marriage

White Lotus Avoidance Day

~ MaryG ~ 1 Comment

My husband and I are major consumers of “prestige TV.” We get all the channels and watch all the shows. (Severance, Succession, Hacks, The Last of Us, The Bear, Handmaids Tale, etc.) We watch together and we talk about the shows. TV is our thing.

Sometimes a show is too violent for me, so I relinquish it to my husband to watch while I’m at choir or doing something else. (For example, I bailed on The Sopranos fairly early on and I never watched Breaking Bad.) I always have a few shows I’m watching on my own, because I stay up later than him. Currently, I’m watching Marie Antoinette on PBS Passport on my own. Downton Abbey is another example of a show that my husband didn’t watch with me, though he fully embraced The Gilded Age, so it’s not that he won’t watch period pieces. (We’re big fans of Wolf Hall.)

We plan our TV watching out in advance. Sometimes, a very important show—like last night’s White Lotus season 3 finale—needs to be watched live (rather than on demand) in order to avoid spoilers, which will undoubtedly be everywhere today!

We fully intended to watch the White Lotus season finale live last night, but then my husband got tired and wanted to save it. Obviously I wouldn’t watch it without him, so now I will spend the entire day trying not to read anything about it, which basically will require staying offline altogether.

So, as the stock market crashes (I’m assuming another Black Monday is underway) and people are distracting themselves by discussing whatever happened on White Lotus last night, I will try to finish reading my library book today.

Ironically, the book is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (author of Normal People) and I could totally see it getting made into a Hulu series (like Normal People did) that I would end up watching on my own because my husband doesn’t like shows that are too “relationshipy.”

Comments closed due to abject fear of White Lotus spoilers.

Related: Consider the Source

Image from Pexels

Duh!

~ MaryG ~ 10 Comments
Posted on Facebook by “Feminist News”

My first thought when I saw this post was “no shit.” Do some women actually think they have to vote how their husbands do? (And don’t even get me started on churches. Pastors should not be telling their flocks how to vote. And if they do, they should get their nonprofit tax-exempt status revoked.)

My second thought was “how sad.” So many women are stuck in power-imbalanced marriages and feel they can’t get out.

I’ve been married 31 years and my husband (thankfully) never even entertained the idea of voting for Trump, but we’ve had plenty of other fights. Two things he’s never done is physically threaten me (even though he’s much bigger and stronger than me) or try to control what I do (even though he earned much more money than I did when we were both working).

If you’re being controlled by your husband or boyfriend—either physically or mentally—you should be making your escape plan. I firmly believe that.

And did you see that interview that Kamala did with Fox News? Infuriating! Fuck Bret Baier. Fuck him right in the ass.

18 more days.

Art museums

~ MaryG ~ 22 Comments

My husband and I are very different. In fact, we’re almost complete opposites. He likes a lot of things that I will never ever be into like weightlifting in gyms, football and other contact sports like rugby, and hardcore (punk) music. I like a lot of things that he will never ever be into like singing in choirs, going to musicals, and swimming.

For many years, we just kind of did our own thing. I went to the beach with friends, while he stayed home and went to the gym…

But if you’re going to stay married to one person for your entire adult life, you must come up with at least a few shared activities, especially after your kids fly the coop, or you will have absolutely nothing interesting to talk about!

One of the things we both like to do is go to art museums. We have memberships at a few local museums and we go to their major exhibitions. Yesterday was the Georgia O’Keefe and Henry Moore exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

It was an interesting idea. They took two artists who worked in different mediums (a painter and a sculptor) in the same time period (early 20th century) and put them side by side. The idea was to see how they were grappling with similar themes in their work, especially nature and tension/balance between shapes, and appreciate how they influenced each other.

The galleries were quite crowded (a great sign for art museums!), but that made it a bit difficult to fully consider the interplay between the two artists. Still, I think I got the idea.

This gallery, with a large Moore sculpture in the foreground and O’Keefe paintings on the walls, shows what the curators were going for with this exhibit.

