Alexis Senge JohnsonHe starts as the guy you spot across the room that makes you immediately smile or maybe he even approached you with a witty greeting that left you unable to form a sentence. His smile, charm and date suggestions all seem like something out of a storybook. Everything is all sunshine, rainbows and unicorns while you’ve been dating, right? A trip away will certainly tell you all you need to know about whether he’s your perfect match in life. On vacation it’s all such a dream that you know without a shadow of a doubt you know everything about him by this point. You know exactly how every turn on your journey of life together will go in the future. Case closed.
Okay, let me just interrupt this moment of insanity with a reality check for a hot second. Want to know how you really learn the most about your significant other? I mean actually learn, not just predict in some fluffy technicolor dream, the stuff you never thought you’d witness or hear? Here are the five times in your life you will undoubtedly learn more about your life partner and their habits than you ever imagined not already knowing.
1. Move in together and you’ll suddenly learn all the little things you never in a million years would have expected. For instance, my husband learned I have an inability to squash bugs that crunch. I work on a catch and release type agreement with crunchy bugs until there are so many that I run out of the energy for the release portion of the deal. Sounds harmless enough until you wake up to find glass cups all over the downstairs floor capturing crickets that decided our home was more forgiving than outdoors during hurricane season one year. It becomes an obstacle course of insanity. My husband has some of the funniest habits that I never in a million years would have guessed if my life depended on it. Have you ever seen someone step out of their clothes in a way that makes it look as if they staged an alien abduction or spontaneous combustion crime scene? Come visit our house sometime for an example and a good laugh.
2. You’ve lived together so clearly you know everything about each other now. Yeah, no. Homeownership, also known as one massive DIY project, is where you learn how responsible or irresponsible your partner is with power tools. I’ve always thought my husband was very levelheaded and then I once watched him scale a tree, barefoot, with a running chain saw in his hand. I’ll admit he completed the project on time and unscathed, but I’m not going to say that I looked at his ability to make sound judgements the same ever again. I have learned that we have saved a lot of money over the years doing repairs or improvements on our own, but I’ll also admit that the flap on the door of our ice machine stopped working about seven years ago and for all seven years we have kept it sealed with the help of a hand towel and a Ziplock bag.
3. The joint bank account. That’s enough right there to make my head spin just typing it out. I don’t know how all those fancy apps and dating sites decide to match people together, but I sure as heck hope there’s at least one question about financial literacy or credit scores because shame on me for living in a fantasy land where financial responsibility didn’t come to mind while dating over the years. I’m fiscally responsible and always assumed that others had working knowledge about how finances and credit scores work. I’ll save you the examples here, as I’ve dated more than a few people that didn’t have any financial awareness, but I will say that sharing a bank account with someone gives you a whole new level of insight into habits you may or may not have even known about.
4. Have you ever stayed with your in-laws and significant other for a vacation? You know, the visit their hometown kind of an experience. I’ll tell you right now, while those are fun trips that allow you a chance to see all kinds of embarrassing pictures and hear the wild stories of your partner’s youth they don’t give you the real story. Those of us in Florida have probably experienced living with their spouse and in-laws for at least a few days while riding out a storm. That’s when you get the real picture. That’s when the opportunity for high stress situations, small living quarters and the threat of danger all collide to show you how your partner will handle things when the going gets rough.
5. Moved in together, own a house, share a bank account and you’ve even stayed with your spouse and in-laws through a hurricane so you must know everything possible about that amazing man by now, right? WRONG! I thought there was simply nothing left that my husband could surprise me with until the day I called my husband at work and told him my water broke. Everything changed the day our first was born and I started to learn all kinds of things that somehow after seven years together I had managed to not uncover. I learned that the totally well thought out man that was able to get me safely to the hospital on multiple occasions would always wait until the night after he used the last overnight diaper to let me know there were no more just at the exact moment we were in need of one. He’s learned that, despite my methodical ways and OCD, I’m oddly enough the parent with less rules and instead just a few that I find to be unnegotiable.
Some of you are sitting there laughing because you think I’m nuts and others of you are reading this and laughing because you know how right I am. Either way, we all live and learn. Now, feel free to return to your regularly scheduled daydream about your partner’s perfection. I’ve got to make an emergency trip to the store for yet another pack of overnight diapers STAT.
