Rebooting a marriage...
The Year 20 Reboot is a blog about a year-long conflict resolution experiment in a 20-year marriage between a professional mediator and a college professor. Here are the latest posts:
4 things I’ve learned from my relationship reboot
Over coffee a friend recently asked me what I’d learned so far from this marriage reboot experiment. This is what I told him: I’ve been reminded that bridging the gap between an idea and an action is tricky. When I proposed the Year 20 Reboot to R, he agreed fully. But it took us several months of one or the other crying out, reboot! during disagreements before we began to get into the... [Read more]
The case of the reactive dog
Missy Moo came into our lives three weeks ago. She’s a charming, happy little mutt from a kill shelter in West Virginia, brought to NH by a rescue group. We think she’s probably shih tzu and poodle, though she’s got a scruffy terrier look and attitude that completely abolishes any idea that she’s a prissy dog. Smudge, our scrappy little Puerto Rican street dog, who’s been... [Read more]
The most romantic idea my guy has ever had
What we see depends mainly on what we look for. – Sir John Lubbock. It’s easy, in a blog about rebooting a marriage after 20 years, to focus on the not-so-hot to the detriment of all the good. When I first told R about my desire to blog the Reboot, that’s the very concern he aired. It’s too easy to discount the good stuff, as though it’s expected and therefore of less... [Read more]
The great breadcrumb battle finally brought to its knees
“When you scatter crumbs all over a floor I finished vacuuming not five minutes ago, it conveys you’re disregarding or devaluing the work I’ve done.” A version of that sentence has come out of my mouth for 20 years. I call it the Breadcrumb Battle. Somehow, R butters his toast in such a way that breadcrumbs scatter in a delicate pattern around his feet. I’ve watched him... [Read more]
My job as wife: to make him happy
I’ve had a heretical thought in my head for two weeks. I have to get it out so I can walk around it and stare at it and decide what to do with it. So here we are. Before you go all righteous on me because of that headline, read on. One night, sitting in the living room, I watched R while he read the newspaper. I watch him sometimes. Out of the blue, a little voice in my head asked, in a tiny... [Read more]
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