My husband liked the Moore sculptures best. Me? I just love those famous Georgia O’Keefe flower paintings. As many times as I’ve seen them reproduced as prints and posters, the originals are so nuanced and gorgeous. What can I say? I like flowers and pretty colors. (They sort of reminded me of the Northern Lights.)

And then, for something completely different, we took a stroll through a Salvador Dalí exhibit. The famous Spanish surrealist was truly an extraordinary painter. Interestingly, he was a contemporary of Moore and O’Keefe. All three lived through World War II—an event so monumental no artist was unaffected by it.

The Three Ages (Old Age, Adolescence and Infancy) by Dalí, 1940. If you look closely, each section of the painting is a double image (i.e. the left side is a standing, stooped figure and also an old man’s face).
“This painting revisits Dalí’s most famous composition, The Persistence of Memory, which by the early 1950s had become emblematic not only of Dalí, but also of the Surrealism movement.
Here Dali once again places melting watches in a barren landscape, but now the context is the post-war atomic age. An elaborate grid of bricks recedes toward the distant horizon, the boxy shapes becoming missile-like forms. Typical of the artist, the picture’s meaning is ambiguous, though very much of the nuclear era.”

Bucket List trip: Grand Canyon

~ MaryG ~ 15 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Who do you spend the most time with?
View all responses

A year ago this week, we were in Grand Canyon National Park.

Selfies are hard. This is one of our better ones.
We stayed right in Grand Canyon Village. This was taken just outside our hotel—Thunderbird Lodge.
Shoshone Point—a wild and gorgeous spot in Grand Canyon National Park
Shoshone Point
We even took a helicopter tour—scary at first, but spectacular and worth the price.

This trip was motivated by the death of my close friend Carla who loved the Grand Canyon and whose ashes are spread there. (Carla is the person who set me up with my husband more than 33 years ago.) I would consider it my first “bucket list” trip of retirement, even though I didn’t retire until six months later.

I’m lucky to have a kind and hardworking husband who is willing to travel with me (within reason). He doesn’t love it like I do, but he usually ends up liking the trip a lot more than he thought he would.

Thirty-one years of marriage—that’s a whole lot of time together!

The Grand Canyon lives up to the hype. Go, if you can.

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Hot air balloon flight

Risky business

~ MaryG ~ 12 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.
View all responses

I’ve had my moments, but as of today, I do not regret getting married nearly 31 years ago.

We’ve all heard the statistics that almost half of marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation. It’s a big risk to walk down the aisle and pledge your unending love and support to another person. Given that divorce is so expensive and emotionally taxing, it’s kind of amazing that so many people still give marriage a shot.

At my age, I know happy single people, happy married people, and one or two unhappy single people (they wish they were not alone and are still looking). I no longer know many unhappy married people, because they mostly already got their divorces and are happy again.

At this point, the widows and widowers seem to have it the hardest. When you’ve been with another person for decades and you lose them, the grief and loneliness is profound. It’s the other big risk of marriage—the one you don’t really worry about at the start.

Image from Pexels

Grandparents

~ MaryG ~ 3 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What were your parents doing at your age?
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When my parents were my age, they were new grandparents to my daughter. They only have two grandchildren and she was their first. They were thrilled to have a granddaughter and helped me out a lot. My mother would visit and babysit at least once a week. I was lucky that they lived within an hours drive.

Outside of being grandparents, they were big travelers. They went on many trips to countries around the world including China, Japan, Russia and all over Europe. I have some beautiful gifts from places they traveled to.

All families have issues (mine included), but I know I’ve been extremely privileged to have two responsible, caring parents who are still alive and well and married to each other! How many GenXers can say that? I know I got really lucky in the parent department.

They’ll be celebrating their 85th and 90th birthdays this summer, as well as their 62nd wedding anniversary.

Here we are on the beach in Florida five years ago. I’m looking forward to visiting them in Florida next week. It’ll be my first trip down to see them in their “snowbird” locale since the pandemic. I feel so lucky that I get another chance to make this trip.