary tradition. We will probably DIY it this coming year with a tripod and timer, but maybe get professional ones done every few years?

The Delayed Ring Story

The person who told me in the summer of 2009 that I should not be planning a wedding without a ring was wrong.

After the initial shock of the guy's statement wore off, I think I just politely ended the conversation and mentally dismissed it as a rude comment. But if I could go back now and re-do my reaction, I think that had I possessed the courage and good sense to claim my ring-less engagement experience as equally valid and valuable as his fiancée's ringed experience, I might have gained that needed boost of confidence to approach our non-traditional engagement more boldly. Looking back, I can see how I let that particular comment reinforce the power of the cultural narrative around The Way Engagement Should Be Done. 

In the few weeks before that unhelpful comment, S and I had taken the final steps from seriously-dating-for-a-year-and-a-half to we-both-know-now-that-we-want-to-spend-our-lives-together. Key to that transition was meeting with our fabulous pre-marital counselor for what I called "pre-engagement counseling." I wanted to work out those necessary pre-marital discussions BEFORE we even got engaged and made the commitment to marry. I am a planner like that, and I wanted to try to minimize the unknowns and try to figure out a "game plan" for dealing with our differences in advance. S is not a planner, but he joined me because it was important to me. (He's great like that.) We both ended up really liking our pre-engagement counselor, and this time was essential in me feeling "ready" to go to the next step of marriage. We also learned some things that have proven helpful in dealing with our personality differences and resolving conflict.

Anyhow, before I was reprimanded for planning our wedding, we had already met with our pre-engagement counselor, had decided we were both ready to get married, had begun planning the wedding, and had told our family and close friends. We had my dress, our shoes, the invitation design and all the necessary supplies to make those DIY invites. S told me that he had ordered my ring. We had set our wedding date for three and a half months later. We had not had any sort of official proposal experience, and I was in the process of trying to separate the concepts of "proposal" and "engagement" in my head.
 

So now as I think about it all, well over a year later, I know that I allowed a reprimanding comment and my own high regard of tradition and ritual to have power over my perception of the actuality of our engagement. I allowed myself to believe that our chronologically atypical engagement was somehow less valid than one that begins within the framework of a traditional proposal experience. S was wise enough to know we were engaged without that, while I kept thinking that although, yes, we were actively in the planning process to get married in the near future, we would really be engaged after some sort of official proposal. I was stuck in the traditional narrative of my (American) culture (of a Southern variety) that I had heard over and over since I was a little girl. The schema of The Proposal As The Beginning Of The Engagement, and the lack of an official proposal question threw me off so much I didn't allow myself to feel enough of the giddy enthusiasm of being engaged. By telling myself I was planning-the-wedding but not actually engaged, I cheated myself out of some of this life experience.

Interestingly, S was also operating outside his cultural narrative by even deciding to getting married, since he comes from Québec where marriage in uncommon. Perhaps S's unfamiliarity with proposals, engagement, weddings, and marriage gave him a clearer ability to see the process of engagement for what it is actually about, and to separate the essential from the cultural clutter. About six weeks into our short planning-a-wedding-ment, when I offered my usual faltering explanation to someone of how-we-were-getting-married-soon-and-he-had-bought-the-ring-but-he-was-in-Canada-at-the-moment-and-so-we-weren't-really-officially-engaged-yet, this wise person in my community said, "Marriage is not a commitment held together by a physical ring, so why should a ring be necessary for engagement?" 

These empowering words replaced the previous negative statement and something "clicked" in my head. During those last two months before the wedding, I finally began to let go of my traditional ideas of engagement and accept our process, different though it was. I wish I had been confident enough to boldly embrace our engagement from its gradual beginning instead of letting the blurred line between "pre-engagement" and "engagement" prevent me from changing my Facebook status to "engaged", or using the word "fiancé" more than a few times. At the time when we were planning the wedding, I had not yet heard any unconventional engagement stories, so I had a hard time processing our own. Thankfully, over the last year, I have noticed some smart women speaking up about their atypical experiences of engagement, and lots of smart women sharing stories of how they choose to carve out their own non-traditional paths through life in various ways.*

And shortly before the wedding I realized that I might, in fact, not see my engagement ring until sometime after we were married. And it was mostly okay because I was just ready to be married and move on to the next stage of our life together. But S surprised me. During the week of our wedding, S took me to a nearby waterfall for a short time of quiet and hot cocoa before all the out of town people began arriving later that day. As we were stopped on the suspended bridge overlooking the powerful rush of water speeding to the edge of the cliff to meet its free-fall fate, I suddenly felt the bridge bouncing. Gripping the rail much more tightly, I began to look around and saw people running on the bridge with balloons and flowers. Only when they stopped right by us did I realize that those people were running towards us and that those people were six of our friends. Each one had red and white balloons and a bouquet of daisies. In complete shock, I turned back to S only to see that he was down on one knee and holding a ring. He said, "Will you marry me on Saturday?" It was funny, sweet, and perfectly us. And then we went to eat poutines.

