Wednesday, August 30, 2006Quality TimeToday I was helping my friend Dee clean up his house and was vacuuming his shag rug stairs with his old and unweildy cannister Electrolux.About midway through I pulled the attachment too far and the cannister thudded down the stairs and I yelled something along the lines of "ACK!" A few minutes later, Dee (who was painting the windows outside), called to me and asked me what happened and if I was OK. That summed up everything, I realized after telling him that I had merely dropped the Electrolux a few steps down the shag rug stairs. I went back to cleaning and he went back to painting, but that interaction told me everything I needed to know about what I want in a relationship. Basically, that's it: I want to be with someone who will ask if I'm OK if there's a weird thump in the same room that I'm in. That's it. That's all. It was said so nicely in the movie "Friends with Money." They had the same situation and the fact that the husband didn't ask was largely the straw that broke up the marriage. People don't ask all the time. Because of power trips. Because of a secret "HAH" that goes on in the mind of the person who hears the thump, the HAH that says "SEE, that BITCH finally got what's coming to her." Or at least that's what the silence says to the person being thumped. The silence says I don't care. The silence says it serves you right. The silence says Oh GOD, if it's that important she'll tell me what happened, and goes back to reading the paper. The silence says we're disconnected. The silence says it's over. Dee is my best friend from high school. He has property up here in Oregon and we all have spent the days puttering around the house, going on walks down to the river, river rafting, procuring and cooking and cleaning up food, and generally hanging out. I've travelled with Dee many times over the years. He is as close to me as a brother and we know each other's rhythms pretty intimately. We both love making travel plans, logisticating day trips, figuring out the best order in which to do things. We have the same sense of humor and laugh frequently. Our energy levels are very similar so niether of us feels like we're dragging the other while the other just wants to go home and curl up. He treats the kids with infinite patience and good humor, while still protecting and admonishing them on the important things (like attempting to eat a more balanced diet). We travel as a foursome exactly as I would imagine the perfect nuclear family to operate: seamlessly, with long periods of having no problems. In short, it's practically perfect. The only thing missing is the sex. Which of course we don't do. It's obvious to me that all this harmony is a direct result of us not sleeping together. If we slept together there'd be fights and power struggles and issues and conflict. Whenever a waitress refers to the kids as "our kids" I just want to say, well, yeah... but the only reason we're getting along so well is because we don't actually, you know, do it. But still, I look at us and I think that there are lots of things I can learn from this relationship (besides the fact that sleeping with someone strongly appears to ruin otherwise perfectly harmonious friendships). I can take the qualities we have together and list them as qualities that must appear as a baseline for any future relationship I may get into. Here's what we have that seem to me to be the basis for any good relationship, sexual or not:
That's really all I'm looking for. Just someone to have a pretty simple life with. Someone who will fix up one part of the house while I'm working on the other, metaphorically and literally. Someone who does not take my desire to improve the collective as a usurpation of his authority. Someone who does enough in his own right that I'd like to help him out with my own skill set, so that together we'll have more time to NOT be working. I know it sounds like crazy talk, all of this. But I still believe it must be possible. In the meantime, I am finding all the qualities of relationship I need from my friends that I don't sleep with. My girlfriends, my gay friends, my male friends with whom I just don't have sex. It's all good, and in the aggregate, it all works out well. Collectively, when they hear a thump, they all ask if I'm OK. And truthfully, that's better by far than being with someone in a "real" relationship and hearing that silence from the other room. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:08 PM  
Comments: You're not crazy. Having someone care when you make ACK sounds is vital. I fear that I've made one too many non-emergency ACK noises in my life because my otherwise darling husband is prone to ignore them sometimes. It ticks me off and now I know why! Next time he doesn't respond I'll just lie down on the floor and cover myself with ketchup so that when he finds me hours later he'll learn his stinking lesson!! # posted by  Sarah : 2:00 PM
Kathy -- great post. Of course, you made my day a few weeks back when you called out of the blue and asked if I was all right. You know the intensity of the siuation I was going through and it meant the world to me that someone cared and asked if I was all right. Hugs!!
# posted by LoriAnn's Blog : 8:18 PM
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