Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Marriage is never boring

While prattling on about how I'd like to get a few chickens and get some heirloom varieties of vegetables to start our garden in the back, I noticed Jon raising his eyebrows at me as he smiled that exasperating hidden smile of his.

"What?" I demanded.

He started off with a story from this morning, in which he overheard two female teachers in the copier room talking. One of them messed something up in the copier, and the other one, rather than saying, "I can fix it," instead said something soothing, "Yeah, that's happened to me, too. How frustrating." Whereas, Jon would have immediately zeroed in on how he could fix the problem, not wasting time on empathizing or affirming the other lady's feelings.

Jon continued, "So, I understand that you're just talking about chickens and veggies for the future, that you're not expecting to do it right away, but my brain is hardwired to immediately start thinking of what needs to be done in order to accomplish these things. And I can't do that. I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance."

Does anyone else have a spouse that says things like this?

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