Because our proposal experience was three days before our wedding, it is linked together with my memories of our wedding. Instead of being the beginning of our engagement process, it felt more like the end of the difficult and exhausting planning-a-wedding stage and the beginning of the infinitely-more-fun state of being married. I'm a person who loves tradition, so I am completely thankful to have had the proposal experience, while the unconventional aspects of our entire process taught me some valuable lessons about commitment, and learning to be more confident even when I find myself on a road that diverges from The Way People Tell You Things Should Be Done.

*Meg and commenters over at A Practical Wedding have since talked about some atypical engagement experiences, and it's exciting and liberating to see how many different approaches there are to the decision to get married....and to other choices we make in life.

Science, marriage, and "self-expansion."

Tara Parker-Pope's interesting article, "The Science of a Happy Marriage," on the New York Times blog has made me ponder how the feeling of "self-expansion" influences the commitment and happiness of a relationship. The article says the scientists "theorize that couples who explore new places and try new things will tap into feelings of self-expansion, lifting their level of commitment." They talk about the need to do "challenging and exciting things together" and cite experiments conducted regarding fidelity and happiness in marriage.

I know that most of us would probably agree that trying new things together is good advice, but I also suspect that it is easy for couples to fall into typical routines as the relationship gets more comfortable. Like having a pattern of getting the usual Thai* take-out and watching the same TV series (currently we are enjoying Glee, like tons of other people seem to be), or whatever. And yes, comfortable and reliable can be fun (nothing against Glee!!!) and well....comfortable like a good pair of yoga pants and hot cocoa**, but sometimes you need something completely out of the ordinary to feel, you know...alive and awake. So this article is a good reminder to intentionally mix things up and try new adventures as a couple.

*I still miss our favorite Chicago Thai take-out place like crazy. Snow Spice makes the best crab rangoon I have ever had in my life.
**By the way, anyone tried cayenne pepper in your hot cocoa? Yum!

Rushing pumpkin pie to decorate the tree.

"First comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes baby in a baby carriage."

Saturday was our six month-versary, and on that very day I got not one, but two emails that suggested the idea of the impending "baby carriage." The first one I noticed was an email from The Knot entitled, "Pregnant? New Parent? Trying to Conceive?" I opened it and it told me: "Believe it or not, it's already been six months since we helped you plan your dream wedding!" Then it went on to tell me about their other baby and family websites. Now, I don't mind them letting me know about their other sites, but as they reminded me: We have only been married SIX months! Isn't it a little early for baby hints from anyone besides one's own mother?* Then I realized that I had also received a baby-centric email from Crate and Barrel advertising their child-focused company.

Exactly six months into a marriage seems a little quick to begin the bombardment of newlyweds with pressure to start a family. After all the excitement of the major mile marker of a wedding and the beginning of a marriage, does normal life just seem so boring that people decide to jump ahead to the talk of babies? Is it about needing something concrete to look forward to? Or maybe it's about wanting to celebrate something?

To me, it seems a bit like putting up Christmas decorations right after Halloween, and losing Thanksgiving  in the shuffle. Personally, I prefer to enjoy Thanksgiving for what it is before putting up Christmas decorations. I wait to put up our Christmas tree until after Thanksgiving, usually in early December. I love Advent, which is a whole liturgical season emphasizing the idea of preparing for (and waiting for) the celebration of the birth of Jesus at Christmas. In the liturgical calendar, Christmas Eve marks the beginning of the season of Christmas (Christmastide) which then lasts to January 5th. (You know, the idea behind "The Twelve Days of Christmas.") But, of course, by January, the stores have been flooded by a sea of hearts and chocolate.

