Date: 19 November 2007 20:42:50
Someone (of this here virtual parish actually, though I won't out her here) made a comment on my facebook profile about remembering the stresses and suchlike of planning weddings, changing jobs, and combining lives - and there was something about that phrase "combining lives" which has kept bugging me in a must-remember-to-blog-about-that kind of way. On Saturday night, as we were sitting surrounded by boxes and thinking about ordering pizza (in my defence, I didn't have much in the way of vegetables and, more importantly, there were so many boxes on the kitchen floor it was a bit awkward getting to the cooker) HD's brother-in-law remarked that he couldn't imagine what it must be like having someone move into your living space (he'd always had flatshares and whatnot before he got married, so has never lived on his own, unlike HD and me who have both lived on our own for ages). I thought about this for a bit, and I think that given that our relationship has always been a bit odd in that we've always been living at different ends of the country, or even further away for much of this year while I was away doing my fieldwork, that the thought of him moving in has been something I've been looking forward to much much much more than I've been angsting about sharing my space. The long-distance thing has meant that at times it's really been such an effort, for both of us, that the being-in-an-enclosed-space thing feels like a luxury rather than a source of stress. What has stressed me more (or maybe not stressed so much as been on my mind more) is the fact that, because of my job and my funding I've not been able to be at all flexible about which bit of the country we live in, so it's he who's had to give up home, job, and all the other familiar stuff, in order to move up here and fit round me. So that has made me feel quite responsible (especially with his job here going tits-up), but also aware again how lucky I am to have him - I know not many guys would have been happy about me disappearing for 5 months and may not have waited, but not only that, to give up so much more to come here is something I don't want to take lightly or for granted. Here is someone I'm proud to combine my life with.
The only bit of combination that's really not going to happen (yet anyway) is that of our CD collections. We have completely incompatible systems (mine's the right one, obviously!) and to fit in with his would be more stress than I can be doing with :)