We've all heard the expression "Opposites Attract", and I guess it must be true. Take my wife and me. We could not possibly be more polar opposites in so many areas. In fact, the areas of similarity are virtually miniscule, and yet we just celebrated our twelfth anniversary! I am a man who likes order; she is perfectly comfortable with a desk that looks like a dumpster was overturned on it. I prefer to read the Sports section first on Sunday, while she goes straight for the comics. She grew up in the era when The Beatles ruled; my childhood and teenage years fell during the disco and then hard rock days. Therein, I believe, lies most of the source of our differences.
You see, my wife is 16 years my senior. She was born during the 50's, me at the very end of the 60's; she still resents the fact that she wasn't old enough to go to Woodstock. I attended a couple of rock concerts, I think.....not sure.....hard to remember. (Just kidding.) She wanted so badly to be a flower child and haunt the Haight; I was perfectly satisfied to attend college in a major party town - Columbus, Ohio.
My wife is definitely a Vietnam-era woman; her brother served there, and when her parents ran a Greyhound Bus station, she often saw the tear-filled goodbyes between soldiers going off to war and their families. My early years were spent in blissful ignorance of war, except for the stories my father's friends told me about WWII.
I am a numbers man. Math came easy to me, and I majored in Finance in college. My wife is a words person (she truly believes numbers are a foreign language and that she should have gotten credit in that area when she was forced to take geometry in high school). She has written poetry and short stories most of her life (her preferred form of writing), and has had a fair number published in online magazines and in print. Though my career is in credit and finance, I have also become a writer, with two self-published novels available in a variety of online stores. Words are not my friends; rather, I feel as though I conquer them every time I write a novel. I am also very grateful for spell-check; spelling is not something I do well.
Our writing styles are very different. I schedule time to write, while she writes when the Muse seizes her. This can mean she has a purse full of notes scribbled on fast-food restaurant napkins, the backs of receipts, and pages torn out of her address book (later she can't remember why all the R's are gone...). I sit down in my recliner, turn on my laptop, and write for one hour. Then I take a break. I edit my books the same way. I have a certain number of pages I commit to edit in one day, and I am not satisfied until I can cross that off my "to-do" list.
In spite of our many differences, my wife and I get along very well. We don't always agree on things: sports, politics, religion, what makes a great dessert, or where we should go on vacation, but we do always agree on one thing: neither of us can imagine ourselves spending the rest of our lives with anyone else!
We're very different, but it works.