I guess that's just how it is because our society, as a whole, seems to like to rush things. To speed through the present moment in favor of embracing the excitement of The Next Event.** And I admit I often find myself thinking to the future and missing some of the joy to be found in the present, but I am working to change that and be more intentionally awake in the Now. And for me, Now is being a newlywed. It's about learning more about each other and dreaming and thinking about how we want to live life together. A current (very recent) exploration we are having is related to the idea of buying a house. Or maybe not. Or maybe in a few years. But babies...? I think we are still enjoying the pumpkin pie for now. Though we do talk about potential future Christmas decorations.*** We are just not ready to buy the gingerbread house making kit yet. And I think businesses should not try to rush to sell them to us on our six-month-versaries.

*I don't mind the occasional hint from my mom. And I don't mind talking about this subject with friends of family. I do mind businesses trying to put their timing on me. 

**I do think that people are starting to make choices to live differently and not buy into the rush-rush model of how to live. Like the Slow Movement and the Slow Food movement.

***And I have also been thinking about the Slow Parenting idea and potential implications on our hypothetical future child's childhood and high school years, and the ramifications in the college admissions process and beyond.

La Chasse-Galerie

Home. The word is deceptively simple. It brings to mind the most essential people and things in life, or perhaps early associations of home and family. Or maybe the various places one has lived. But the more I think about it, I realize the complicated emotions, longings, and dreams that are all bundled up in that little word. 

There is a Québécois legend called La Chasse-Galerie that is probably the most famous of all Québécois legends. In the story, a group of men who work out in a timber camp in a remote area of Québec make a pact with the devil to fly in a canoe to go home and see their girlfriends on New Year's Eve. They encounter near-breaches of their contract and risk their souls in the process. The endings vary, depending on the version of the story, and in the Honoré Beaugrand version, the teller declares that it wasn't worth the risk to go home.

In the story, "home" was somewhere outside, somewhere other. In a world where people move frequently from one city, state, or country, to another, how do we define "home?" Is it a location? Is it an attitude or approach to life? What is it that is most essential? Some might say an internet connection, and I can understand that since technology today allows our community to transcend geography. Yet for me, there is still this feeling of home being somehow connected to location, to the land. And why is it that I still have deep feelings of "home" about Norway, where I lived for three years a decade ago? What about when you are only in a location (apartment, city, whatever) for a short time? That space between wanting to put down roots yet feeling like one is temporarily camping like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for forty years is a frustrating state. And when you perpetually rent, the things you dream of doing have to be balanced by the reality that This Apartment Is Not Yours. Then you think of purchasing a house. Excitement begins to bubble to the surface, and dreams grow of a place where you can fully unpack every box, and get rid of all the collapsed boxes that are now waiting in a closet for the next move. Living in a home you own seems to be a state where the air is fresh and you can breathe deeply and slowly. And know that your investment in making that place a home matters, and that you will be able to enjoy it for a long time.

So we are thinking. And dreaming. And browsing on the internet. Maybe unlike Beaugrand's character, we will decide it is worth the risk?


PS. The photo is a mural of the Chasse Galerie that we stumbled upon shortly after I moved to Montréal. We haven't seen it since then and have no idea where it actually is downtown.

Marathon Theatre and the ability to live in the moment.

Just the mention of the almost nine hour length of Lipsynch is guaranteed to elicit a response of disbelief. Yet the experience of watching the show does not feel like A Nine Hour Show. (Thankfully.) Good stories and regular breaks keep it engaging and enjoyable. And it must be said that seeing it in its nine hour version is a completely different experience than the version where it is split up into three sequential nights. There is just something unique about showing up to the theatre prepared and ready to go through the experience of watching a nine hour play. The audience actually enters the theatre in a different way, more like the feeling of when you start out on a long hike knowing that you have your water bottle, chocolate bar (thank you, Norway, for teaching me this hiking necessity!), packed lunch, and the conviction that you will make it to the top, picnic there, and then come home with that tired-in-a-nice-way feeling. Obviously, a nine hour play requires a desire to be there and the effort to set aside other activities to commit to focusing on the play for an extended amount of time. There is a type of discipline involved, though not an unpleasant one, and this attentiveness and investment pays off with a communal sense of having accomplished a long journey where the boundaries of your experience in the world have been expanded in some way.

Which makes me wonder about how much our anticipation of an event affects how we actually experience an event? Often I find myself rushing to events or meetings and slipping in without much personal preparation. And even when I plan for events I am hosting, I often end up doing things at the last minute anyways. Clearly, planning is a part of hosting an event, especially for Myers-Brigg J's, but perhaps it should be as much about being actively present and investing in the actual lived moment. That is sometimes difficult for me because I am always thinking ahead to plan for what might happen, and then coming up with an additional back-up plan in case the first plan doesn't work. As a wanna-be ENFP (who is actually a J, much to my own disappointment and despite my former delusion of being a "carpe diem" kind of girl), I guess it is about finding the right balance of planning and being well-prepared enough so that when the moment comes, I can relax about the details and know that now is the time to just BE. Sometimes I am better at this than other times, but I guess this needs to stay on my list of life qualities to strive to cultivate. (Is that allowed? Can I actively plan to try to be more disciplined about living in the moment?)

