It’s the weekend and that means it’s time for a marriage situation post! As always, Paul’s comments will be bolded and my comments will be normal. Enjoy!
There’s a country song that has a line in it that goes like this:
It’s the little imperfections, It’s the sudden change of plans, When she misreads the directions and we’re lost but holding hands Yeah I live for little moments like that.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I wonder if this resonates with anyone out there. Has anyone actually experienced the “I’ve got to be somewhere NOW and we’re lost because you misread the map/GPS, but that just makes me love you more” kind of love? Anybody at all? No takers? Okay then. So, this weekend’s post is about heading toward that kind of love—only, better. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here are two situations that are similarly tragic.
Take 1: Paul and I have a good friend who lives about 2 hours north of us. We travel up to visit every so often in order to find a needed respite from our frenetic lives. On one particular trip I’d been driving for about an hour and a half when I began to get so tired that I started to drift off the road (yay for rumble strips!!!!). Paul had been trying to wrap up a few odds and ends from work but insisted that I pull over and let him drive (simply out of concern for her well-being…not at all because I feared for my life :-). I was dead asleep within, oh, say about 5 minutes. And that’s weird for me because I almost never sleep in the car. Unfortunately Paul always has a difficult time remembering which exit to take off of 476. After he realized that the GPS was out of reach and that I was sound asleep, he decided not to wake me but to rely on his memory to help him find the correct exit. So he continued driving and driving and driving—and apparently he got that iffy, uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach—the one you get when you don’t recognize any of the geography anymore. After some dangerous on-road acrobatics he reached the GPS and entered our destination only to discover that he had, indeed, driven about 40 minutes out of the way. The double whammy came when the chipper voice of the GPS girl woke me up from my peaceful slumber. And let me tell you, I don’t wake up from naps well (It’s a good thing that the GPS Girl wasn’t there. I guarantee you she wouldn’t have been so chipper after she encountered Liz at that point:-). For some reason I just feel up to the brim with wrath and anger (this is why I don’t take naps too often : ). My immediate response was one of incredulous anger. How could he have made such a silly mistake? So here we were, late for dinner, an extra hour to drive and a wrathful Liz. How do you think that situation played out?
Take 2: We were driving up from Washington, DC recently and Liz decided to take a “short cut” because of the rush hour traffic. I’m convinced that there are no short cuts out of DC, because every road she tried ended up being a total mess. Not only this, but the road that the all-knowing Google Maps kept herding us toward was colored a deep crimson red on our map, indicating it’s belief that travelling on that road would induce one to commit bodily harm (with an appropriate amount of blood). Having given up on finding an alternate route, and having stopped for gas and snacks, we were back on the road. And then Liz did it. I don’t know why she did it, but the GPS said “go north young woman” and she went south. (In my defense, I thought the exit split…and the GPS was saying “exit here!” I just didn’t stop to check the signage : ) She headed straight back onto that deep arterial blood colored road. Two miles of excruciating slowness ensued before we were able to turn around only to cover the exact same two miles of excruciating slowness the other direction. I was nonplussed. I did not have that “lost but holding hands” love of Brad Paisley lore. She misread the directions and those were dark times. I was angry. I wanted to lash out, but I settled for strategic bombardment—lobbing little barbs in her direction.
Tomorrow we’ll look at both situations and try to give some advice that probably would have been helpful to us during those “lost” moments.
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