PS. This show demands a ton of investment...12 hours, a ferry ride, and a 20 minute walk.

PPS. S pointed out to me that I am not a carpe-diem girl in any sense of reality. It is amazing how much you can learn about yourself from someone else. Another surprising thing marriage has taught me is that I am much more klutzy than I thought I was and I drop things more frequently than the average person. Which caused me to wonder...have I always dropped things and never noticed, or is this something new that should be a concern?

Don't you know, half of all marriages...

I just ran across a few articles in the New York Times on marriage that I think point to a larger ongoing cultural conversation that I wanted to bring up here. Two of the articles address the rate of divorce in the United States, another looks at the impact of higher education levels among women on marriage, and one looks at a shifting marriage model. Each article is thought-provoking and worth reading.

The article on divorce ("Divorced from Reality") states that research shows that the rate of divorce is at the lowest level since 1970. Wait, let's say that again. Research shows that the rate of divorce is at the lowest level since 1970. And that rate is not 50%. So why, may I ask, are we incessantly (and evidently, inaccurately) reminded that "half of all marriages end in divorce?" This article points out some errors with the census measurements that seem to have led to the perpetuation of this 50% divorce myth. Another interesting New York Times article addresses the same issue, but breaks down the statistics into year ranges since the divorce rate differs based on when one got married and the education level of the wife.

Then there's this opinion article about how women are redefining "marriage material," in part due to changes in the education level of women over the years. One of the contributing writers, Betsey Stevenson, references this other article that she wrote with Justin Wolfers on the influence of economics on marriage. The writers point out the shift of marriages from basically being a way to conquer the feat of running a household (with specialization of one person working at home and one person working in the market place) to today's model which is based on love and companionship in shared pleasures. They talk about the shift from "shared production" to "shared consumption," pointing out the logic of opposites attracting being a benefit in the specialization marriage model, but in today's model, similarities are more of a strength. The writers propose the high divorce rates of the 70s reflect the transition period from the specialization marriage model to the "modern hedonistic marriage" model.

The articles offer interesting analysis and reflection-- and it's fantastically encouraging too, as a newlywed who wants a strong, happy, life-long marriage. And this last article even makes sense of the reason for the two different relationship compatibility philosophies of "opposites attract" and "birds of a feather." And yet, I can't get away from the fact that I was unaware that the oft-quoted divorce statistic was inaccurate. This article was from 2008, so it is not even a brand-new revelation. Why are these numbers not getting out? Is failure more interesting than success? Do people prefer to set the bar low? Why are more people not talking about happy, healthy marriages?

Well, some people are, and for that, I am thankful. There is an on-going conversation that began a few months back over with Meg at A Practical Wedding and other blogs about the way people talk about marriage within our culture, the institution of marriage, and about the terms of "husband" and "wife." * And I guess the U.S. is at a point where marriage will either become more and more uncommon (as in Québec) or young adults will increasingly re-think marriage and this new model (or multiple models) will continue to evolve in society.

As a newlywed originally from the south of the U.S. (where people marry young) now married to someone who is from Québec (where marriage is uncommon), we are already at a starting point that is unconventional. In a way, that offers an unexpected freedom in how we build our marriage and life together. Clearly, we will not perfectly reflect either model from our culture of origin, so we have the task of creating a shared life that is right for us. And it is fun to explore the possibilities as we dream together about normal, daily life in the months and years ahead. We talk about things like this summer's upcoming move and our potential future rented apartment in Québec City, or alternatively maybe looking at homes outside of town. Or the potential future little kiddos we might have one day, running around in little snow pants and speaking adorable little-kid-French. And then, we can also lazily reflect on the fact that a couple of cats would wake us up less at night. But this...this is the space we inhabit these days: an extremely creative place full of potential and unexplored possibilities.

*Which is even more of a linguistic issue in Québec, where no one in our generation seems to use those terms of "mari" (husband) and "femme" (wife, literally "woman"). We are often referred to as "blonde" (girlfriend) and "chum" (boyfriend) among Québécois friends. There is also another term that is used, conjoint(e), which means life partner, and can be used for married and unmarried couples.